Shooter_ The Autobiography of the Top-Ranked Marine Sniper - Jack Coughlin [45]
Shortly before the invasion began, Army Chief of Staff General Eric Shinseki told Congress that several hundred thousand troops would be needed in Iraq. He was upbraided by the Pentagon’s civilian leadership and retired. Army Secretary Thomas White supported Shinseki and would be fired. Rumsfeld and his acolytes were clearly in control.
But now, their novel war plans were in jeopardy. Moving fast and keeping unrelenting pressure on the enemy meant that the advance could not slow down and that support troops had to keep pace, just the opposite of what was happening. Maps and reports showed the Army was struggling out in the desert, and the big Marine drive along the two big highways was sputtering. The unexpectedly tough enemy opposition, ambushes on convoys, bad weather, the sandstorm, and an increasingly dire fuel and supply situation had the top commanders second-guessing themselves. On television, former generals said the war wasn’t going well because we didn’t have enough troops involved. The whole enterprise had reached a critical point, and the leaders were about to order a three-week halt in place to refit, reorganize, and rethink.
Out in the sand, we were totally unaware of all of the bureaucratic fighting in Washington. I was just hanging around in the desert with Casey and my boys, and all we wanted to do was to get into the fight. Our trucks were packed with everything we needed, and there were Marines as far as we could see, lines of tracked vehicles and trucks and thousands of men, all moving in the same direction.
We were so firmly on the sidelines that except for some local patrols for security, we were snoozing, getting haircuts, doing laundry, cleaning weapons, and servicing the trucks. In fact, from where we stood, we thought the war was going quite well.
More than a week had elapsed since we had invaded Iraq, and my butt was sore from spending so much time bumping along in the passenger seat of my Humvee. I stomped around the sand and bitched out of frustration with being useless in the middle of a war. I was a sniper, and I needed to get into the fight.
About four kilometers directly ahead, the 5th Marine Regiment was bogged down on Route 1 outside of Ad Diwaniyah, a town of about a quarter million people on the central Iraqi plain. Every time the 5th Marines battled through one patch of ambushers, another bunch was waiting for them, and they had been taking casualties for almost two days. We were some four kilometers back and could hear a bit of battle going on, bang-bang, thump-thump, but it didn’t involve us.
And about fifty miles to the east, over on Route 7, another regimental-sized Marine unit called Task Force Tarawa had ground to a stop. They were blocked outside of Al Kut, a town where, back in the distant era of World War I, Turkish defenders held up the British drive on Baghdad for 143 days. We couldn’t wait that long, but TF Tarawa, which had been bloodied in An Nasiriyah, was fighting on fumes. They were just about out of everything, and the supply convoys trying to bring up water, ammunition, and fuel were being shot up in the south.
Finally, on Saturday, March 29, my luck changed and we got back into the game. Sergeant Major Dave Howell drove up, unfolded his stocky frame from the Humvee, and took me aside. “John, get your ass over to the command tent,” he said. “We’re getting out of this cluster fuck. They’ve decided to send in the