Shock Factor (21 page)

Jason flourished in our platoon. We worked harder than anyone else in the brigade, and Jason worked harder than almost any of our new guys. Though he'd grown up amid gun violence, he'd never handled a real firearm until the year before in Basic. This actually proved an advantage to him, as he had no bad habits to break. We started teaching him the math behind long-range precision shooting, and all of the NCOs discovered he had a knack for numbers.

“The math and physics made sense to me,” he recalled.

He was all heart after he joined us. To hone his skills, Jason spent thousands of dollars out of pocket on ammunition and extra gear—as did most of the platoon. Day after day, we hit the range and I saw him develop into a phenomenal shot.

By the time he went to the Scout Sniper Basic Course, Jason had been so thoroughly trained within the platoon that school seemed easy. He received his class's High Shooter award. To Jason, that didn't seem unusual at the time, as 3/4 Marines had made a habit of sweeping up those sorts of things. He was just glad to be part of the team.

During the March 2003 invasion of Iraq, 3/4 Marines led the charge to Baghdad, and our scout sniper platoon went into combat for the first time. Most of our shooters had never seen action, and they entered the fight amped up, aggressive, and eager to go. I'd seen enough in Somalia to realize that this would be a marathon, not a sprint, but I also knew that I couldn't tell my guys that. They would need to experience it for themselves and settle down as the innate foreignness of battle and death became their daily routines.

This is a process that most noncombat veterans cannot understand. An average American has little association with death, or the threat of it. When somebody dies in a car wreck, or in a street fight, or in some accident, their body is removed almost always within minutes. With death that remote in our daily lives, being confronted with unexpected or violent death is even more deeply shocking and transformative for us. One only needs to remember the sight of our fellow Americans leaping from the Twin Towers on September 11 to know the indelible effect such sights have on us here at home.

In combat, these moments are commonplace. They happen all around us, they claim our friends, civilians, and the enemy. In most of us, there is a switch that such scenes eventually throw within our psyches. It allows us to cope and function. Our first encounters are shocking, no doubt, but then we go numb. Black humor helps, and we make jokes to help normalize the insanity around us. While fighting for the Diyala River bridge, for example, one of the Iraqi soldiers we killed remained in our front for hours. We nicknamed him “Ach-Dead,” something that buttoned-down Americans would have probably found offensive. By then, as a platoon, we'd thrown our switches.

It happens in every war, to every soldier, Marine, and sniper who can psychologically withstand warfare. One look at the gruesome Battle of Verdun is all it takes to see the extremes that the human spirit can endure. During that 1916 campaign, German shellfire was so intense that entire companies of French infantry vanished into these barrages. Trenches were ground up, pitted by artillery strikes, then ground up again by subsequent barrages. When French reinforcements were fed into the battle and told to dig in, their spades unearthed shredded pieces of their comrades. They dug anyway, and soon new trenches took shape with corpses embedded in their walls. The fresh troops grew so immune to these horrors that they would sit and eat their rations surrounded by the rotting remains of their brother warriors, knowing that in time, they would probably be entombed in the trench walls, too.

Violent death is shock enough, at least initially. Taking a life is another thing altogether. It never unfolds the way Hollywood portrays. Novelists who have never taken a life, or seen one taken, have created all sorts of heroic final moments, or desperate last stands as their protagonists face the whirlwind with unfettered resolve, killing away without thought or conscience.

Jason Delgado had been no stranger to violence. His world back home in the Bronx had been steeped in it. Yet the scale and nature of what we experienced during the drive up was so much more vast and surreal, it left him hyperalert, edgy, and unsettled. As we fought forward toward the Diyala River bridge, the gateway to southeastern Baghdad, Jason came to grips with the nature of our job as shooters.

It was at the end of March 2003 when 3/4 Marines pushed into a small town we called Buyinah. The Iraqi Army and Fedayeen (Iraqi guerrilla fighters) resisted fiercely, and the fighting devolved into a close-range small-arms and RPG slugfest. Jason, one of our lieutenants, and one other sniper scaled a nearby tower to try and get a better view of the enemy ahead of us. As they did, the enemy fired a rocket-propelled grenade. This one streaked straight at one of our armored vehicles, slammed into its track, but failed to detonate. Jason spotted the smoke plume created by the launch, but couldn't see the enemy soldier who had fired it.

