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Over the noise, I heard McCoy asking loudly and sarcastically whether I was killing anybody or just shooting for the hell of it. Even with a fight going on, the sonofabitch would not pass up a chance to rag on me.

I stayed right where I was, locked into position and glassing the other buildings. Mutt and Jeff were already history, worthy of no more thought whatsoever.

Seven minutes later, a sharp-eyed corporal called out, “Staff Sar’nt! I got some people on a roof a little more than two blocks away.”

I followed his directions and shifted my aim up to the roof of a three-story building where two figures were moving behind a low wall. That gave them a substantial height advantage, since I was still on the truck and could only see above their thighs. That was enough, because they loomed large in my scope. One was in an Arab headdress, the other wore a scarf over his face, and both carried weapons, which meant they were fedayeen and definitely up to no good. I had them cold.

They moved toward a door that would lead them off the roof, so I centered on the closer guy, fired, and put the bullet in the middle of his chest. As he crumpled out of sight, his pal dove for cover before I could jack another round into my rifle. Damn. One got away.

Three shots, three kills, the fight was still going on, and I was in my zone, testy and irritable. I took a moment to manually reload, putting one in the chamber and four more in the magazine, then went looking for new targets.

That was when I confronted one of those dreadful do-or-die moments when I was faced with giving an unsuspecting Iraqi civilian a brush with death. Only my training and years of experience in this job, plus Casey’s good sense, kept the guy alive. It would have been so easy to blow him away, knowing that nobody would ask any questions.

Casey and his security team had dragged me off the Humvee, ignoring my complaints, and took me up to a nearby roof, which put me about fifteen feet off the ground—not really very high, but every foot of altitude increased what I could see, and what I could see, I could control. We were in the center of the city, and streets wheeled out to all points of the compass. Casey posted the boys around the building, then crawled over beside me on the roof and took out his binos for a better look. Things were busy down below; files of yelling Marines were plunging into buildings to clear them and running along the sidewalks to protect the flanks of the big tanks. Instead of being terrified, residents began to venture onto the streets, and they gathered in small crowds once they realized a general bloodletting was not in progress. Soon civilian vehicles were going every which way, taking care to stay out of the sight lines of the tank gunners.

The amount of activity looked suspicious because it had neither the shape of a brewing conflict nor that of a welcoming committee. Braced solidly on the knee-high wall that edged the roof, I swept the streets below with my scope and came upon an Iraqi man standing rather calmly near a corner exactly 127 yards away, according to the laser range finder that Casey put on him. He was talking to other people moving through the area, and cars would pull up to him, then speed away after an exchange of a few words. We watched that happen over and over, and as I studied him through my scope, I saw the butt of what appeared to be a pistol sticking from his pocket. Casey saw the same thing through the powerful binos.

Elsewhere around the town, I heard the bark of machine guns, but that did not mean I could just start taking target practice. My task was to take out only legitimate threats, not to blindly murder innocent people, but deciding whom not to shoot isn’t always easy.

This mystery man was an obvious target, but who was he? I kept him in the crosshairs and rested my finger lightly on the trigger. Was he an enemy commander who had thrown away his uniform and was now working in civilian clothes? Or was he a city councilman,