Shooter_ The Autobiography of the Top-Ranked Marine Sniper - Jack Coughlin [48]
I climbed from my Humvee, and Casey fanned the security unit out around me as I laid the rifle across the hood to steady it, and glassed the area through the scope. Dun-colored homes that were not much more than stacks of mud building blocks moved past my rifle in quick montage, and I examined a few civilians, plus some dogs, cats, goats, and chickens. Everyone else apparently had abandoned their homes until things settled down. Fortunately, no one fired a shot at us, for had they done so, we would have returned a thousand. After thirty minutes, the place was clear and we got ready to move on.
I was disappointed that Bonus Town had been so easy and that, once again, I had not been a factor. Was I ever going to find some way to earn my salary? But there were bigger places just down the road, where there had to be some soldiers, paramilitaries, fedayeen guerrillas, and other guys with guns, and I wanted a piece of those clowns.
As I walked around the Humvee to continue toward what was sure to be a fight, I found a glittering four-inch-long piece of metal sticking out of the right rear tire, which had gone as flat as a dirty penny on a railroad track. I filled the desert air with my entire vocabulary of obscene words, and other Marines actually laughed at me as they saddled up to head for the next village. I had been taken out of the war again, this time by a fucking flat tire!
We could not fix the tire on the road, for while we had plenty of combat stuff, spare tires were few and far between in the Marine Corps. The Army had plenty, but we didn’t. We were stuck and could neither hold up the advance nor stay where we were alone, so we had to head back to the safety of the cloverleaf, six hundred long yards away. I watched with dismay as the armored column set off to attack the next village; then my Humvee headed back to the big intersection, bumping along on the steel tire rim, and Casey’s truck followed to provide security.
As the gap between the raiding force and ourselves got wider, Route 17 immediately grew dangerous. That stretch of road, only recently so totally under our control, was turning back into bad-guy country right before my eyes. If we didn’t sit on it, we didn’t own it. The bad guys could easily reemerge and assemble another roadblock, plant a roadside bomb, or prepare an ambush. An officer’s voice came on the radio, telling us not to try to rejoin the column because it would be too dangerous. Casey turned him off.
But when we reached the cloverleaf, we got the full NASCAR pit crew treatment from the men of the 3rd Battalion, 5th Marines, who seemed to have been waiting their whole lives to change that tire. They stripped one off of a destroyed Humvee, and with captains and first sergeants working side by side with corporals, they got that tire on in record time. It went flat, too.
While I paced nervously, they wrestled still another one onto our limping Humvee, and that one also went flat.
If we wanted to get into the fight, we had to come up with a Plan B, so we decided to leave my truck and stack everyone into Casey’s single Humvee. We replaced Casey’s driver, Corporal Baby, with the Panda Bear and were about ready to roll when I counted noses. We had too many people.
The Panda was at the wheel, Newbern was inside with the radios, and we definitely needed Jerry Marsh standing behind his Mk-19 automatic grenade launcher. One of the Secret Squirrels from a Human Exploitation Team also was jammed inside, along with Casey, who was in the passenger seat. That meant there was not a place