Shooter_ The Autobiography of the Top-Ranked Marine Sniper - Jack Coughlin [59]
So although I listened to other people’s problems on a daily basis out in the field, there was really nobody there for me, which was as it should be. Now there probably was no one at home, either. We all have a private room in our soul for our deepest secrets, but I have a whole warehouse down there in which I keep my personal stuff, because I carry so much of it. Since I had no control over what might be happening back home, I put my girls safely on a shelf that was out of harm’s way and turned my growing anger and frustration onto the soldiers of Saddam Hussein, closing off any thoughts other than those directly related to where I was and to my job. Life was easier when my worldview was narrowed to what I could see.
So far in this war I had fired six shots and had six kills, exactly the right ratio. I considered the ill-trained, poorly led soldiers of Iraq to be hamburger in my scope, practically begging me to kill them, and I was more than ready to grant that wish.
Then came the second slice of Sunday-morning bad news, and we learned that the war was about to grind to a dead stop for three full weeks! Coalition forces all across Iraq were to stop in place for a twenty-one-day “operational pause” to refit and secure the exposed lines of supply. McCoy was summoned to take a helicopter back to regimental headquarters for an official briefing.
We were stunned and almost felt the earth tilting beneath our boots, because we could not understand the reasoning behind the decision. We still had plenty of supplies and had just ripped through four towns in a single day to kick open a vital supply line. So what was the problem? To us, stopping made no sense at all, but orders are orders.
Now we believed that dusty, nowhere Al Budayr on Route 17 was to be our home for the next month, so we planned to go back into the town and set up shop in the old Ba’ath Party offices. McCoy could be the mayor for a while, and we could erase all traces of the Saddam regime. We would saturate the area with patrols for security, maybe reopen schools, get the utilities running, and prove to the locals that the dictator and his men were no longer to be feared.
It was a good hearts-and-minds program, but I found it all to be totally depressing. My boys were trained as scouts and snipers, not carpenters or bricklayers, and we had come to fight, not to occupy. Yes, we wanted to help the people, but we also needed to get on with the real job. Having my boys put down their rifles to do reconstruction work would be like hitching up a thoroughbred racehorse to pull a beer wagon.
And personally, the sooner I finished in Iraq, the sooner I could get back home, and a lot could be happening back there in an extra thirty days, none of it good. I was struggling to keep apart the two phases of my life, the professional and the personal.
Thank God that op-pause nightmare only lasted a few hours.
I was checking the Main’s defenses when Gunnery Sergeant Don Houston came running up with good news. “Jack!” he announced with a big smile. “It’s off!”
“What’s off?”
“The stupid fucking op-pause. I just heard it on the radio.”
“No shit?” I thought he was trying to be funny, and I was in no mood to get excited about a joke.
“No shit, Jack.” He threw a little jab at me, tapping my shoulder. “You get to kill more people tomorrow.” I could almost feel the monkeys jumping off my back.
Immediately we went back to being Marines instead of administrators. We received orders to collect the noncombat battalion units that we had stripped off for the Afak Drills, then move up to the big cloverleaf intersection and prepare to attack into Ad Diwaniyah.
As we returned along Route 17, small groups of civilians emerged from their homes to wave, a hopeful sign that they were beginning to believe that Saddam and his thugs were