Shooter_ The Autobiography of the Top-Ranked Marine Sniper - Jack Coughlin [33]
The invasion was exploding forward all across the country, but all I could see was the back end of the truck directly in front of me and sand, sand, and more sand. It hung in the air like a great dirty curtain, clawed at my throat, and went into every crack and crevice of the trucks. My Humvee was at the tail of the battalion main headquarters trucks, which were sandwiched between Kilo and India companies. From there, I could easily fly up to the front or out to the flanks if anything happened, but it meant eating a lot of dust. We pulled down our goggles and wrapped scarves around our faces, feeling like the cowboys who brought up the rear of the herd. When I finally passed through the first berm, I picked up the radio and called out to Casey, “Welcome to Iraq!”
“We’re not there yet, jackass,” was his reply, from the lead truck twenty vehicles ahead. As a precise engineer, he did not count us as technically being on Iraqi soil until we crossed the second berm, not just the first. We got through that one soon enough and put Kuwait in the rearview mirror.
By the time we were through the breach, the tanks up front had skirted what was left of Safwan Hill and were surging north along country roads toward a paved highway that was designated Route Tampa. It was the main road to Basra, and once we reached it, the pure khaki desert gave way to scraggly wintertime brush, and then to more green than I had expected. It looked a lot like 29 Palms in California, only without the mountains. This was our kind of terrain. The Bull could fight here.
Basra, one of the natural gateways into Iraq, lies at the southern edge of a vast marshy area. The fabled Euphrates and Tigris rivers empty into those savannas and then race down the Shatt al-Arab waterway to reach the Persian Gulf. The Caliph Omar, an adviser to the Prophet Mohammed, founded Basra in A.D. 636, and according to legend, it was home port to Sinbad the Sailor. It is even mentioned in The Arabian Nights.
Here and there, a few Iraqis emerged from low-walled mud huts in isolated hamlets of three or four buildings and waved, just as their Mesopotamian ancestors had greeted other invaders over the centuries. The Persians had come through in 539 B.C., and Alexander the Great and his Greeks in 331 B.C., then Muslim Arabs in A.D. 636, the Mongols out of Central Asia in 1258, the Ottoman Turks about three hundred years after that, the British four hundred years later, and the U.S.-led coalition back in 1991. Throw in the Sumerians, Akkadians, Assyrians, and Hittites, and the invasion routes into Iraq are littered with the graves of armies.
Modern-day Basra’s claim to fame was the nearby Rumaylah oil fields, where a thousand wells sprouted like grim desert flowers, plus refineries that had the potential of producing about 140,000 barrels a day. Postwar planning envisioned using the revenue from that oil to pay for rebuilding Iraq.
The city, with a population of almost 1.4 million, was Iraq’s major port; it had an international airport, and rail lines reached out from it to other cities in the region. As an oil and petrochemicals center, a transportation hub, and the second-largest city in Iraq, Basra was the biggest target outside of Baghdad itself.
Our job was to blunt any attempt to reinforce the defense of the oil fields. While we slammed the 51st, and possibly the Medina, other U.S. and British Marines were assigned to take the vast tract of oil wells. We sailed on, through lowlands that steadily became more populated; dirt roads careered every which way, and long pipelines reached across the sand. The place looked like a Texas oil patch.
“All Darkside units, this is Darkside Six! Gas-Gas-Gas!”
McCoy’s chemical detection alarm had been triggered, and his radio call again had us grabbing our masks. Although we had neither heard nor