Shooter_ The Autobiography of the Top-Ranked Marine Sniper - Jack Coughlin [26]
I was tired, but feeling good after calling home and talking to my kids, for their girlish chatter lifted my spirits. The babysitter said my wife was at school, where she was working toward a doctoral degree, and I paid her absence no mind. I was receiving a lot of letters and packages from friends and family and figured the low volume of correspondence from her was because she was simply overwhelmed taking care of the girls, running the house, working, and going to school. Being a Marine wife is not easy.
Casey ducked into my cubbyhole on a bitterly cold night in early March 2003 as a hard wind beat against the sturdy Bedouin tent. He heated up some Spam on the little propane stove, grabbed some lukewarm coffee, and settled in for a bullshit session while I cleaned my disassembled rifle, up to my elbows in gun oil, patches, and rags. He was thoroughly capable in his job, although Officer Bob frustrated him almost to the point of mutiny. A couple of times I had to stop the staff guy from trying to replace Lieutenant Kuhlman, carefully explaining that we needed someone who knew what the hell he was doing to take this unit into combat.
“I hate everybody and everything,” Casey declared. “I hate Bob. I hate this fucking country.” Everybody hated Kuwait.
He was a kindred spirit, and I recognized his jumpiness as nothing more than a case of prebattle jitters. After months of training and tense expectation, he wanted to get into it, to see how he stacked up as a combat Marine, but he wanted to be leading a rifle platoon, not babysitting Bob. I knew he would do fine, but Casey would reach that conclusion only after enduring his trial by fire. It’s always a one-man graduation ceremony.
“You need a day away. Go down to Doha and get a hamburger.” Camp Doha is a rear-area paradise that had been established near Kuwait City during the last Gulf War and then was built up with millions of U.S. dollars. Between the shopping mall and the restaurants, you can get anything you want at Doha. It was not like life at the front.
I had my boots off because my feet were always itching. Outside our little office, Casey and I observed military courtesy and addressed each other by our ranks, officer and enlisted man, but in private, it was Jack and Casey, an equality that is not unusual among Marines.
“A properly trained monkey can do my job,” Casey complained.
“A properly trained monkey is doing your job, asshole,” I said. He didn’t smile. “Cheer up. We’ll be going soon.”
“Why do you think that? The politics still suck. If we go, we risk our credibility as a player in international diplomacy. If we don’t go, we risk our credibility as a military powerhouse. We got a hundred thousand Americans sitting out here and we’re at a standstill.”
We are not robots, and with newspapers, radios going constantly, laptop computers with Internet access, and telephone calls back home, everyone had been keeping up on the latest developments. We also received classified information that the media did not. We knew exactly what was going on. The rhetoric for war had risen in intensity, and the belief that Saddam Hussein was hiding weapons of mass destruction was universal among our leaders. The White House spelled out that we faced twenty-five thousand liters of anthrax, thirty-eight thousand liters of botulinum toxin, enough material to produce five hundred tons of sarin, mustard,