Shooter_ The Autobiography of the Top-Ranked Marine Sniper - Jack Coughlin [44]
Our heavy Humvee was being rocked on its springs by the wind, and from my seat in front I couldn’t see a damned thing. I lowered goggles over my eyes and wrapped a thick bandana around my mouth, but it made no difference. Sand seeped into every crevice, including those in my body, and choked me with tiny dunes that piled up at the back of my throat. We shut the trucks tight and stuffed rags into every crack, but the harsh wind, keening at a banshee pitch straight out of a Halloween movie, seemed to push sand right through metal.
Outside it was worse, but a few Marines had to be out there on security patrols, and their exposed flesh was lashed with whips of grainy sand. Risks increased with the bad weather, and all along the line, dreadful accidents happened. A guy fell from an Amtrac and had to lie injured in the swirling storm because medical evacuation was impossible. A tank drove off a bridge and plunged into the Euphrates, drowning its crew, and no one knew about it until the next day. A bulldozer ran over two sleeping men, killing one and severely injuring the other.
It was like being trapped inside a deadly sunset, and the rushing clouds that surrounded us changed from orange to red to purple as the wind changed speed and direction, then stacked high into the dark scarlet sky until we could not tell when day turned to night. There was nothing to do but sit there and endure the pounding as the windblown grit chipped paint from our big metal machines. Sleep was impossible. The millions of dollars that we had floating around the battlefield in advanced optics and sighting systems couldn’t help us, so we sat there blind.
“The storm was worse than anyone imagined,” the battalion historians would write later. Mother Nature did what the Iraqi army could not do—stop the 1st Marine Division. The fucking dirt was everywhere, the wind would not let up, and for ten hours, we sat there and suffered.
The sandstorm finally eased about three o’clock in the morning of Tuesday, March 25. Then it began to rain, the water pouring down in cataracts that slammed us for the rest of the night, churned the dust into pasty mud, and further ruined the already sloppy road. Despite the weather, we started moving again even before the sun came up over a yellow horizon. None of our boys had been hurt, but days would pass before our conversations could start with something other than a cough that visibly expelled dust from our bodies.
A herd of camels, saddled but riderless and separated by the storm from their owners, serenely strolled past at daybreak, their heads held high, haughty princes of this terrible environment.
I had hoped that by being out front, we might bump into some action, because I was feeling hamstrung. Once the battalion caught up with us, we rejoined the Main and continued to roll. Iraq seemed endless, and the odometer on my Humvee was ticking away the miles to Baghdad.
Were we ever going to find some fighting? “Is this what we’re going to be doing for the entire war?” Casey asked me one afternoon, and although I wanted to give him my usual optimistic song and dance, I was having some doubts myself. The days of the war were falling from the calendar at an alarming rate. It wouldn’t last much longer, and I had not been involved in any real fighting, including the dustup back at Basra. In moments of doubt, I wondered if McCoy had forgotten our deal, or had lost confidence in me.
11
Send In the Bull
There had been a major shake-up in the Pentagon over the past months, as Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, wanting a thorough overhaul of the Army and new strategic thinking, won a decisive victory over the generals. Rumsfeld argued that a relatively small, fast-moving attack force could slice right through the Iraqi defenses and reach Baghdad quickly, making the war short.