Shooter_ The Autobiography of the Top-Ranked Marine Sniper - Jack Coughlin [91]
But all of the Marines had to be suspicious about the cars and trucks coming toward them, some even accelerating after the snipers shot them. These kids had been carefully trained for months to add their power to the violent supremacy of an attack, and that’s just what they were doing. No one was going to let a truck that might be packed with explosives and driven by a suicidal madman get through and blow up in the middle of our lines.
The death toll began to mount out there, and the strain was growing intolerable. It was the worst possible time for anyone to come down that road, and everybody who tried it during the first hour after we crossed the bridge was writing his own obituary.
A fat guy in a white shirt, all by himself, came flying toward us in a pickup, and we blew him away. There was an AK-47 on the seat beside him. Good kill.
Ten minutes later, it all changed in the blink of an eye, and in the swirling fog of war, the inevitable tragedy emerged in the form of a blue Kia minivan that came over the hump of the hill. I decided to engage it as far away as possible. Carrington, Moreno, and I all fired into the engine block, but once again the motor kept running and the built-up momentum pulled it along. Who are you people? I screamed in my head. What are you doing? Who the hell drives toward people who are shooting at them? Dont you know there is a goddamn war going on? It was impossible to comprehend, impossible to stop, and I watched the van roll forward.
I could see the people moving inside, both in the front seat and in the rear compartment. They didn’t seem to be military, for the driver and the passenger were in street clothes, and I could see no weapons, although that did not mean no weapons were in there. Who knew what was packed in the big cargo space? The van kept coming, now accelerating down the grade, and although I prayed for the damned thing to just stop, it eventually reached the trigger line and entered the kill box.
The Marines legitimately opened up on it, and a typhoon of bullets pummeled the van. I couldn’t remove my eye from the scope and watched these innocent people die as rifle fire flashed and flared all around me. A middle-aged man and woman in the back of the van somehow lived through that hell of gunfire and spent the night hiding among the dead members of their family before crawling out the next morning with their hands raised.
Suddenly, I was present, but I wasn’t really there at all. I snapped from the emotional overload, something I had never before experienced and did not believe was possible. My body began to react automatically to its years of training, but my mind totally disengaged from the awful scenes unfolding in front of me as people kept coming. Innocents were dying, and I was stuck right in the front row with a huge spyglass, not only watching the butchery in magnified detail but also participating in it, up close and personal. I was still a sniper, but I just wasn’t home.
I don’t remember all of the cars and trucks that were dealt with that day. A mother and father driving a big Mercedes were shot to death, but their little girl, clutching a teddy bear in the backseat, survived. I have no recollection of that bloody moment, nor of much else after the incident with the van.
There was no way for us to go into that uncleared area to help without exposing ourselves to getting killed, for Iraqi soldiers up that road were still shooting at us. Neither was there any way to set up warning signs or barriers, so Iraqis continued to come to the bridge, and they continued to die.
It did not come to a stop, because it could not, until our defensive perimeter was set. There was no way to separate the sheep from the wolves.
I could not count, and did not want to know, how many people I had killed in the past two days. My logbook would just have to wait, and it would never be complete. I don’t remember when, and I don’t remember how, but once the perimeter was firmly in place, I picked up my big rifle and walked away, back across that damned bridge, as lifeless