Shock Factor (27 page)

After his four-year contract ended, Engle got out, came to Oregon, and settled at the coast. He found a job as a commercial fisherman—hard, rugged work that demanded long hours and physical stamina. He was at sea on 9/11 when the Towers fell, but as soon as his feet hit dry land, he reenlisted. He joined the Oregon Guard and was pulled into the scout platoon after a series of drills with the 2–162. Maries saw his potential and picked him for the sniper section.

The two formed an interesting combination. Engle's blood ran hot; Maries's ran cold. Engle tended to be more emotional and excitable, while Maries was analytical and detached. As the two learned to work together, Maries made a concerted effort to show Engle how to control his emotions while out in the field.

Six months after mobilizing for duty overseas, the Volunteers departed the United States. They flew to Kuwait in March of 2004 just as Sunni and Shia insurgent groups forged an alliance intended to create a nationwide uprising against the American-led Coalition. In April, as the battalion drove north across the Kuwait border destined for their new base in eastern Baghdad, the Shia and Sunni groups struck simultaneously throughout the country. In the once-quiet southern provinces, members of the Badr Brigade and Moqtada al-Sadr's ragtag Mahdi Militia attacked Coalition bases, convoys, and patrols. Al-Sadr's men seized control of dozens of southern Iraqi towns, including the holy city of Najaf. Meanwhile, Sunni groups west of Baghdad rose up against the U.S. Marines, leading to ferocious fighting around Fallujah, Ramadi, and other key cities.

With only a minimal load of ammunition, the Volunteers had to fight their way into Baghdad a year after the initial invasion. As they reached the southern suburbs, a sixty-man force of Syrian foreign fighters ambushed their column, wounding three Americans. After blowing through the ambush and evacuating their casualties, the Oregonians finally reached their destination later that night.

The battalion took over a small base built around the former Iraqi Olympic training facility. Known at the time as Forward Operating Base Provider, later renamed Patrol Base Volunteer, Kevin Maries and the other snipers found some interesting things in their new home. Saddam's psychotic son, Uday Hussein, had frequented this place, and the scouts discovered his mangled Ferrari abandoned in one of the base parking lots, towed there after U.S. forces blew him up in late 2003. Inside the Olympic training facility, his snipers discovered a bloodstained room with a drain in the floor that their interpreters later explained was Uday's personal torture chamber. Apparently, he used it to punish the Iraqi national soccer team whenever they lost a match.

The scouts spent their first nights in Baghdad sleeping first in a gravel parking lot, then later in a drained Olympic-sized indoor swimming pool. Rocket strikes echoed through the city. Mortars exploded, gunfire rattled periodically in the distance. This was not at all what the Volunteers had been led to expect while training up for the deployment at Fort Hood, Texas. There, they'd been told resistance in the capital was minimal and the few roadside bombs encountered were small, Coke-can contraptions that had little effect. Instead, they'd driven into the middle of a well-armed national uprising that rocked the entire country. They faced roadside bombs so large they were destroying M1 Abrams tanks, and an enemy both skilled and capable who knew the terrain.

Getting a handle on the situation became Lieutenant Colonel Hendrickson's first priority. He deployed the sniper teams out onto hide sites all over their new area of operations, and Maries's men soon found excellent spots in Baghdad's busy high-rise buildings from which to observe the goings on around their patrol base. In downtown, they actually took over the observation point my sniper section had built on the Sheraton Hotel in 2003 after our Marine battalion helped capture the capital. It provided an excellent vantage point of the area, and Maries's snipers were sent there to help protect the Western press corps still working out of the hotel.

The Ministry of Interior (MOI) building was another one selected by Maries as a prime vantage point. From the fifteenth floor, his sniper teams could watch several key intersections in northeast Baghdad. On the floors below them, American civilians and military personnel worked from shabby offices and cubicles as they propped up the Iraqi bureaucracy that would eventually replace them when the transfer of authority took place later on in the summer. The place hummed with activity at all hours of the day.

The Oregon snipers took over the entire fifteenth floor. Being workout fanatics, they dragged exercise equipment into one of the interior rooms and created a makeshift gym. During scrounging trips to lower floors, they acquired chairs, tables, and even a mini-fridge that made life on their floor a little more comfortable.

