Shock Factor (24 page)

Yeah. And the higher ups kept wondering who the hell I've been shooting at for the month. Maybe those geniuses will get the message now.

The guns raked back and forth over the platoon. Several men went down wounded. The situation was getting out of hand. It is in such dire moments that snipers can be the most effective. Usually, the only way to overcome an ambush like this one was to bring in more firepower. Tanks, aircraft, helicopters could dig the scouts out of the jam they were in. Nobody does firepower like the U.S. Marines.

But it would take time to get air support and artillery. The pounding the platoon endured that morning could not be allowed to go on for long. The ditch wasn't that deep, which meant the enemy fighters positioned in the taller dwellings around them would be able to get direct fire on at least some of the Marines as they looked down on them. The insurgents began to find the angles. Another Marine went down wounded as bullets began impacting among the men. As the corpsmen went to work, some of the others burrowed into the trash to conceal themselves from the gunmen out there in buildings overlooking the trench.

Something had to be done, or they'd get picked off one by one. Jason and his spotters, sharp-eyed Joshua Mavica and Brandon Delfiorintino, eased up the ditch wall to try and get eyes on the enemy machine guns. When they reached the top, they used binos and the scope on Jason's M40 to glass the nearest buildings. At a hundred and seventy yards, the trio observed muzzle flashes coming from an apartment complex. Lots of them. Black clad figures moved around inside the rooms as others darted about on the roof.

Find the crew-served weapons.

The air around the sniper team suddenly buzzed with bullets. To Jason, they sounded like pissed-off bees. The enemy had seen their heads exposed above the lip of the trench. Now at least one of the machine gunners had the range on them.

They ducked low and waited out the fusillade. A moment later they crawled back up to the top and continued their sweep. This time they focused on a building about two hundred thirty yards away. On the rooftop, they found one of the machine-gun positions. The gunner wore black man jammies and Adidas running pants. Another man was with him, similarly dressed but carrying an AK-47.

More angry bees. The enemy had seen them expose their heads again, and the two Marines had to go to ground once again.

Half buried in the garbage, the urge to laugh overcame Jason again. Half aloud he said, “Are you fucking kidding me? What the hell have we gotten ourselves into?” The words were swallowed by the din of cracking bullets.

There was no way the scouts would gain fire superiority in this fight. With wounded men, and the top of the trench covered by so many heavy weapons, if they tried to shoot back they would certainly just incur more casualties. Something needed to be done to level the playing field, or they were going to be in for a long and bloody day in the trash.

Carefully, Jason inched back up to the top of the trench, swung his M40A3 over the rim, and stuck his eye in the scope. Technically, a two-hundred-thirty-yard shot at an elevated target was not particularly difficult. Wind was light. Sun was not an issue. Enough of the gunner was exposed above the parapet to make an inviting target. Back on a range in the States, it'd be an easy kill.

But back in the States, nobody was shooting at you. Without any covering fire, Jason was exposed to the full fury of all the guns the enemy had in the fight. He focused on the task, blocking out fear and ignoring the rounds smacking into the dirt on either side of him. The enemy was getting close. He couldn't let himself think of that or the physical reaction to the danger would ruin his aim.

A half breath, and his reticle settled on the machine gunner, just a bit above center mass in order to compensate for the angle. He had the shot lined up. He could see the gunner laying on the trigger, his weapon's barrel spewing flame.

Jason's finger slipped into the trigger guard. More 7.62 rounds streaked over his head. He blocked them out. Nothing mattered but the picture in the scope. He left half his breath out, then pulled his own trigger.

The gunner spun away from his weapon and fell out of view. Jason racked another round into his M40 and drilled the rifleman with his second shot.

The volume of incoming diminished. What next? There were too many bad guys in the apartment complex for his M40 to make much of a difference there. He hadn't been able to find the other heavy weapons yet either. An idea struck him.

