Chapter 30
Those were my strangest shots. My longest came around the same time.
One day, a group of three insurgents appeared on the sh.o.r.e upriver, out of range at around 1,600 yards. (That's just under a mile.) A few had tried that before, standing there, knowing that we wouldn't shoot them, because they were so far away. Our ROEs allowed us to take them, but the distance was so great that it really didn't make sense to take a shot. Apparently realizing they were safe, they began mocking us like a bunch of juvenile delinquents.
The FAC came over and started laughing at me as I eyed them through the scope.
"Chris, you ain't never gonna reach them."
Well, I didn't say I was going to try, but his words made it seem like almost a challenge. Some of the other Marines came over and told me more or less the same thing.
Anytime someone tells me I can't do something, it gets me thinking I can do it. But 1,600 yards was so far away that my scope wouldn't even dial up the shooting solution. So I did a little mental calculation and adjusted my aim with the help of a tree behind one of the grinning insurgent idiots making fun of us.
I took the shot.
The moon, Earth, and stars aligned. G.o.d blew on the bullet, and I gut-shot the jacka.s.s.
His two buddies hauled a.s.s out of there.
"Get 'em, get 'em!" yelled the Marines. "Shoot 'em."
I guess at that point they thought I could hit anything under the sun. But the truth is, I'd been lucky as h.e.l.l to hit the one I was aiming at; there was no way I was taking a shot at people who were running.
That would turn out to be one of my longest confirmed kills in Iraq.
MISPERCEPTIONS
People think that snipers take such incredibly long shots all the time. While we do take longer shots than most guys on the battlefield, they're probably a lot closer than most people think.
I never got all caught up in measuring how far I was shooting. The distance really depended on the situation. In the cities, where most of my kills came, you're only going to be shooting anywhere from two hundred to four hundred yards anyway. That's where your targets are, so that's where your shots are.
Out in the countryside, it's a different story. Typically, the shots out there would run from eight hundred to twelve hundred yards. That's where the longer-range guns like the.338 would come in handy.
Someone once asked me if I had a favorite distance. My answer was easy: the closer the better.
As I mentioned earlier, another misperception people have about snipers is that we always aim for the head. Personally, I almost never target the head, unless I'm absolutely sure I'm going to make the shot. And that's rare on the battlefield.
I'd much rather aim center ma.s.s-shoot for the middle of the body. I've got plenty of room to play with. No matter where I hit him, he's going down.
BACK TO BAGHDAD
After a week on the river, I was pulled out, swapping places with another SEAL sniper, who'd been injured briefly earlier in the operation and was ready to get back into
Command sent me back to Camp Fallujah for a few days. It was one of the few breaks in the war that I actually welcomed. After the pace of the battle in the city, I was definitely ready for a brief vacation. The hot meals and showers felt pretty d.a.m.n good.
After chilling out for a few days, I was ordered back to Baghdad to work with GROM again.
We were on the way to Baghdad when our Hummer was..h.i.t by a buried IED. The improvised explosive blew up just behind us; everybody in the vehicles freaked-except me and another guy who'd been at Fallujah since the start of the a.s.sault. We looked at each other, winked, then closed our eyes and went back to sleep. Compared to the month's worth of explosions and s.h.i.+t we'd just lived through, this was nothing.
While I'd been in Iraq, my platoon was sent to the Philippines on a mission to train up the local military to fight radical terrorists. It wasn't exactly the most exciting a.s.signment. Finally, with that mission complete, they were sent to Baghdad.
I went out with some other SEALs to the airport to greet them.
I was expecting a big welcome-here my family was finally coming in.
They came off the plane cussin' me.
"Hey a.s.shole."
And much worse than that. Like everything else they do, SEALs excel at foul language.
Jealousy, thy name is SEAL.
I'd wondered why I hadn't heard anything from them over the past few months. In fact, I was wondering why they were jealous-as far as I knew, they hadn't heard about anything I'd been doing.
Come to find out, my chief had been regaling them with the after-action reports of my sniping in Fallujah. They'd been sitting around hand-holding the Filipinos and hating life, while I'd been having all the fun.
They got over it. Eventually, they even asked me to do a little presentation on what I'd done, complete with pointers and stuff. One more chance to use PowerPoint.
FUN WITH THE BIG SHOTS
Now that they were here, I joined them and started doing some DAs. Intel would find an IED-maker or maybe a financer, give us the intel, and we'd go in and snag him. We'd hit them very early in the morning-blow his door down, rush inside, and take him before he even had a chance to get out of bed.
This went on for about a month. By now, DAs were pretty much an old routine; they were a h.e.l.l of a lot less dangerous in Baghdad than in Fallujah.
We were living out near BIAP-Baghdad International Airport-and working from there. One day, my chief came over and gave me a chiefly grin.
"You've got to have some fun, Chris," he told me. "You need to do a little PSD."
He was using SEAL sarcasm. PSD stands for "personal security detail"-bodyguard duty. The platoon had been a.s.signed to provide security for high-ranking Iraqi officials. The insurgents had started kidnapping them, trying to disrupt the government. It was a pretty thankless job. So far, I'd been able to avoid it, but it seemed my ninja smoke had run out. I left and went over to the other side of the city and the Green Zone. (The Green Zone was a section of central Baghdad that was created as a safe area for the allies and the new Iraqi government. It was physically cut off from the rest of the city by cement walls and barbed wire. There were only a few ways in and out, and these were under strict control. The U.S. and other allied emba.s.sies were located there, as were Iraqi government buildings.)
I lasted an entire week.
The Iraqi officials, so-called, were notorious for not telling their escorts what their schedules were or giving details on who was supposed to be traveling with them. Given the level of security in the Green Zone, that was a significant problem.
I acted as "advance." That meant I would go ahead of an official convoy, make sure the route was safe, and then stand at the security checkpoint and ID the convoy vehicles as they came through. This way the Iraqi vehicles could move through the checkpoints quickly without becoming targets.
One day, I was advance for a convoy that included the Iraqi vice president. I'd already checked the route and arrived at a Marine checkpoint outside the airport.
Baghdad International was on the other side of the city from the Green Zone. While the grounds themselves were secure, the area around it and the highway leading to the gate still came under occasional fire. It was a prime terror target, since the insurgents could pretty much figure that anyone going in or out was related to the Americans or the new Iraqi government in some way.
I was on radio coms with one of my boys in the convoy. He gave me the details on who was in the group, how many vehicles we had, and the like. He also told me that we had an Army Hummer in the front and an Army Hummer in the back-simple markers I could pa.s.s along to the guards.
The convoy came flying up, Hummer in the lead. We counted off the vehicles and lo, there was the last Hummer taking up the rear.
All good.