Shooter_ The Autobiography of the Top-Ranked Marine Sniper - Jack Coughlin [67]
Our Bravo tanks charged over the bridge and into a fight with more Iraqi tanks, cannons blazing only twenty yards apart, as we penetrated deeper into the western outskirts of the town. Enemy tanks and armored vehicles were hidden behind corners and would pop out to take easy shots and quickly pull back. Bravo kept attacking, and the grunts of Kilo Company piled out of their Amtracs and dove into a sprawling grove of date palms, where enemy bullets chipped trees around the ears of the advancing Marines. The CAATs swept out north and south to add their missiles and machine guns to the fray, while India Company hit clusters of buildings the Bravo tanks had bypassed.
Casey and I brought in the Tac and Main headquarters, and I watched with breathtaking eagerness as heavy fire slashed out from the palm grove where the enemy troops were dug in. The radio blurted calls for assistance from the battle commanders, and I grabbed my sniper rifle but Officer Bob suddenly appeared and refused to let me leave. “I need you back here,” he insisted.
“I’m not your personal fucking bodyguard!” I shouted, but I got no response.
There was a war erupting just up the road. Up there, the big guns of the tanks were hammering away, heavy machine guns were stuttering, Marine grunts were yelling and running and shooting, tankers were calling for more infantry support, enemy fire was astonishingly heavy. Down here, Officer Bob strolled back and forth, safe behind the steel walls of the Amtrac. I was heading back to see J-Matt Baker to protest when a coded radio call broke through.
“Nightingale!” That single code word meant that Marines were down and urgent medical evacuation was needed. It was also my ticket out to the fight. Casey and I and our boys jumped into the Humvees to provide security for an ambulance Amtrac on a two-minute sprint to the front edge of the battle. We wove through debris on the road and past smoking hulks of enemy T-62 tanks in which ammunition was still cooking off in booming explosions. A CAAT came screaming back, and its commander said it was carrying out the wounded men. We cut the ambulance free to return while we kept going to the fight. Although I didn’t know it at the time, lying in the CAAT was a badly wounded Mark Evnin, the eager kid from Vermont who had been my spotter only two days before when we took out that sniper on the bus in Ad Diwaniyah. He would die before I even knew he was hit.
The palm grove was alive with action, but the thick dust, flashes of fire, and flying debris made it impossible to distinguish who was who, so we pulled to a stop and I climbed atop the Humvee. Since the tanks and grunts were already at work among the trees, I glassed over to the right and found that the north side of the battle zone seemed open for a flank attack on the Marines. I lasered some ranges and yelled down that we would be staying in this spot for a while, so Casey spread the boys out in a protective cordon. The radio squawked annoyingly: Officer Bob, telling us to return to his position. We ignored him.
I lay there, still as a corpse, with my eyeball becoming part of the scope, magnifying my world in multiples. A mirage down the way tipped me about wind conditions, and I adjusted the setting, then scanned the empty streets and worked my view up to the rooftops. Accumulating knowledge of repeated behavior is a prime reason for keeping sniper logbooks. Ours had taught us that the Iraqis liked to hang out near those little doorways that exit onto the rooftops, so I gave extra attention to every one of those that