Shooter_ The Autobiography of the Top-Ranked Marine Sniper - Jack Coughlin [64]
I removed the mask when the “All clear” was given after the false alarm. When the doctor finished working, the kid was moved to a cot. I knelt beside him and had the interpreter explain that he was going to be all right and that I would be back to see him later and bring him some food. He was woozy but never took his eyes off of me.
I went back to work at the Main for a while, then grabbed some coffee and rations and returned to the prisoner aid station. Achmed was gone, having been taken by the military police to another prisoner cage in the rear, so I tossed aside the MRE rations and dined instead on fried Spam with my friends. It was disappointing, but it was war.
After chow, I was briefed on where we were going the next day, cleaned my weapons, and settled in to get some sleep on another cold night in Iraq, banishing Achmed from my mind. He was a onetime thing, and while I was glad that he survived, my job was not to coddle enemy soldiers but to kill them. If we ever faced each other again on a battlefield, I would shoot him again without hesitation.
I now had ten kills in Iraq. Then there was Achmed, who was blessed and protected by his merciful Allah. Should have been eleven, but things had not been going quite right all day.
Earlier, I almost got my foot shot off by accident, and Casey almost committed suicide by RPG.
Gunny Don Houston and I were on patrol along a canal when a gunshot snapped out. The round impacted right at my feet, punching up a small column of dirt an inch from my boot.
“Oops,” said Houston.
“Oops?” I yelled at my buddy. “What the fuck do you mean, oops?”
“OK. Oops, sorry.”
That broke the tension, and I cracked a smile. He had accidentally pulled the trigger on his rifle, but it had been pointed at the ground. I told him to forget it—after all, shit happens in war—but I came out of the incident knowing that I was one lucky sumbitch.
Meanwhile, Casey and some of the boys had cleaned out a bunker in which they had found a cache of AK-47s, machine guns, plastique explosives, and about fifty rocket-propelled grenades, enough to arm a whole platoon. They stacked the weapons and set about destroying them with a thermite grenade, a big-league weapon that generates as much heat as a welding torch and melts through anything. Casey unwrapped the grenade, then handed it over to a sergeant who wanted to toss it.
They jogged away when the grenade was thrown, and we heard the quiet pop as the little bomb ignited and began to sizzle through the stacked weapons. Then came a loud BANG and a WHOOSH, and an RPG flew past Casey’s ear and thudded into a nearby sand berm. The intense heat of the thermite grenade was cooking off the pile of live ammo. Casey and the sergeant crawled behind a little mound some farmer had built and hunkered down while more rocket-propelled grenades came to life and went flying. For the next five minutes, the aimless rain of RPGs zoomed about, giving the place the look of a major counterattack—or a carnival. Everyone chewed dirt. Luckily, an RPG must be manually armed in order to detonate on impact, so the actual damage was light.
“Were you really trying to shell your own troops?” I asked the unusually sheepish Casey as he was dusting off.
He gave the only appropriate response, “Fuck you.” The lieutenant had just endured another embarrassing lesson about how, in combat, even doing the right thing can go wrong.
Achmed, the murdered donkey, a bullet that almost took off my foot, and Casey’s attack on the rest