Shooter_ The Autobiography of the Top-Ranked Marine Sniper - Jack Coughlin [76]
The site eventually gave us nothing. There was no evidence of WMDs, and the exact purpose of the place remained unknown. The best guess was that the abandoned factory complex was some sort of precision manufacturing facility.
With only three hours of daylight left, Casey located a broad, tilled field about two kilometers away where we could spread out for the night. McCoy secured the sensitive site of mysterious buildings with an infantry company, plus the Bravo tanks and his tactical headquarters team. The Main, the CAATs, the trains, and other units set up in the field. That night, much of the combat power of the battalion settled down within the berm of the complex itself, among manicured rosebushes, while the rest of us stretched out on farmland that had the consistency of granite.
The strange war just kept getting stranger. Enemy soldiers could become free citizens simply by dropping their guns and uniforms and walking away from their fighting positions. Their comrades up the road would still be trying to kill us, and some of those who quit made their military retirement temporary and would revert to their combatant ways in the cities and villages that we had bypassed. Who to trust?
That night, India Company was marching back from a mission to join our position when they crossed a field that we had traversed earlier, sidestepping the bodies of some enemy soldiers. The “bodies” suddenly came to life, leaped up, and started firing, but the Marines reacted instantly and returned fire, so the enemy soldiers went back to being dead, this time for real. It was another lesson that we were close to the enemy’s heartland and sudden death could come from any quarter: suicide bombers in pickup trucks; fedayeen hiding in the bushes; soldiers who were dangerous one moment, then changed into civilian clothes at our approach and laid down their guns—but not their hatred. There were booby traps, deadly RPGs, roadside bombs, the threat of weapons that could deal death in massive amounts, and now people faking death to stage an ambush. It was dangerous to let down your guard.
On the flip side were the friendly little mom-and-pop stores that could be found alongside almost every road in Iraq. Sometimes, when a trove of Saddam’s private cash was discovered, the intelligence guys we called the “Secret Squirrels” became our private ATM machines, spitting out money, as they distributed Iraqi dinars among the troops as unofficial bonuses so we could pump cash back into the local economies. We figured the dictator had stolen enough money, so we were happy to give it back to the citizens.
We would step into those dark little shops and buy almost everything on the shelves—bottles of 7-Up and the Arab version of Pepsi-Cola, bubble gum, and local snacks such as an odd version of caramelized corn. There would be a lot of friendly jabber about prices, and the costs skyrocketed as more Marine customers showed up. A cold drink that went for only five dinars to the first customer was suddenly five thousand dinars for latecomers who were trying to shove ten-thousand-dinar notes into the hands of the shopkeepers. They could not believe the bonanza spilling from the wallets of the young men carrying guns. Those shop owners were friendly, exuberant, and happy to see us.
Or were they? Who knew? How could you tell? To say we were on edge is an understatement.
Artillery blinked against the night sky in the north, and mosquitoes hit us in swarms as I made myself as comfortable as possible among the hardpan ruts of the plowed field. I wondered what kind of crops could possibly grow in such desolation, other than sheaves of hardship and vines of misery.
Suspense gripped us tightly, for the war was entering its final phase. All along the Marine lines on that Saturday night, recon teams were out, snooping to find ways through the last big obstacle, the Diyala River.
Over the centuries, the swift green waters of the Diyala had dropped from a lake far to the north to carve a wide and deep channel that meandered for miles through central