Shooter_ The Autobiography of the Top-Ranked Marine Sniper - Jack Coughlin [78]
This just didn’t feel right, though, and I began to fidget. I got up, stretched, and looked up the road at the long line of vehicles. Something was stirring up front, and the combat power was on the move. Were they going into a fight or just repositioning?
Little bells began to jangle in my head. Something was up. Something had to be happening! Are we attacking? I climbed inside my Humvee and sat there, staring through the window at the truck in front of us, as if the answers were written on the tailgate. In my gut, I had that sinking feeling again that I was in the wrong place.
At nine o’clock in the morning, we suddenly heard the clear sounds of battle ahead and watched some rocket-propelled grenades ride their hot little tails into balls of explosions. I flipped the radio to the Tac-1 net and clearly heard gunfire behind the voices. Detonations erupted in the area of the sensitive site. I tuned to the Main net and got Officer Bob on the horn. Why had I not been told about the order to attack?
His laconic reply was simply “The colonel said he doesn’t need you today.”
Oh, my God! McCoy himself had told me that I would be taking my gun into a target-rich environment, and now I was once again on the sidelines, literally stranded at the very back of the line and intentionally left out of still another fight. Cursing loudly, I got out of the truck, found a scrawny tree, and sat beneath it in a brooding sulk, so plainly pissed off at the entire fucking world that no one dared say a word to me. The boys had questions but asked them only with their eyes, and for once, I had no answers.
Then one of them screamed that there was some talk on the radio about me, so I walked over to the truck in time to hear the last part of the transmission. It was the unmistakable voice of Darkside Six roaring over the tactical net, shaded by a background of crackling gunshots, asking, demanding, none too politely: “Where the FUCK is Coughlin?”
19
The Baghdad Two-Mile
Death was just beyond my windshield. Bullets whanged against metal, and rocket-propelled grenades zipped toward us. Marines were running and gunning amid the chattering pops of small-arms fire, and machine guns were firing full out, with a heavy, rhythmic stomp. Artillery shells exploded and shook the ground.
On the map, this town was called Az Zafaraniyah, but on that April morning, it was hell for the United States Marines, a raging, brutal firefight that gave this new generation of jarheads a taste of what the Corps had faced on Guadalcanal in World War II, at the Chosin Reservoir in Korea, and at Khe Sanh in Vietnam. It was not pretty enough to appear on TV, for our job was to heap casualties on the defenders, fast and with unrelenting force, and force them to withdraw. So time slowed down and I went on a killing spree.
McCoy had been thoroughly ripped that I was not out on the front edge of the attack, dominating the rooftops when the fight started, and he had barked out on the open radio frequency, “Listen, I want Coughlin and his rifle up here right now!”
I grabbed the mike and confirmed that I was on the way. “Good,” the colonel grumbled. “See you soon.” We’d explain after the shooting stopped, but right now there was work to be done.
“Game on, boys!” I yelled. “We’re back in it.”
Our trucks were rolling almost before I finished telling the boys to get cracking, and we went from loafing to combat-ready in a heartbeat. As the two Humvees broke out of line and gathered speed, Officer Bob appeared in the road, waving his arms. Casey told his driver, “You work for me, not him. Do not stop.” His Humvee dodged the captain and kept going.
I, however, wanted a few words with the lad, so I had the Panda pull to a quick stop. The officer rested his hands on the edge of my window and asked, “Where you