Shooter_ The Autobiography of the Top-Ranked Marine Sniper - Jack Coughlin [18]
With the colonel behind the plan, pushing and cajoling and opening doors, things actually began coming together. I needed special weapons, and a fellow sniper at another base was maneuvering that paperwork for me. For vehicles, I wanted to leapfrog over the available Humvees in favor of quicker desert-rat dune buggies. Hummer said, “Do it.”
I also needed men for my plan to work. Not just any troops, but those finely tuned overachievers from advanced schools such as Recon and Sniper. I wanted to take five to seven men from each battalion, personally train them in the new tactics, then have them train others. That’s where I ran headlong into the regimental operations officer, a bear of a lieutenant colonel named Bryan P. McCoy. Since Marines don’t grow on trees, any men I gained for my team would be subtracted directly from McCoy’s roster of combat personnel. He didn’t like that.
Casey once described me as not being very subtle: “If Jack likes you, he curses and insults you. If he doesn’t like you, he does the same thing, only nose-to-nose and louder.” McCoy and I had a number of spirited discussions.
While I could bully a lot of officers, he was a stone wall. He stands about six-six, weighs a muscular 240 pounds, keeps his light brown hair high and tight, and usually has a big cigar stuffed in his mouth. He tried to stare holes in me with his beady hazel eyes. McCoy is brilliant and kept cluttering up our arguments with quotes from Napoleon and Rommel. Nevertheless, the Boss supported my plan to put snipers on wheels, and I wasn’t going to let some S-3 regimental operations officer, even a tough dude like McCoy, stop me. I didn’t think anything could.
On September 11, 2001, our eighth wedding anniversary was less than a month away. My wife was in the kitchen, and I was getting out of the shower to start another day in Marine paradise. We would take our kids to day care, then Kim would go to her teaching job and I would head off for another argument or two with McCoy.
The telephone rang, and I picked it up in the bedroom.
No hello. “Turn on the television set!” It was the battalion commander’s wife, who was running the home front while her husband had the troops in Okinawa. “We’re being attacked!”
I snapped the power button on the remote, and New York swam into view on CNN. A tower of the World Trade Center was on fire, and as I watched, a big jetliner slammed into the second tower. I was stunned into disbelief and silence for a moment. “OK,” I said, and hung up the telephone, then jumped into my uniform and sped to the base, growing angrier by the minute. I didn’t know who had done this, but they were not going to get away with it.
A savage typhoon had stalled over Okinawa, where it was now about nine o’clock at night at Camp Schwab, the northernmost base on the island. A few poor bastards were pulling outside guard duty in the storm, while most of the battalion’s senior officers were in Korea for a conference. One major and a bunch of lieutenants were left in charge at the camp, including Casey, the executive officer of Kilo Company. He finished checking his e-mail, went to his room, and turned on the radio. At first, he thought he was listening to some War of the Worlds kind of fake broadcast. He quickly called his four platoon leaders together for a briefing, and someone found a television set in time for them all to see that another plane had crashed into the Pentagon.
Soon after that, Threat Condition Delta was ordered by President Bush. That