Shooter_ The Autobiography of the Top-Ranked Marine Sniper - Jack Coughlin [28]
“When other Iraqi units see what happens to the 51st, they might just go ahead and surrender,” McCoy shouted, and the confidence of Darkside Six was infused into his 1,004 Marines. Although most had never seen combat, they whooped as if they were at a Super Bowl instead of in the middle of the Arabian Desert, and the smell of war rose in their nostrils. Few considered that some would not be coming back, for their blood was hot, their knives sharp, and their guns ready, and nobody felt the least bit sorry for Saddam Hussein’s goddamn doomed 51st Mechanized Division.
The formation ended, and everyone got back to work, tearing down the camp and getting ready to move out. The heavy metal band AC/DC wailed “Hell’s Bells” from a boom box. It was a terrific speech. Too bad Casey and I missed it. We were already gone.
We had gotten up hours earlier, about four o’clock in the morning the same day that McCoy would give his pep talk, to tune in the radio and hear President Bush give Saddam Hussein and his two weird sons forty-eight hours to leave Iraq. “Their refusal to do so will result in military conflict commenced at a time of our choosing,” the president warned.
Once those forty-eight hours were up, we had to be at the starting line, because no one really expected the Hussein gang would leave. So beneath the glow of a full moon, Casey and I had our boys load the Humvees with enough ammunition, communications gear, fuel, food, and water to get us through five full days, and we went tearing out with the advance regimental quartering party to find our battalion’s assigned staging point in the Kuwait dirt.
In any major military movement, somebody has to go in first and stake out an area that is defensible, is accessible by vehicles, and has good lines of communication. With tens of thousands of men and vehicles on the move, the job of the quartering party is not very sexy, but screw it up and confusion reigns.
Our designated dispersal area was several miles from Safwan Hill, a big pimple in the desert on the Iraqi side of the border with Kuwait. The Iraqis used this dominant geographical feature as their southernmost observation post, and as dawn broke on March 17, they had a superb view of the powerful American force that was growing before their eyes. I knew this place only too well, as did other Marines and Army grunts who had chewed Iraqi sand before. When the fight started, Safwan Hill was to be pulverized.
We guided in the rest of the battalion that afternoon, and for hours, wave after wave of Marines arrived in convoys that trailed sky-high rooster tails of dust. The Iraqis up on the hill must have been putting down their binoculars and packing their bags to get the hell out of there. It was after dark before our final elements arrived, and before anyone slept, we were lined up with all of our guns facing north.
“MISSILE LAUNCH … MISSILE LAUNCH … MISSILE LAUNCHT!”
We thought it was the fucking end of the world. Shit! Where’s my gas mask? We had gotten up after a few hours of brief, exhausted sleep and were still stumbling about in the darkness when the banshee cries from an Army Patriot missile defense battery’s loudspeakers erupted about two hours before dawn on March 18. The missile boys had set up shop a few hundred yards from our position without our hearing a sound and had just scared the hell out of us.
We jumped over and onto each other in a mad scramble for gas masks