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By Root 1046 0

as cratered as the dark side of the moon, when we finally got over there. Our gunfire had churned the area into a lumpy field of nothing, overlaid with a frayed carpet of battle junk. Abandoned RPGs and AK-47s lay everywhere, amid torn clothing and lost pictures from destroyed homes, empty fighting holes, and deserted bunkers. Rows of houses, most about two stories tall, and a line of shops occupied the left side of the road. Grunts from Kilo Company charged straight into them, yelling, “Clear!” as they surged from room to room and house to house. India Company veered right and worked their way through a large grove of palm trees that had been a nest for Iraqi troops. Our artillery had wrecked the oasis, but rifle fire still snapped on the morning breeze. Resistance had been light this morning, but we could not take anything for granted, and we pumped rounds into anything that looked like a potential threat.

I gathered my sniper team and went looking for a good position. Only a block from the waterfront, we came across a house tall enough to provide a good view. A big padlock secured the steel gate to the courtyard, and Dino Moreno pulled out his pistol and fired into it five times, each round smacking the padlock with enormous force. It held. I muttered about his lousy aim and opened fire at point-blank range with my own pistol, slamming two more bullets against the stubborn device. It danced, it dented, and the ricocheting rounds sang away, but the lock remained secure. It was the second bulletproof padlock that I had encountered in the war, and I made a mental note to buy stock in the Iraqi padlock company.

Our shots were answered from inside the courtyard by the mournful moooo of a cow, so I climbed up on some debris and looked over into what seemed like a cross between a petting zoo and a butcher shop. Cattle and sheep and goats and chickens milled about in utter confusion, stepping clumsily in and around the blown-away carcasses of other cows and sheep and goats and chickens. The poor beasts had endured a nightlong fusillade, watching their companions explode right next to them; there was blood and gore everywhere, and they were all mad with fright. I took a pass on this building. After killing at least a dozen men yesterday, I had no sympathy to waste on cows, but damn, how can you fight a proper war in a slaughterhouse?

The Marines secured the front ranks of buildings and the palm grove, then pushed on to established defensive positions about five hundred yards from the end of the bridge. My boys found a good high spot that gave us an unobstructed view up the main road, and all four snipers—me, Moreno, Carrington, and Harding—locked in on it. Since we could see clearly for about a thousand yards, we established an invisible “trigger line” on a curve in the road about eight hundred and fifty yards from our position. Anyone approaching our positions would be watched but not considered a true threat until he reached that point. We quickly noticed that the curve in the road was at the top of a slight downward grade, so gravity and the physics of momentum would conspire to pull a vehicle toward us. It was another reason to be careful in choosing our targets.

Almost as soon as I had my rifle pointed down the street, a white Toyota truck appeared about nine hundred yards away, and through my scope I saw that the driver wore a green military tunic. A second uniformed man stood in the bed of the truck, with a pistol in his belt and an AK-47 in his hand. No doubt about these guys, and they looked as if they were scouting us. The truck came closer, and I told Doug Carrington to take out the guy in back while I tended to the driver. When the truck reached four hundred yards, we did a short count and our sniper rifles barked as one. The driver slumped dead over his steering wheel, and Carrington knocked the passenger out of the back. The truck lurched to a stop.

More Marines were pouring over the bridge, which meant more rifles were pointing down the roads and machine guns were set up. The buildup had the potential for