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“Wait a minute. You want me and my spotter to clear a whole fucking building all alone? Just us?” There was stunned silence around the table.

He nodded dumbly, and I lost it. “Are you fucking crazy? This is a deliberate daylight attack, and every motherfucker in a twelve-mile radius is going to know exactly where we are. Ain’t no fucking way we’re going in there by ourselves.”

I looked over at the battalion executive officer, Major Matt Baker, to see if he was going to nail me on the spot for insubordination, but J-Matt, a forty-year-old officer who was wickedly intelligent and had the calmness of a Buddhist monk, said nothing. Only a few days earlier, he had banned Bob from even speaking on the radio for issuing conflicting orders that hopelessly snarled one unit. Baker did not interfere, and Bob stood there and took my shouting in his face without a word. What was he going to do, send me to Iraq?

Casey pulled me aside to ratchet down the situation, and in a matter of minutes, the two of us constructed a beefed-up security squad that would provide cover for me. That was a formula that I could literally live with: machine guns, grenades, and Marines.

While getting ready to move out, our battalion lost our first Marine, a lance corporal who died when his Humvee flipped into an aqueduct while he was driving around in the darkness to update the codes in command net radios. It’s not good to start the day with a casualty, for such a glitch could screw up the entire timeline, but while his death would be devastating to his family, it could not be allowed to impact the mission. This was war, and war does not stop just because somebody gets killed.

Our raiding force started moving before first light, working our way through the jumpy 5th Marines outside of Ad Diwaniyah, who were worn out by their own fighting during the past few days. They gave us quiet looks of pity as we passed, like “You’re all gonna die, suckers.”

At the big highway cloverleaf outside of Ad Diwaniyah, we hung a right onto Route 17 as dawn illuminated big blue and white highway signs spelling out the names of towns that were our targets for the day—Hajil, Afak, and Al Budayr—in both English and Arabic. Tanks were in the lead, followed by Kilo Company, then McCoy with his tactical headquarters team. Casey and I were next, with the armored Main, and were followed by India Company. The CAATs circled the column like protective wolves, leaving triangular flags of dust fluttering in the air behind them.

I was on the edge of my seat in the armored Humvee, holding my sniper rifle tightly with both hands. We were rolling, and all thoughts except the coming combat were banished. This was where I belonged, and the familiar prebattle calm, almost a serene disconnect from the surrounding world, flowed through my system, energizing and focusing my senses. I became aware of the steady beating of my heart and willed it to slow down, because in a fight I did not want it to vibrate through my body and wobble my scope. A good sniper pulls the trigger at that momentary lull between heartbeats, and it is best not to have your heart thundering like a trip-hammer with excitement.

A makeshift barricade had been thrown across the road less than a mile beyond the cloverleaf, a hodgepodge of big rocks and metal junk that provided cover for some Iraqi militiamen manning a group of technicals, those ubiquitous third-world weapons that are just pickup trucks with machine guns mounted in the beds. Those jackasses might scare the locals, but they were nothing more than an inconvenience to us.

Our tanks smashed through the barricade without slowing down, and the big, bad militia technicals scurried away like cowrardly cockroaches—but not fast enough as our guys opened fire. Within minutes, the steaming carcasses of a couple of pickups, and the corpses of their drivers and gunners, dotted the roadside.

Just beyond the barricade, on the left side of the highway, was a string of low-walled houses, a village