Chapter 62
People would say that a lot. It irritated me when it was someone I didn't know well. The people I did know well respected that I might not know every detail but I knew what I needed to know.
IN THE VILLAGES
With things relatively calm in Sadr City, we were given a new area to target. IED-makers and other insurgents had set up shop in a series of villages near Baghdad, trying to operate under the radar as they supplied weapons and manpower to fight Americans and the loyal Iraqi forces. The Mahdi army was out there, and the area was a virtual no-go zone for Americans.
We had worked with members of 4-10 Mountain Division during much of the Sadr City battle. They were fighters. They wanted to be in the s.h.i.+t-and they certainly got their wish there. Now as we b.u.mped out into the villages outside the city, we were happy to have a chance to work with them again. They knew the area. Their snipers were especially good, and having them along improved our effectiveness.
Our jobs are the same, but there are a few differences between Army and SEAL snipers. For one thing, Army snipers use spotters, which we don't, as a general rule. Their weapon set is a bit smaller than ours.
But the bigger difference, at least at first, had to do with tactics and the way they were deployed. Army snipers were more used to going out in three- or four-man groups, which meant they couldn't stay out for very long, certainly not all night.
The SEAL task unit, on the other hand, moved in heavy and locked down an area, basically looking for a fight and having the enemy provide us with one. It wasn't so much an overwatch anymore as a dare: Here we are; come and get us.
And they did: village after village, the insurgents would come and try and kill us; we'd take them down. Typically, we'd spend at least one night and usually a few, going in and extracting after sunset.
In this area, we ended up going back to the same village a few times, usually taking a different house each time. We'd repeat the process until all the local bad guys were dead, or at least until they understood that attacking us was not very smart.
It was surprising how many idiots you had to kill before they finally got that point.
COVERED WITH c.r.a.p
There were lighter moments, but even some of those were s.h.i.+tty. Literally.
Our point man, Tommy, was a great guy but, as it turned out, a terrible point in a lot of ways.
Or maybe I should say sometimes he was more of a duck than a point man. If there was a puddle between us and the objective, Tommy took us through it. The deeper the better. He was always having us walk through the worst possible terrain.
It got so ridiculous that finally I told him, "One more time, I'm going to whup your a.s.s, and you're fired."
On the very next mission, he found a path to a village that he was sure would be dry. I had my doubts. In fact, I pointed them out to him.
"Oh, no, no," he insisted, "it's good, it's good."
Once we were out in
It stunk even worse than Iraq usually stunk.
"Tommy," I yelled, "I'm going to whip your a.s.s as soon as we get to the house."
We pushed on to the house. I was still in the rear. We cleared the house and, once all the snipers were deployed, I went to find Tommy and give him the thras.h.i.+ng I'd promised.
Tommy was already paying for his sins: when I found him downstairs, he was hooked up to an IV and puking his brains out. He had fallen into the muck and was completely covered with s.h.i.+t. He was sick for a day, and he smelled for a week.
Every article of clothing he'd been wearing was disposed of, probably by a hazmat unit.
Served him right.
I spent somewhere between two and three months in the villages. I had roughly twenty confirmed kills while I was there. The action on any particular op could be fierce; it could also be slow. There was no predicting.
Most of the houses we took over belonged to families who at least pretended to be neutral; I'd guess that the majority of them hated the insurgents for causing trouble and would have been even happier than we were to have the bad guys leave. But there were exceptions, and we were plenty frustrated when we couldn't do anything about it.
We went into one house and saw police uniforms. We knew instantly that the owner was muj-the insurgents were stealing uniforms and using them to disguise themselves in attacks.
Of course he gave us a BS line about having just gotten a job as a part-time police officer-something he'd mysteriously forgotten to mention when we first interrogated him.
We called it back to the Army, gave them the information, and asked what to do.
They had no intelligence on the guy. In the end, they decided the uniforms weren't evidence of anything.
We were told to turn him loose. So we did.
It gave us something to think about every time we heard of an attack by insurgents dressed as policemen, over the next few weeks.
EXTRACTED
One night we entered another village and took over a house at the edge of some large open fields, including one used for soccer. We set up without a problem, surveying the village and preparing for any trouble we might face in the morning.
The tempo of the ops had slowed quite a bit over the past week or two; it looked as if things were slacking down, at least for us. I started thinking about going back west and rejoining my platoon.
I set up in a room on the second floor with LT. We had an Army sniper and his spotter in the room next to us, and a bunch of guys on the roof. I'd taken the.338 Lapua with me, figuring that most of my shots would be on the long side, since we were on the edge of the village. With the area around us quiet, I started scanning out farther, to the next village, a little more than a mile away.
At some point I saw a one-story house with someone moving on the roof. It was about 2,100 yards away, and even with a twenty-five power scope I couldn't make out much more than an outline. I studied the person, but at that point he didn't seem to have a weapon, or at least he wasn't showing it. His back was to me, so I could watch him, but he couldn't see me. I thought he was suspicious, but he wasn't doing anything dangerous, so I let him be.
A little while later an Army convoy came down the road beyond the other village, heading in the direction of the COP we had staged out of. As it got closer, the man on the roof raised a weapon to his shoulder. Now the outline was clear: he had a rocket launcher, and he was aiming it at Americans.
RPG.
We had no way of calling the convoy directly-to this day I don't know exactly who they were, except that they were Army. But I put my scope on him and fired, hoping to at least scare him off with the shot or maybe warn the convoy.
At 2,100 yards, plus a little change, it would take a lot of luck to hit him.
A lot of luck.
Maybe the way I jerked the trigger to the right adjusted for the wind. Maybe gravity s.h.i.+fted and put that bullet right where it had to be. Maybe I was just the luckiest son of a b.i.t.c.h in Iraq. Whatever-I watched through my scope as the shot hit the Iraqi, who tumbled over the wall to the ground.
"Wow," I muttered.
"You dumb lucky f.u.c.ker," said LT.
Twenty-one hundred yards. The shot amazes me even now. It was a straight-up luck shot; no way one shot should have gotten him.
But it did. It was my longest confirmed kill in Iraq, even longer than that shot in Fallujah.
The convoy started reacting, probably unaware of how close they'd come to getting lit up. I went back to scanning for bad guys.