Shooter_ The Autobiography of the Top-Ranked Marine Sniper - Jack Coughlin [65]
16
Have Gun, Will Travel
We pulled out of the rancid Ad Diwaniyah cloverleaf, which Casey accurately likened to “a camelshit amusement park for flies,” at ten o’clock on the morning of April 2 for another road march that moved us closer to Baghdad. It was another day of just getting into position to fight. All across Iraq, other Coalition troops were doing the same thing. The weather had improved, supplies were flowing, and the ground attack was rolling inexorably forward beneath a sky owned by Coalition warplanes. The Army’s 3rd Infantry Division finally was coming out of the desert through the narrow Karbala Gap and was within sight of the Euphrates River, while the 101st Airborne was finishing off the stubborn resistance in the strategic city of Najaf. On our side of the war, the 5th Marine Regiment was rushing up Highway 1, with our 7th Marines right behind them, and we formed a mighty column of tanks and trucks that stretched for miles over the horizon. It was time-consuming, but we had to reach the enemy before we could kill them.
The two Marine regiments made a sharp right turn off of Route 1 and onto an intersecting highway, Route 27, and caught the Iraqis flat-footed when we rolled up on the city of An Numaniyah and its important bridges across the Tigris River. Once on the other bank, we would link up with Task Force Tarawa and unify the combat power of the entire 1st Marine Division into a single powerful fist for the final push on Baghdad.
The steady movement was bringing all of us into the Red Zone, the area around Baghdad in which intelligence analysts predicted Saddam Hussein was most likely to slime us with his chemical and biological weapons. We were aware of the possibility but would not even think of stopping.
We drove all day, and as I sat and rocked and bumped along in the passenger seat of my Humvee, my thoughts drifted to how wheels were making just the sort of difference I had long envisioned for snipers. Once relegated to stationary hides and holes in the ground, we were now part of a mobile force. Shoot somebody in one town, saddle up, move on to another town, and shoot somebody else. Have gun, will travel.
Toward evening, Casey and I added a couple of CAATs for extra security to our advance quartering party, broke away from the main column, and raced ahead to find a spot where the battalion could settle down for the night near An Numaniyah. The sounds of a mighty battle, a steady drumbeat of gunfire and explosions that rolled across the desert, greeted us as we approached the first bridge and pulled to the side. Then we received startling new orders from regimental planners who wanted our handful of Humvees and CAATs to drive right through the firefight that was raging around the embattled bridge, cross it, dash through the hostile, uncleared city, and set up camp on the other side of the Tigris. It was a recipe for a suicidal disaster.
Fortunately, as we were trying to figure out some way to carry out the order without getting everyone killed, our battalion began pulling in, and McCoy was soon standing beside us. He chewed on his big cigar as we gave him the briefing, and he grew quite unhappy to hear how we were supposed to go through a ferocious battle, then drive through a totally unsecured city, and do it in the dark. The colonel grabbed his radio and laid some sharp, unkind words on headquarters about planners who did not take into account the reality of the battlefield.
At least three times, McCoy said, “I won’t have a Black Hawk Down situation!” Since one of the raps against Darkside Six was that he liked to fight too much, the colonel easily won his point. The battalion would spend the night where it was and attack tomorrow, when conditions would have changed and we could see what the hell we were doing.
Somehow, Casey squeezed the battalion into an overnight position in a scrubby field about two football fields square, only about 20 percent of the space