Shooter_ The Autobiography of the Top-Ranked Marine Sniper - Jack Coughlin [17]
5
Winds of War
Twenty-nine Palms, California, is a company town, and its business is the United States Marine Corps. It has more barbershops than convenience stores, and apartment leases run month to month instead of by the year because Marines are transferred at a moment’s notice. Fast-food joints stay open late, knowing that we may be in the field long past normal closing times, and the dry cleaners keep their doors open on Sunday nights so we can pick up pressed uniforms after a long weekend. Despite the name, it is an arid desert so devoid of majestic palms that we call it “the Stumps.”
I am stationed there as part of the 3rd Battalion of the 4th Marine Regiment, attached to the 7th Marine Regiment of the 1st Marine Division. The reasons for this numerical soup are complicated and confusing, even to those who understand them, and make little difference anyway. We are called “the Three-Four”—it’s written like a fraction, 3/4—and because of our aggressiveness, our nickname is “the Bull.”
Out here, in nine hundred square miles of emptiness, we have as much room to play as the mind can imagine, and roaring, thunder-clapping, live-fire exercises are common as we train to the breaking point. We fire our weapons in a totally tactical environment that we make as realistic as we dare: Real bullets are fired right over the shoulders of the troops, tanks attack with real cannon fire, and planes drop real bombs. Then we do it all over again because we never consider ourselves ready enough. There are no days without gunfire or Marines running in the sand at 29 Palms, although only a few miles away down Highway 62, the rich folks play golf and enjoy a champagne brunch in Palm Springs.
Other units are sent here for specialized training, but this is our home turf, and we know every inch of it. An area called “Range 400” is considered one of the scariest stretches of territory in the Corps for training, but that range is so familiar to us that it is no longer challenging, so we devise different, and more difficult, scenarios to practice. The result is a unit so razor sharp that we walk with a swagger and are always ready to be the opposing force in some war game. The Bull is the home team, the varsity.
But it didn’t feel like that on September 11, 2001, when terrorists drove two hijacked airliners into the Twin Towers in Manhattan, crashed another into the Pentagon, and sent still another spiraling down into the placid countryside of Pennsylvania. Thousands of American civilians were murdered that day, and there wasn’t a damned thing the Bull could do about it. Not yet.
Only the month before, in August, most of the battalion had packed up and departed for Okinawa. This small island in the Pacific had been one of the most contested battlegrounds of World War II. Now Japan owned the place again but allowed the United States to keep the 3rd Marine Division, our official parent unit, on the island to respond to area threats. The 4th Regiment headquarters was also out there, along with a rotation of its fighting units. It was the Bull’s turn to go sit on the Rock for a while and do some jungle training. Among those who made the trip was Lieutenant Casey Kuhlman, the platoon commander I had “shot” during ProMet. We still barely knew each other, because we were in different companies within a large organization, and while he went to Okinawa as the executive officer of a rifle company, I stayed in the Stumps.
Colonel Steve Hummer, the commanding officer of the 7th Marines, was what we call a warfighter, the highest accolade an enlisted man can bestow upon an officer, and he was always preparing for the fight he was sure was coming. Hummer didn’t know exactly who, when, or where—only that it was coming and that he would have his Marines ready.
He had