Shooter_ The Autobiography of the Top-Ranked Marine Sniper - Jack Coughlin [75]
One man Casey and I bagged that morning was a pretty friendly fellow who was a lieutenant colonel in the Iraqi counterintelligence corps, and he sang as freely as a canary. He described in great detail one of those “sensitive sites” that our intelligence people had been hunting, places where it was hoped some of the weapons of mass destruction might be stored. The officer even built a model of it in the sand, like a kid at a beach, and helped us mark the position on a map. We passed him back to the rear for further questioning, although I would have preferred to keep him around as a consultant.
We pushed on up the road from the intersection until we reached a peculiar area where a bunch of abandoned and heavily weathered buildings occupied the right side of the road, a run-down collection of structures similar to a light industrial park in some small city back home. On the left was a mysterious wall of sand, a thick berm that must have reached forty feet in height, with no entranceway facing the road. McCoy sent the Bravo tanks around to see if they could find a door in the dirt.
In a little while, an ominous radio call came back from Captain Lewis. “Darkside Six, this is Bravo Six. I’ve got something up here that you may want to come see.” The tankers had found the site described by the Iraqi officer.
Much of the argument put forward for America starting this war with a preemptive strike had hinged on Saddam Hussein’s possession of weapons of mass destruction, including a nuclear capability. So far, no such weapons had been found, although we still expected to be chemed or slimed as we neared Baghdad.
Rumors had been flying that the 101st Airborne Division had discovered some chemical munitions and that the 82nd Airborne had also found some suspicious artillery rounds. Both of those reports proved to be negative. Perhaps we had finally turned up one of those mysterious caches.
Behind that huge berm of sand, our boys had come upon a complex of modern buildings that were startlingly different from almost every other place we had seen in Iraq. While obvious neglect reigned almost everywhere else, this place had been carefully maintained. It was actually clean! Large pieces of industrial equipment lay in the yards, each neatly covered with a tarpaulin and protected by sandbags from the elements and American bombs. The air inside the buildings was cool, although the electricity was off and the air-conditioners idle. Computers with blank screens sat in neat ranks on desks, wooden cabinets lined the floor, and a picture of Saddam Hussein was in every work cubicle. It was obvious that this was a workplace for skilled technical personnel and needed a thorough search.
Some of the Jackals did a search of their own and found that some of the buildings still had running water, a promise of bliss for the civilian media types who had been out in the desert with us for almost two weeks. Reporter Peter Maas later wrote about the incident in a New York Times Magazine story: “Along with the usual assortment of portraits of Saddam Hussein and outdated computers, Ellen [Knickmeyer of the Associated Press] discovered a shower with running water. I grabbed a bar of soap, raced inside, and stripped. Just then a Marine shouted down the hallway, The building is rigged with C4! Get out!’ I got out.” The Jackals hastily abandoned the booby-trapped building and stayed dirty, just like the rest