Shock Factor (41 page)

Buck smoke-checked another Mahdi. Suddenly, an RPG swooshed right between him and the captain. The heat of the weapon and the total shock of the near miss caused the captain to flop flat on his back. Staring skyward, he lay there as Buchholz pulled his eye out of his scope to regard him.

“Ya got enough photos yet, sir?” Buchholz deadpanned.

The captain stammered, “Uh, yeah. I'm good.”

He crawled off the roof and disappeared downstairs.

A few of the 2–7 dismounts began popping up over the parapet to add their firepower to the fight. Nate moved to the parapet, too. Darren tried to contact Lieutenant Colonel Hendrickson on the section's secure radio to give him a status report, but the device malfunctioned. With the amount of incoming growing, Buck didn't have time for fussy technology. He stowed the radio and knelt beside Gushwa and Engle. In the apartments and street, there were more targets than bullets. Just like August 10.

Several RPG teams maneuvered on the Bradley. Hendrickson was standing near the track when they launched their rockets. The sudden barrage scored several near misses and convinced the 2-7 crew to back their Bradley out of the immediate line of fire. The 25mm spewed flame. Down the street, the cannon shells killed an RPG man, then set fire to the car he'd been using for cover. A moment later, the Brad had repositioned to a less vulnerable spot out of the intersection.

When the track disappeared from the Mahdi Militia's immediate field of view, they shifted their fire to the snipers and the dismounts on the roof of the MOT building. The parapet was swept with a storm of bullets and incoming RPGs.

The dismounts left to return to their Bradley. Buchholz, Engle, and Gushwa refused to leave. Darren spotted an RPG launch in the street, called it out to Nate, who settled his scope on the militiaman's position. He was using a loophole in a concrete wall as a firing slit for his launcher. Gushwa got the range: one hundred twenty-five yards. The loophole was only a few feet high and perhaps eighteen inches wide. The RPG man reloaded, then stuck his weapon through the loophole. Nate drilled him before he could shoot again.

Below them, the car the Bradley had hit now blazed from bumper to bumper. Black smoke filled the street and boiled hundreds of feet upwards.

Three men stole out of an alley and jumped into a blue minivan—one carried an RPG, another hefted an AK. Buchholz called it out. The three snipers concentrated on it. Keith got off one shot with the Barrett .50 cal. His HEAPI round struck the back of the van. Seconds later, Buck shot the driver. The other two bailed out and ran inside a nearby building.

Over the din of the firefight, the snipers heard a wailing siren. It seemed to be growing nearer. Looking around, Nate spotted an Iraqi fire truck speeding toward them.

The Baghdad fire department had arrived. Apparently, somebody had dialed 911.

The firemen drove straight through the middle of the battle, totally oblivious to the bullets and rockets flying around them. They stopped near the burning car the Bradley had hit, pulled out their hoses, and set to work extinguishing the blaze.

On the roof, Gushwa's jaw dropped. Buck turned to him and said, “Is that really happening?”

The Mahdi incoming never slackened. As the firemen doused the car with long streams of water, the fight continued. Keith spotted an AK-47 appear in a window in one of the apartments. Buchholz saw it, too, and knocked the man down with a single snap-shot. Moments later, Nate watched a Mahdi militiaman run into the street five hundred yards away. He called it out, and Buchholz pinned the man with his ACOG's reticle. He triggered a shot, but was low. The bullet struck the man in the leg. He staggered under the impact, but didn't lose his footing. The Oregonians watched as he limped the last few yards to cover.

The car, now good and soaked by the firemen, sizzled and steamed in the street. The Mahdi grew cautious. Fewer exposed themselves in the street, choosing instead to pop around corners to let off a few rounds before ducking out of harm's way. By now, it was mid-afternoon and the day's hundred-thirty-five-degree heat was punishing the snipers, who had no overhead protection from the sun. Nate, bathed in sweat, began to get dizzy. He slid under the parapet and peeled off his body armor as he sucked water from his Camelbak.

“We need to call for ammo resupply,” Buck said to Nate.

“Roger,” Nate did a quick count. He had borrowed Kevin Maries's M24 for this mission and had brought forty rounds with him. He was down to just a handful of 7.62, with no M4.

Buck and Keith were in the same boat. They wouldn't be able to stay on the rooftop much longer if they didn't get resupplied.

Nate keyed his radio handset and called the BC. He explained their situation and asked for ammo.

Hendrickson replied, “Try to shoot less. We're getting ready to unass.”

Buck and Keith heard this and turned to Nate. “Really? Shoot less? You gotta be shitting me.”

Fortunately, back at the warehouses, Lieutenant Ditto's men finished the search at last. They'd found very little inside the structures, though it was clear from leftover trash that the Mahdi had been using them as staging bases. Ditto and his men mounted up. Lieutenant Colonel Hendrickson gave the word to pull out.

