Shooter_ The Autobiography of the Top-Ranked Marine Sniper - Jack Coughlin [94]
The colonel was as good as his word, but it was a devil’s bargain. I was going back into the fight, but Casey had to stay behind again, which meant that I was losing my security blanket. As much as I disliked that decision, it was neither illogical nor unexpected, for Casey had proven invaluable. His experience level had soared since the start of the war, and he was always busy, whether searching an Iraqi armory with enough weapons to equip a battalion or using his engineering training to help lay down those important new bridges. Such things win wars, and the battalion honchos expressed confidence in him.
Casey was blind to that; he just wanted to get back to the fighting. “I’m sick of being pissed off,” he wrote in his journal. “I am just depressed … a monkey could do this job. I’m a glorified taxi driver. I would be the happiest man alive if I had a rifle platoon right now.” Having had a taste of fire, he wanted more, and he considered anything less than a shooting battle to be a bullshit mission.
By splitting us up, Officer Bob had checkmated the development of my sniper team. We had already proven to other combat leaders how effective we were working together, but it had made no difference to Bob. He wanted both of us left behind but settled for Casey. When I broke the news that he was being quarantined, Casey just shook his head and said nothing at all, but it was easy enough to read the anger and disappointment in his thoughts. I left with the main body for the attack a few minutes later while Casey told his boys to stand down and pulled his truck out of the assault position.
That same day, with the Main and Tac HQs established and guiding the battle that was developing up the road, a couple of large Iraqi BM-21 rockets came howling into the area and exploded nearby. As usual, Officer Bob went bananas, got on his radio, and started yelling gibberish at the senior officers in the Tac, who were only a few yards away and knew as well as he what had just happened. Bob said that everybody had to pack up and move, although no one had been hurt and our counterbattery radar had already pinpointed the launch site and was guiding planes to attack and shut it down. Bob was ignored, but the incident spurred Casey to get out of the man’s presence and find something useful to do.
One of the Secret Squirrels, an intelligence officer, told him that an abandoned antiaircraft missile launch site had been found nearby, and he wanted to check it out. Instead of assigning a grunt to provide an armed escort, Casey grabbed his rifle and went along to do the job himself. They came upon a carefully built position containing another of those huge French-built Roland antiair missile launchers, a state-of-the-art piece of defensive equipment, but useless because its operators had abandoned it. While the Squirrel rummaged through the trashed position, Casey found a discarded Iraqi flag: three broad stripes—red, white, and black—with three big green stars in the middle of the white one. It was not a new flag, and the colors had been dulled by time and exposure to the hot sun.
To most Americans, the Iraqi flag was just a flag, but this one was a relic from another era. Its design had been the banner of Iraq since 1963, but just before the Gulf War in 1991, Saddam Hussein added the takbir of “Allah Akbar” (God is great) in green Arabic script, between the stars, in an effort to portray himself as a leader of all Muslims. Unknowingly, Casey had picked up a flag that was considered a pre-Saddam symbol, a fact that was very important to Iraqis. Without much thought other than having a neat souvenir, he rolled it up, stuffed it into his backpack, and promptly forgot about it. That flag would be unfurled a few days later in a historic moment.
The morning’s mission began with the Bravo tanks and Kilo infantry heading for a suspected chemical factory while the India grunts set up in a blocking position and cleared neighborhoods to the east. The military side of the operation was relatively routine, because our coordination