He was carrying an M16A2 at the time, zeroed to six hundred yards. He scanned the area around the smoke plume until movement caught his eye. In an alleyway, a Fedayeen fighter, dressed in black, edged out of a building and moved to a nearby corner. He was armed with an AK; there was no doubt about taking the shot.

Jason leveled his M16, brought his sights onto his target, and pulled the trigger. The shot missed. He took aim again. The Fedayeen had not moved. Jason fired again, and missed again.

He took a breath, let part of it out, and tried to relax amid the din of the battle playing out around him. He focused and pulled the trigger a third time. The Fedayeen dropped his rifle and clutched his stomach. He began to walk with awkward, almost drunken steps. He hadn't gone far when Jason saw him bend over and hunch his shoulders. Then he fell to the ground. As he lay there, Jason looked on as the dying man crossed his legs, then crossed his arms over his chest. He bled out in that position a few seconds later.

Jason stared at the corpse, the shock of his first kill and the peculiar way the man died sinking in. A stay thought ran through his mind.
Hollywood never gets this right.

The fighting continued. Jason shouldered his rifle and scanned for targets. The hyperness, the overeagerness born from inexperience, drained away. He settled down and felt cold resolve. He was a veteran now.

Not long after his first kill moment, Jason was spotting for a sniper named Jesse Davenport. The battalion had been advancing on the Diyala River bridge, but the going had been tough and bloody. The enemy resisted with surprising intensity, hitting 3/4 Marines with everything they had. No wonder. If the Iraqis lost the bridge, the Marines would have crossed the last obstacle before Baghdad. It was the Remagen Bridge of the Iraq War. If we took it, we'd have a dagger pointed right at the heart of Saddam's capital.

Jason spotted an Iraqi soldier on a rooftop and lased him for Jesse. Eight hundred yards away. Davenport brought his scope on the target, but could only see part of the man's weapon and a portion of his head.

They'd set up a position on a rooftop, so there was little elevation difference to calculate. But a slight breeze was blowing. Jason raised one finger in the air to gauge the wind and said, “One and half right.”

“Roger.”

Davenport dialed it into his scope. A moment later, he took the shot. The Iraqi suddenly clutched his face and spun out of sight.

“Oh my God! Dude! You hit him!” Jason exclaimed. The veteran in him now marveled at the incredible complexity of the shot. To hit a sliver of a man at eight hundred yards was something only a handful of shooters could ever pull off.

“Jesse, greatest shot ever!”

Davenport pulled his eyeball out of the scope and grinned back.

My boys had grown up.

 

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Ain't Dyin' Tonight

APRIL 2003
NINE MILES SOUTHEAST OF BAGHDAD

As 3rd Battalion, 4th Marines inched closer to the Diyala River bridge, armor battles raged around the Iraqi's last foothold on the southern bank. Massive, sixty-seven-ton M1A1 Abrams main battle tanks used their 120mm guns to blast a path of pure destruction through every Iraqi strongpoint. Nothing the Soviets produced during the Cold War could stand toe-to-toe with the American tanks, and those Iraqi crews who tried ended up paying an unimaginable price. Here and there, Delgado and his fellow snipers encountered the burned-out remains of T-62 tanks, whose armor proved no defense to American-depleted uranium rounds. In some cases, the 120mm rounds had struck the T-62s in the bow and blown clear through the vehicle to exit the other side. The incredible kinetic energy the round produced created a vacuum in its wake so powerful that it sucked the Iraqi crews through the exit holes that were the size of quarters. Beside the wrecked Soviet tanks there would be a fine spray of human remains drying on the ground in a fan spreading from those exit holes.

Despite being in service since the 1980s, not a single M1A1 had been lost to enemy fire, including during Desert Storm when hundreds of them wiped out the bulk of Iraq's armored forces. It was the closest thing to an invulnerable weapon's system the United States possessed. To the Marines, the Abrams was king of the battlefield. Where those tracks went, the Marine infantry knew they were in the best possible hands.

