Part 22 (2/2)

He gave us a building and off we went. I'd been paired with a sniper I'd met during BUD/S, Ray. (I've used the name to protect his ident.i.ty.)

Ray is a big-time gun nut. Loves guns, and knows 'em real well. I'm not sure how good a shot he is, but he's probably forgotten more than I know about rifles.

We hadn't seen each other for years, but from what I remembered from BUD/S I figured we'd get along all right. You want to feel confident the guy you're working with is someone you can rely on-after all, you are literally trusting him with your life.

A Ranger we called Ranger Molloy had been shepherding our rifles and some gear with us in a Hummer. He came up and gave me my .300 Win Mag. The rifle's extra distance over the Mk-11 would be handy once I found a good hide to shoot from.

Running up the stairs, I sorted the situation out in my head. I knew what side of the building I wanted to be on, and roughly where I wanted to be. When I reached the top-I'd decided I wanted to shoot from a room rather than the roof-I started walking through the hall, scanning for an apartment that had the right view. Going inside, I looked for one with furniture I could use to set up.

To me, the home I was in was just another part of the battlefield. The apartments and everything in them were just things to be used to accomplish our goal-clearing the city.

Snipers need to either lie down or sit for a long period of time, so I needed to find furniture that would let me do that as comfortably as possible. You also need something to rest your rifle on. In this case, I was going to be shooting out of the windows, so I needed to be elevated. As I searched through the apartment, I found a room that had a baby crib in it. It was a rare find, and one I could put to good use.

Ray and I took it and flipped it over. That gave us a base. Then we pulled the door of the room off its hinges and put it on top. We now had a stable platform to work on.

Most Iraqis don't sleep on beds; they use bedrolls, thick mats, or blankets that are put directly on the floor. We found a few of them and laid them out on the door. That made a semi-comfortable, elevated bed to lie on while working the gun. A rolled mat gave us a place to rest the end of our guns on.

We opened the window and were ready to shoot.

We decided we'd work three hours on, three hours off, rotating back and forth. Ray took the first watch.

I started rummaging through the complex to see if I could find any cool s.h.i.+t-money, guns, explosives. The only thing I found worth acquisitioning was a handheld Tiger Woods golf game.

Not that I was authorized to take it, or even did take it, officially. If I had taken it, I would have played it the rest of the deployment. If I'd done that, it might explain why I am actually pretty good at the game now.

If I had taken it.

I got on the .300 Win Mag in late afternoon. The city I was looking out at was brownish-yellow and gray, almost as if everything was shaded the light sepia of an old photograph. Many, though not all, of the buildings were made of bricks or covered with stucco in this same color. The stones and roadways were gray. A fine mist of desert dust seemed to hover over the houses. There were trees and other vegetation, but the overall landscape looked like a collection of dully painted boxes in the desert.

Most of the buildings were squat houses, two stories high, occasionally three or four. Minarets or prayer towers poked out of the grayness at irregular intervals. There were mosque domes scattered around-here a green egg flanked by a dozen smaller eggs, there a white turnip glinting white in the sinking sun.

The buildings were packed in tight, the streets almost geometrical in their grid pattern. There were walls everywhere. The city had already been at war for some time, and there was plenty of rubble not only around the edges but in the main thoroughfares. Dead ahead of me but out of view was the infamous bridge where the insurgents had desecrated the bodies of the Blackwater contractors half a year earlier. The bridge spanned the Euphrates, which flowed in an inverted V just south of my position.

My immediate concern was a set of railroad tracks about eight hundred yards from the building. There was a berm and a train trestle over the highway south of me. To the east, on my left as I looked out the window, the train line ran to a switching yard and station outside the main part of the city.

The Marine a.s.sault would sweep across the tracks, driving down and into an area from the Euphrates to a highway at the eastern end of the city, marked by a cloverleaf. This was an area roughly three and one-third miles wide; the plan was to move about a mile and a half deep to Iraqi Route 10 by November 10, a little less than three days. That might not seem like a lot-most Marines can probably walk that far in a half hour-but the path lay through a rat's nest of b.o.o.by-trapped streets and past heavily armed houses. Not only did the Marines expect to be fighting literally house to house and block to block, but they also realized that things would probably get worse as they went. You push the rats from one hole and they congregate in the next. Sooner or later, they run out of places to run.

Looking out the window, I was anxious for the battle to start. I wanted a target. I wanted to shoot someone.

I didn't have to wait all that long.

From the building, I had a prime view across to the railroad tracks and the berm, and then beyond that into the city.

I started getting kills soon after I got on the gun. Most were back in the area near the city. Insurgents would move into that area, trying to get into position to attack or maybe spy on the Marines. They were about eight hundred meters away, across the railroad tracks and below the berm, so probably, in their mind, they couldn't be seen and were safe.

They were badly mistaken.

<script>