Jason took a smoke grenade off his chest rig, pulled the pin, and flipped it over the lip of the trench. The smoke offered a little extra concealment. As it settled over them, Jason called for Joshua Mavica, one of the platoon's radio operators. Mavica came on the run at once, staying as low as possible as he picked his way over the piles of trash at the bottom of the ditch. When he reached Jason, the sniper grabbed his handset and called battalion to request a fire mission using 3/7's 81mm mortar platoon.

The mortarmen brought their A game that day. The first round landed about two hundred yards north of the apartment complex. Jason saw the round explode, lased the distance with his binos, and called back, “Drop two hundred and fire for effect!”

The mortars landed right atop the apartment building and detonated on its roof. They touched off some propane tanks stored up there, sparking a conflagration that roasted the insurgents using the roof for their fighting positions. One of the machine guns and three men were later found to have been up there.

The flames swirled and spread to the top floor. As they did, one of the Marines in the trench stood up and fired an AT-4 rocket into the building. The fire spread until the entire structure was consumed.

Meanwhile, the scout platoon's leadership had been trying to get a MEDEVAC ride for their wounded men. Helos were out of the question—landing anywhere nearby would be a death sentence to the crew given the amount of firepower arrayed against the Marines. A vehicle evacuation was the only possibility, but there weren't any Humvees available. At length, the situation grew so critical that 3/7 HQ sent them an unarmored seven-ton along with a fuel truck. The two vehicles were the last ones at Al Qaim.

They showed up in the middle of the firefight and instantly drew fire. An RPG sizzled over the trench and speared the fuel truck just as it came to a halt a few yards away from the Marines. The rocket punctured the truck's huge tank but failed to explode. That seemed like a moment of inspired divine intervention—if it had blown up, there would have been few survivors in the trench. As it was, the hole it created caused hundreds of gallons of gasoline to spray out into the dirt and flow into the ditch. Soon, most of the Marines taking cover in the trash were soaked with fuel.

The wounded men were carried to the vehicles and extracted as the surviving insurgents fired back with everything they had left. Fortunately, nobody was hit. The apartment building burned on as Marines from one of 3/7's line companies cleared the two remaining machine-gun nests.

Then they moved into the city proper. Jason and the scouts ran into immediate trouble as the streets were laced with roadside bombs. Other Marine elements took sniper fire from well-trained foreign fighters, most of whom were later discovered to be Chechens. They were a cagey and disciplined bunch, and the Americans took more casualties fighting house to house again. At times, the Marine snipers ranged on enemy fighters who were using small children as human shields. The battalion's executive officer, Major George Schreffler, got on the radio and warned the other companies of this new development, telling the Marines not to take any shots that could harm the kids.

As the fighting continued, the IEDs stopped the scouts for almost four hours as EOD teams came out to neutralize them. They advanced a block forward, ran into another makeshift IED minefield, and had to wait again as the specialists rendered them useless. Block by block, they advanced at a crawl, taking sporadic fire as they worked. But the main resistance they'd faced had been broken after the 81mm mortar barrage.

It took fourteen hours of continuous combat to finally break the enemy's back. Late that night, the Marines finally received air support. Cobra gunships made strafing runs on pockets of resistance near the downtown soccer stadium. Those gun runs signaled the end of the offensive.

One hundred fifty insurgents had been killed during the day. The Marines captured twenty more. Captain Gannon and five other Marines were lost. The insurgents wounded twenty-five more. In one day, the battalion lost over five percent of its combat strength.

The end of the First Battle of Husaybah did not end the violence in the city. In the days that followed, the insurgents continued to resist and bring in reinforcements. They learned from their mistakes, switched tactics, and evolved. But they never tried a full-scale offensive again. They didn't need to; what they came up with next was far worse.