During one of those scrounging trips, six-foot-two-inch-tall Sergeant Darren Buchholz discovered there were more than just bureaucrats in the building with them. Buchholz, whom Maries had pulled into the sniper section in 2001, wandered onto a lower floor none of the other snipers had yet visited. To his surprise, he found a Caucasian female secretary sitting at a desk outside a closed office door.

Dressed in nothing but BDU pants and a tan undershirt, Buchholz approached the secretary with an air of brassy authority.

“I wanna talk to your boss.”

The secretary smiled warmly and led him through the office door.

Buchholz stopped in his tracks. He had intended to requisition a few chairs from the woman's supervisor. Instead, he found himself in an ornate room full of elegant wood furniture that was totally out of place in a building that looked like it had been decorated by the Salvation Army. It felt like he'd walked into a CEO's office in an otherwise down-at-the-ears strip mall that had been leased out to county services.

The walls were covered with photographs of world leaders and generals posing with the dapper, gray-haired man sitting behind a desk at the other end of the room. He was dressed in an expensive suit. A pistol lay on his desk within easy reach.

Buchholz stared at the man, who quietly asked, “Can I help you?”

The Fortune 500 setting knocked the swagger out of Buchholz. Deferentially, he introduced himself and explained his purpose and mission in the building. The man rose from his chair. For a second, Buchholz thought the man might reach for his pistol, but he simply came around his desk to shake the Oregonian's hand.

Despite the suit, the man possessed a steely, almost sinister sort of aura that unnerved Buchholz. The man was clearly used to this reaction, and took charge of the encounter. He gave Darren his business card that indicated he was one of the senior-level members of a particular “Other Governmental Agency,” and asked if he could do anything for the Oregon snipers working upstairs.

Buchholz was surprised by his helpfulness, but he wasn't about to take advantage of it. Politely, he extricated himself as quickly as he could and beat a hasty retreat upstairs, never to return to that floor.

It was the first indication that things were not as they seemed in the Ministry of Interior building.

Maries established a rotation for his five teams that kept them moving between the Sheraton, the MOI, and rolling out with the scouts as they patrolled the city. Usually, two teams would man each observation post for a week to ten days at a time. A fire team from the scout platoon usually provided security. At the MOI, the Oregonians took to sealing themselves onto the fifteenth floor by chaining and locking the stairwell doors.

Every few days, a logistics run would be made and food would be delivered to the men under the guise of normal working traffic into the building. The snipers and their spotters rotated time on their weapons, ensuring that Lieutenant Colonel Hendrickson had eyes on his section of Baghdad 24/7.

During those first weeks in Baghdad, Maries and his men saw a lot of things go down from their observation points. Suicide bombings, car bombs, mortar and rocket attacks took place almost every day. It did not take long for Moqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Militia, the primary Shia insurgent force in Baghdad, to discover that the Volunteers had moved into their neighborhood. They targeted 2–162's base every day with sudden mortar and rocket strikes. Periodically, a car or van would cruise by the entrance and blast off a few rounds from an AK. Once in a while, they'd even fire RPG's at the base.

On the MOI observation point, the snipers made a concerted effort to pinpoint the mortar and launch sites used to hit their base. This was no easy task, and even when they did see a launch, the Coalition forces in the area usually could not react fast enough to catch the mortar crews before they vanished into the byzantine streets of Sadr City, a massive slum that made up most of eastern Baghdad.

Between long stretches on the OPs, the snipers took turns going out on dismounted and vehicular patrols with the rest of the scout platoon. These missions led to the snipers' first taste of battle.

One night in the late spring of 2004, the scouts had dismounted from their unarmored Humvees in what turned out to be a very hostile neighborhood. Darren Buchholz was with the platoon that night. Usually, he carried a Barrett .50 caliber sniper rifle and a scoped M14 that he loved for its semiauto capabilities, but on this mission he'd brought along his M4 with a PEQ-14 laser designator for use with his night vision goggles. While in the street, the scouts spotted a light flashing intermittently on a rooftop two hundred yards away. Moments later, somebody sprayed the street with automatic weapons fire. The scouts took cover and searched for targets. After a moment, the scene went quiet.

As the scouts continued with the patrol, the light flashed again from the same rooftop. Seconds later, somebody laced them with machine-gun fire again. This happened several more times until the scouts realized what was going on. There was an insurgent standing on the rooftop, signaling his fellow fighters with a flashlight. Each time he used it, the other insurgents would make a hit-and-run attack on the platoon.

