Shooter_ The Autobiography of the Top-Ranked Marine Sniper - Jack Coughlin [112]
Our sanitary needs overwhelmed the available facilities, since our toilets were wooden benches with holes in them, perched above trenches dug by a backhoe. When the trench was filled with human waste, it was covered, and the stalls were shifted to a new trench. In the unbearable heat, the stink was awful, and the latrines attracted about a million flies that feasted on exposed flesh.
The tight cohesion that the battalion had forged in combat started to evaporate, and fights, arguments, and world-class bitching left many of us on edge. The auxiliary units that had been attached to us for the combat phase, such as the Bravo tanks, the engineers, and the Amtracs, were all sent back to their original units, so those bonds of brotherhood were broken, although not forgotten.
Most of the lieutenants hung out by Casey’s truck, which became unofficially known as the “Bus Stop,” for we were confident that sooner or later the Marine Corps would remember we were parked out here in the middle of hell and move us on over to Kuwait. The Bus Stop was an oasis for anyone who cared to stop by, and we sat around, hour after hour, day after day, swapping lies and rumors, betting on the date when we would leave, reading magazines and eating candy bars sent from home. We gave a lot of shit to Daniel Tracy, my communications guy, because he had not gotten killed in Baghdad as he had so often predicted. Instead, Daniel and the rest of the guys in our trucks came out of the war as tough combat veterans. The five pigeons that had gone along with the battalion as early warnings for chemical attacks had also all managed to survive the heat, wind, and bullets of the entire conflict. Their cages had been opened before we left Baghdad, and the birds flew away to a well-earned freedom.
Nobody wanted any more damned MREs. We would rather get sick from eating too many Snickers bars than rip open another MRE pouch. Care packages were gold, and time stood still. A virus swept the camp, causing vomiting and severe, stomach-cramping diarrhea that forced the Marines to use those damned toilets even more. Some guys caught it two or three times, but my own immune system proved to be tougher than the bugs, and I didn’t get sick at all.
Every day was the same, and almost every hour somebody at the Bus Stop would stand out in the road, shield his eyes against the sun, and actually look for a bus, but then sit back down and say, “Nothing yet.”
Our battalion—the Bull, the mighty 3/4—had endured a cauldron of combat. From the starting line of this war until the very finish, we were in it, and the eighteen- and nineteen-year-old boys who made up the heart of the battalion had grown even more than the veterans. John Koopman of the Chronicle wrote, “These Marines saw a lot of combat. They fought as much as any unit in Iraq, and more than most.”
We had battled in Basra, created the deadly efficient Afak Drill, fought hard in Al Budayr, Ad Diwaniyah, and Al Kut, charged across the bridge over the Diyala Canal, and gone straight into Baghdad itself, where we pulled down the statue. Our battalion had a piece of almost every major battle the Marines fought in Iraq. And, as Casey put it, “We cracked the skulls of anyone who tried to fuck with us.” We had lost six good Marines dead, and we held a memorial service on Easter Sunday before a line of six helmets on six rifles that were bayoneted into the Iraqi dirt. More than twenty men were wounded.
Whether we would achieve military victory in Iraq had never been a question for me, and it had come much easier than I had anticipated. When I had factored in the possible use of weapons of mass destruction, I once guessed that our attacking Coalition force might sustain up to ten thousand casualties. Instead, although we were saddened by the loss of our comrades, the overall casualties for the war were