 

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

The Thousand-Yard Shot

In the weeks that followed the First Battle of Husaybah, 3/7's snipers grew into experts at urban warfare. They learned not to insert into a hide in vehicles. They'd only be spotted by one of the countless kids the insurgents used as their eyes and ears. Early on, they would move into the city in seven-ton trucks, then bail out at their objective. Too obvious. So Jason and the other Marines in the scout sniper platoon switched tactics. They stopped going out with the infantry, stopped using vehicles—convoys of any size were bound to get hit anyway. They also discovered platoon-sized patrols did not work. The insurgents always detected them and countered whatever mission they had laid on for that night. So the Marine snipers took a page from the enemy's book and started infiltrating at night in groups of no more than four. They entered the city on foot, unscrewed streetlights so they could remain in the shadows. Instead of smashing in doors and violently taking over homes so they could establish an overwatch position on the roof, they found a kinder, gentler approach worked much better. To mask as much noise as possible, Jason would tap lightly on a window to get the home owner's attention. Later, he discovered an even more effective trick. Most of the houses had window-mounted air-conditioner units. He could knock on those loud enough to wake the folks inside, but the A/C's motor drowned the sound outside. It made for a very stealthy way to get into a good hide site.

When gaining the high ground didn't work, the 3/7 sniper teams got creative. Like most Iraqi cities at the time, garbage littered the streets. This wasn't just stray packages and wrappers, but heaps of household trash families just dumped in front of their homes because transporting it anywhere was a life-threatening proposition with all the IEDs emplaced in and around the city. The trash heaps made perfect concealment. The snipers made effective use of them and it always surprised the insurgents when they did.

The tactics worked, and the snipers racked up kills. They took out bomb-laying teams, surprised insurgent patrols, and interdicted their supply lines. But at times, it seemed like whatever they did, the enemy always had more willing bodies to throw into the fray.

As the snipers adapted to their environment, the Sunni insurgency they faced underwent a transformation. Many of the local Iraqi leaders had died in the fighting that spring. The Marine and Army's efforts to interdict their supply networks and roll up cells had been extremely effective. The Americans underestimated their successes. Yet those victories came with unintended consequences. As their capabilities diminished, the Sunni turned to the only source of outside help: al-Qaida. They opened the door and let the devil in. Through 2004, al-Qaida's role in Anbar Province grew considerably. In time they would take complete control of the Sunni insurgency and turned it not just against the Coalition but against the Shia as well, hoping to spark a sectarian civil war.

That spring of 2004 was the first iteration in that development. On the battlefield, it meant that 3/7 suddenly faced a host of new threats and sophisticated weapons systems. Al-Qaida brought considerable experience and skill to the IED-making industry around Husaybah. The bombs became far more lethal than ever before. Bigger, utilizing larger explosives and triggered in different ways, they wrought havoc on the Marines and their unarmored trucks and lightly armored Humvees.

On one mission, Jason and the scout sniper platoon rushed to the scene of an IED attack. They found a 998 high-backed Humvee sitting in the kill zone. At first, it looked unharmed. But as Jason drew closer, he saw a fist-sized hole punched in its side. When the scouts dropped the back gate, blood poured out in a wave. Most of the Humvee's crew had been badly torn up.

The Marines had never seen the kind of IED used in that attack. The insurgents had encased it in concrete and left it in the street. It looked just like any other pile of debris in Husaybah. But inside the concrete was a tube with a flechette rocket. When it was detonated remotely, the rocket shot from its tube, broke through the concrete, penetrated the Humvee's sidewall, and maimed the crew.

As the IEDs grew more sophisticated, the enemy brought in a new threat: traveling snipers. These guys never stayed in one town long. They moved from city to city, taking only a few shots and never lingering to see their handiwork. One began showing up every few weeks after the April 17, 2004, fight. Jason studied his attacks and learned his signature—every sniper has one. This shooter was an opportunist. He would stick around for perhaps two to three days at a time, then vanish for a while. He was not a particularly good shot, and he usually missed. He sometimes triggered off more than one round, too, before breaking contact and going to ground.

Then another sniper showed up. This guy was a pro, though Intel was never able to get a handle on who he was or where he had been trained. He was an expert shot, fearless, and disciplined—the kind of sniper who instills paralyzing fear in his targets.