Buchholz found a stable firing position in the street and waited for the man on the rooftop to return. Through his night vision goggles, he spotted the insurgent reappear. Buchholz illuminated him with his PEQ-14. Wind was minimal; the night was warm and still. He pulled the trigger and smoke-checked the insurgent with a single shot from his M4.

After the patrol, the platoon learned that the man on the roof was an Iraqi cop, and he'd been signaling the enemy while atop the local police station. It was one of the first indications the battalion picked up that the Iraqi Police, which was predominantly Shia, had been penetrated by Moqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Militia.

Others evidence accumulated. That spring, the Volunteers received numerous distress calls from the neighboring police stations claiming to be under attack. The Oregonians would send a platoon out to the rescue, only to be ambushed en route. Other times, they would show up and find everything normal at the station. As they drove back to Patrol Base Volunteer, Mahdi Militiamen would spring an ambush. At times, the police even gave the Mahdi fighters free access to their armories. The insurgents took what they wanted, then vanished into the streets where they used those weapons against our troops.

From the observation point I had established the year before on the Sheraton Hotel, the 2–162 snipers witnessed many unsavory acts by the Iraqi Police. More than once, Buchholz saw them beating people during routine traffic stops. Engle observed them doing similar things as well. The Oregonians grew disgusted by the behavior of their erstwhile allies, but could do little about it besides report it up to the battalion operations center.

In 2004, most of the police had been recruited since the invasion from the ranks of the Shia Iraqi population. This was part of our de-Ba'athification program designed to sweep away the last vestiges of the despotic Saddam Hussein regime. Before the 2003 invasion, the police were largely composed of Sunni, who served as the oppressive bulwark for the dictatorship.

During the 2003 drive on Baghdad, my sniper section discovered how brutality was a mainstay of Iraqi police operations. We had been scouting toward the capital, several kiloyards in front of the main body of our battalion, when waves of nausea overtook me. I'd come down with some sort of stomach bug the night before, and I'd languished all morning in our Humvee's right seat, trying not to puke all over our Blue Force Tracker as we searched for the enemy.

We rounded a bend and I ordered our driver to halt. As soon as the Humvee stopped, I bailed out, grabbed an ammo crate, and made a beeline toward the side of the road. In seconds, I was running at both ends, praying that we wouldn't end up in a firefight. All I had was my 9mm pistol, which I kept holstered on my flak jacket for easy access. Between retches, I drew it and held it at my side, wishing I'd brought my rifle with me when I had slid off the truck. Of course, my gunner thought this was hilarious, and he busted out laughing while manning his weapon in the turret of our Humvee.

Meanwhile, the rest of my men dismounted and set up security. Several of them pushed up the road to clear the police station. They came back a moment later and said, “Hey, Boss, you've got to come see this.”

When I was finally able to get off the crate, I followed them into the station. At first glance, it looked like a typical small-town, down-at-the-ears constabulary office. That was until the men showed me the torture chamber. The Iraqi cops would take prisoners back there, strap them onto a metal bed, and go to work on them. A car battery sat nearby with jumper cables attached. The other end of the cables dangled from hooks in the nearby wall. During sessions, these would be clipped to the bedsprings to electrocute the prisoner. The sight of such a barbaric thing filled us with grim resolve. This regime had to be destroyed.

We saw that sort of thing in nearly every police station we cleared. In April 2003, as the Iraqi Police returned to work for the first time, our unit went out on joint patrols with the cops to help put an end to the looting going on. Lieutenant Casey Kuhlman, my company executive officer, rolled out on one patrol that encountered a bank robbery in progress. The Iraqi cops caught one of the looters as he tried to escape and began beating hell out of him. On one hand, this was their country and their way of doing business. Stuff like this was going on all over Baghdad. On the other hand, this was not the way we did business, and we were here to bring a new era to the Iraqi people. Clearly, this wasn't the way to start it off. Plus, a news crew had come along for the ride, and Casey worried that this could end up being a very bad media moment. Finally, he walked up to the Iraqi police commander and said, “If you or your boys beat someone else like that today, I'll put a bullet in the back of your head before you can throw the second kick.”