Shooter_ The Autobiography of the Top-Ranked Marine Sniper - Jack Coughlin [39]
By the middle of the day, the fight was all but over. A dozen civilians who had been caught inside the terminal made their way out to surrender after a morning in hell. Our only casualty was a Marine who was wounded when he tossed a grenade into a room at the Sheraton only to have some metal fragments blow back through the wall and hit his hand.
About an hour after we took the airport, a bright yellow Nissan Pathfinder sports utility vehicle bearing a white flag of surrender drove onto the airstrip and cautiously approached some guys from India Company. When the four-wheel-drive SUV eased to a stop, a man in a crisp uniform stepped out and identified himself as the commanding general of the 51st Mechanized Division. He had nothing left with which to fight and wished to meet with our commanding officer. The astonished commander of India Company called for Colonel McCoy and suggested, “Darkside Six, this is India Six. You may want to come over here.”
McCoy was there instantly, and in an oddly formal moment reminiscent of a time when wars were fought by more gentlemanly rules, the Iraqi general politely declared, “I am surrendering to you.” McCoy accepted the surrender and then hustled the general back to higher headquarters for questioning. The Bull had taken a terrific trophy, but there was still some fighting going on.
By nightfall of March 21, the second day, the shooting was over and the approaches to Basra were secure. We had broken through the main defense cordon, had captured the airport, held three vital bridges across the big canal, and were in position to stiff-arm any resistance that might try to emerge out of Basra.
Casey and I escorted senior officers of our battalion and our replacement unit, the 1st Fusiliers of the British 7th Armored Brigade, the famed Desert Rats, on a tour of the vital points of the quiet battlefield. All night long, their companies moved in and took over from our units. Having come up the marshy Al Faw peninsula and battled for the oil fields, the Brits were more than capable of taking over and were tasked to conquer Basra itself.
Kipling once wrote how a cheap bullet fired by the lowest enemy soldier can erase an important officer, and as a sniper, I love taking out the big guys on the other team. The leaders are not supposed to take chances, but nobody could put a leash on McCoy, and he stumbled into doing something foolish in all of the excitement.
As I sat on the hood of his Humvee and ate my dinner of MREs—Meals Ready to Eat—that night, the colonel ducked out from under the tent of the Main headquarters, took a seat on an ammunition crate across from me, and lit one of his big cigars. We were developing a habit of getting together after a battle to compare thoughts on what had gone down, both right and wrong. He looked tired, not having had any sleep since Kuwait, but his spirits were buoyed by the two good days of work his Marines had turned in. “So, how’d you do?” he asked pleasantly, preparing me for a special ration of shit.
“I only got two, boss,” I said, lighting a cigarette and describing the ambush of the Main. The man soaked up information of all sorts, and every piece of battlefield data helped him clarify the overall puzzle, so he listened to me describe working as a sniper in a shifting combat environment.
McCoy nodded, then grinned, a crease of white teeth through a dust-caked face. “I got a tank,” he announced. “Pretty cool, huh?”
McCoy and his driver, driving off