Shooter_ The Autobiography of the Top-Ranked Marine Sniper - Jack Coughlin [43]
Midnight came and went and still we drove, and sleep pulled at our eyelids. About two o’clock on Monday morning, March 24, one of our tracked vehicles bogged down in a marshy area beside the road. When we stopped to pull out, a heavily camouflaged Marine from a Force Recon platoon materialized out of the surrounding darkness and wanted to know what the hell we were doing up here.
“Moving north,” Gunner Eby told him.
“You guys know there’s nobody in front of you?” asked the Marine with the blackened face. His team was scattered about at the northernmost edge of the advance, and he said they did not know what was going on farther up the road.
Somehow we had jumped to the lead position of the entire Marine advance and were basically out on our own. That was only a minor concern to Gunner Eby, so he thanked the Recon dude for the information and cranked us up again.
Sleep was quickly forgotten as we moved deeper into the unknown. There were no stars, and we heard helicopters buzzing overhead, heading for targets up ahead. We waited expectantly for a sharp crack of gunfire or the sudden blast of an ambush, but none came.
Eby kept us rolling for two more hours before pulling us to a stop. We were so far out on a limb that we could no longer even see the tree, but both Casey and I argued that we should keep on pushing. We dont know where everybody else is, but we know where we are, so let’s keep moving! Gunner Eby rightly ignored us. It was senseless to step much farther into the great void without supporting forces; the last person we had seen was that lone Marine advance scout, and he was now far behind us.
Except for our radios, we were out of contact with any friendly units, isolated and exposed. All of a sudden, those thirty Humvees bristling with weaponry didn’t seem quite as powerful as before. If we were jumped by a bunch of enemy tanks and troops tonight, we would put up a hell of a fight but stood a good chance of being annihilated.
Nevertheless, I had reached the end of my rope. Our convoy coiled into a defensive position beside the road, and guards were posted, but I passed out in my seat even before my Humvee coasted to a stop. For the first time since Kuwait, I got more than forty-five minutes of shutdown time, and the boys had mercy on an old man and let me sleep.
Fortunately, our luck held and nothing happened while we were parked out there on our own beside the road in the middle of the Iraqi night. I awoke two hours later, at daybreak, to see the Abrams tanks and the Amtracs of the 5th Marines grinding past, which meant the big boys had caught up and we were no longer alone. I got out and stretched, feeling as if I had been asleep in a cushy hotel bed for a week.
Thousands of Marines and hundreds of vehicles were pounding through the red grit in the brilliant light of a clear morning. Gunner Eby received orders from our own regimental headquarters, still far back down the road, to tuck into the 5th Marines column for a while. We got back on the road.
Desert sandstorms are not weather phenomena but evil things that rise up from hell. One of the extra-large variety brewed up and dropped on us on Monday, March 24, and the war came to a halt. The sheer power of the hurricane of dirt made all of our weapons look puny by comparison. When those breezes start to whisper against your ear, you had better take shelter and button up, for you won’t be going anywhere for a while, and you are going to come out of the experience feeling like sand has been ground into your very soul.
We had begun to feel cocky because of the speed of our midnight ride and believed that the Iraqis could not stop us. We thought that nothing could. We were wrong.
Our convoy was taking a maintenance break when the first gentle breezes began to hum around the vehicles, raising the talcumlike loose sand and swirling it about in small funnels of dirt. The velocity increased, more sand jumped into the air, and visibility fell as dirt colored