Shooter_ The Autobiography of the Top-Ranked Marine Sniper - Jack Coughlin [87]
The Panda Bear and I had ducked away from the blast and, shielded by the tall sides of our armored Humvee, were unharmed other than being thoroughly rattled and disoriented. Screams of wounded men mixed with calls for “Corpsman up!” When I looked over at the smoking ruin of the Kilo command track, I thought Colonel McCoy was dead. We had been standing right beside it, talking, only a moment before.
Through the smoke, fire, and chaos, my pal Gunnery Sergeant Jean-Paul Courville, the Ragin’ Cajun, came across the courtyard. He stands a shade under six feet tall, his blond hair is cut short, and his 175 pounds are nothing but solid, lean muscle. When we had first met several months ago, Courville had just finished a stint as a basic training drill instructor and looked like a Marine television commercial. “Hello, Gunny,” I had said. “It’s ‘Gunnery Sergeant,’ ” he corrected. “Fuck you,” I replied. After that we got along fine.
After seeing the devastating explosion, Courville, in an astonishing display of calmness and courage amid mayhem and confusion, already was getting things under control. He got corpsmen busy treating the wounded, assigned priorities on who was to be evacuated, then personally ducked into the still-burning Amtrac and hauled out live ammunition, rockets and bullets that were in danger of exploding from the heat. My personal negative feelings about everything French do not extend to Courville, who is without question a ripped stud of a gunnery sergeant. Anyway, he’s from Louisiana, not Paris.
Then I heard a shout—McCoy’s voice! He had walked to the other side of a wall just before the shell hit and had survived the explosion. Two of his Marines were dead and three had been wounded, but the colonel yelled, “This doesn’t change anything!”
He pushed the incident from his mind, for it is an accepted fact of war that men die, and a leader must focus on the mission. The best way to help the wounded and remove the danger is to finish off the enemy, and that meant taking that bridge.
The Panda Bear and I hustled down to the guardhouse, and McCoy followed a few minutes later. “Ten minutes,” he told me.
Various media Jackals, who had heard about the plan for a river crossing, had been drifting in since daylight and jostled for position among the grunts. Many of the news types looked dazed after the deadly artillery barrage that had made them eat dirt, too.
Infantry Marines and combat engineers had scavenged the town throughout the night and had gathered a witch’s brew of wooden planks, strips of metal, part of a steel gate, and anything else that they might throw across the hole in the pedestrian bridge. They gathered now, looking like big pack rats carrying their treasure.
We lined up against the walls and waited through a countdown that seemed to take forever. I had a powerful team to take across the river, for our group had grown some more during the morning. I had the Panda and the two snipers who had come over from Kilo, Carrington and Harding. Then, out of nowhere, came still another sniper, Staff Sergeant Dino Moreno, who had been the partner of Mark Evnin. There were few flaws and no weaknesses in this bunch, and a lot of sniper rifles would be going across the river in the first wave. Once across, we would take up positions and let our long guns reach out to help control the captured bridgehead. We could cause a lot of trouble.
Time slowed down again, as if to let me think a bit before going out on a narrow bridge that we fully expected to be swept by enemy fire and the same sort of heavy opposition that we had encountered the day before. A daylight assault on a bridge was dangerous, and I wondered why, in the ultramodern twenty-first century, some bright tactician in a war college had not come up with a better way of doing this.
“Let’s do it,” McCoy said calmly, and Sergeant Major Dave Howell walked out into the middle