Until the day after April Fools turned everything upside down.

A civilian truck appeared on the battlefield. Unbeknownst to the Marines, it had been turned into an improvised weapon, packed with explosives including an antitank missile. The driver careened into an M1A1 and triggered his car bomb. The blast destroyed the Abrams and left it a skeletalized hulk that burned for hours.

Jason Delgado and the other snipers of 3/4's scout platoon had never seen such an attack. Mixed in with the Iraqi Army units they were fighting were Fedayeen guerrillas, but this was the first suicide bombing they'd faced. It was a harbinger of things to come as Saddam's die-hards grew increasingly desperate to stop the Marine advance.

On April 3, 2003, the battalion assaulted Al Kut, a small Iraqi town only a few kiloyards from the critical bridge across the river. An artillery barrage paved the way, and Abrams tanks rolled forward with the Marine infantry, but the Iraqis resisted fiercely.

The 3/4's battalion commander, Lieutenant Colonel Bryan McCoy, had gone in with the initial assault force. One of the battalion's scouts, Corporal Mark Evnin, was with him, along with the unit's sergeant major. Just after securing a foothold in the town, the Iraqis counterattacked. Some fifteen fighters and soldiers charged out of buildings and rubble in a human wave, bent on trying to overrun and destroy a nearby Abrams.

The 3/4's sergeant major dashed across a street to help stop the attack. Evnin, a gung-ho kid from Burlington, Vermont, followed. As he ran, an Iraqi bullet struck him in the hip. Three years removed from his graduation ceremony at South Burlington High, Evnin tumbled to the street, critically wounded.

He'd been a new addition to the scout platoon and had not had a chance to go to sniper school before the battalion deployed to the Middle East. Eager to learn, eager to excel, he was a skinny, narrow-faced twenty-one-year-old whom everyone liked because his enthusiasm came from his heart, not from a sense of ambition.

The company medics rushed to his aid even as the Iraqi human wave attack was mowed down. All fifteen soon lay dead near the M1A1.

Mark was loaded into a Humvee and rushed to an aid station about a kilometer behind the lines. Doctors and medics descended on him. Mark was talking, and when asked by one of the docs, he wiggled his toes.

A chaplain rushed over. Mark was Jewish, so he leaned over the wounded Marine and read him the Shema, the first prayer the young Vermont native learned as a child.

“Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one.… And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might.”

The Chaplain finished and began to read the 23rd Psalm. Mark looked up at him and said, “Chaplain, I'm not going to die.”

A MEDEVAC CH-47 Chinook helicopter landed nearby, and the medical staff carried Mark's stretcher to the bird. The helo lifted off and rushed south for a combat support hospital.

But it was too late. During the flight, Mark Evnin went into shock and died. He was 3/4's first combat loss, which was difficult enough on his fellow Marines. But his death hit the scout platoon like a sledgehammer.

For Jason Delgado, learning the news marked the beginning of the most painful and intense period of the invasion. The fighting grew increasingly intense as the battalion clawed the final kiloyards to the bridge. On April 6, 2003, the snipers and infantry of 3/4, supported by armored personnel carriers, or Amtracs, Humvees, and M1 Abrams tanks, finally advanced to the south end of the Diyala River bridge.

They'd reached the last obstacle before Baghdad.

The Iraqis were under no illusions. Should the Marines get across the river, they would be unable to stop the Americans from assaulting into Baghdad. Their capital and the Saddam regime's survival were at stake. Republican Guard units were thrown into the north bank's defense. Fedayeen fighters and artillery were also brought up.

The bridge had suffered heavy damage, which made getting vehicles across it impossible—at least until combat engineers were able to repair it. But the decision was made to assault across in daylight on the morning of April 7. Along with a reinforced platoon from Kilo Company, three sniper teams from the 3/4 Scouts would go across in the initial attack and secure a foothold on the far side. Their precision marksmanship would be relied on to repulse any enemy counterattacks while the battalion fed reinforcements into the bridgehead.

In the morning, both sides launched heavy artillery barrages at each other. Marine 105mm shells pounded the north bank, blowing apart buildings and Republican Guard dug-in defensive positions in preparation to the assault.