The snipers broke contact, dashed downstairs and through the Wizard of Oz door to a waiting Bradley. Back at Patrol Base Volunteer, LTC Hendrickson angrily demanded to know why his snipers hadn't been giving him contact reports and status updates. When Buck described the hornet's nest they'd found themselves in on the MOT's roof, all was forgiven.

*   *   *

Not long after the warehouse raid, Buchholz and Gushwa took part in another sweep through the same area. This time, the battalion went to go clear the school on the other side of the Ministry of Transportation's motor pool facility. During the search, the Volunteers found a room bathed in blood. At first there was talk that they'd found a Mahdi torture chamber. Then Nate and Buck went to take a look. They walked in to find dried blood all over the floor and wall. The heavy, double-paned, shatterproof window in the room held a single 7.62mm bullet hole. As Nate peered at it, he saw the MOT building in the background. This was the room he'd seen the Madhi militiaman run into during the warehouse scrap. That was his bullet hole. Until that moment, he hadn't known if he'd made the shot. Now, as he stood there with Buchholz, it was clear that he had, and the amount of blood suggested the target probably had not made it.

Only a handful of snipers could have made that shot.

*   *   *

Over the next four weeks, the battalion lost three more men killed in action. Two died in a roadside bomb attack north of Baghdad, while the third, Specialist David Johnson, died in northeast Baghdad in another blast while on a resupply run.

Yet just as quickly as the Second Shia Uprising began that summer, it came to an end that fall. October was dead calm in Zones 22 and 50. November saw a major series of attacks launched by Sunni insurgents reinforced by a cadre of al-Qaida, but the Shia militias never again posed a serious threat to 2–162. A few scattered firefights with the Mahdi Militia remained to be fought in December and January, but the days of massed attacks ended with the warehouse raid.

Lieutenant Colonel Hendrickson took his battalion home in March 2005. During the year the Volunteers had been in combat, they had suffered nine killed and over eighty wounded in action. Over ten percent of his citizen-soldiers had become casualties while struggling to bring stability in Iraq. It was the most difficult and battle-torn deployment the Oregon National Guard had experienced since fighting across the Pacific with General Douglas MacArthur in World War II.

The snipers came home with dozens of confirmed kills, but that is not what they remember. They take pride in the lives they saved at the Ministry of Interior in June 2004. They take pride in stopping the mortar attacks and the friendly casualties they incurred. Who knows how many lives they saved with their August 10 ambush.

Most importantly, Staff Sergeant Maries brought everyone home. Despite rocket attacks, firefights, roadside bombs, and urban ambushes, Nate Gushwa was the only one from the sniper section to be wounded in action, though there were several men from the scout platoon who were hit, including Andy Hellman, Randy Mitts, and Giordi.

Of his section's performance in Baghdad, Kevin later said, “Nate and Buck—they were the best sniper team I had. I could always count on them to get the job done, and they need credit for that.”

Ten years later, Tyson Bumgardner looked back on the deployment and summed things up: “Most of us had families with a military hero in them. We all read the literature voraciously, we knew our unit's unique history. We wanted the fight more than most. I think our scout/snipers were able to survive so many close fights with relatively few casualties because of our solid leadership … our aggression, discipline, and training. We thought of ourselves specially picked—and Oregon men are expected to never quit any fight. Ever.”

Six months after returning to Oregon, Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast. The governor of Louisiana appealed to Oregon for help. The 41st Brigade mobilized, and within a week deployed to New Orleans to put an end to the violence and looting there. Hendrickson took three hundred fifty men, veterans of the Baghdad firefights, into the Big Easy with him.

In a neighborhood that once had been home to eighty thousand Americans, the Volunteers found precisely seven holdouts. Here at home, they patrolled the trash-strewn streets and felt nothing but revulsion for the sights they witnessed. Block after block had been devastated by looters and vandals. Gang wars had broken out. The cops had gone rogue and the Volunteers caught them looting businesses and private homes. They encountered bullet-riddled corpses in mini-markets and gas stations, suicides closeted in waterlogged houses. One patrol encountered a corpse whose groin was being eaten by a stray dog. On another, the men escorted a distraught young man searching for his grandmother. Upon entering her home, they found her corpse draped across an upright piano. When the levees broke and the floodwaters hit her neighborhood, she'd been knocked off her feet by the first wave and slammed into a wall. She fell, dead, atop her beloved piano, her corpse rotting in the stifling humidity of late-summer Louisiana.

Running water did not exist in the city. Neither did power. The men slept on concrete walkways and on the steps of the chapel at the New Orleans Baptist Seminary. They took whores' baths, ate MREs, and endured swarms of chiggers, mosquitoes, and other insects every night as they bunked down. None of the men grew used to the stench of the dead city. It permeated their filthy uniforms, lingered in their nostrils, and even the gentle breeze and occasional summer showers offered no respite from the charnel house smell.

Baghdad had not been as bad as this. Said Keith Engle later, “That an American city smelled worse than Baghdad was … unbelievable.”

Morale in the battalion was tested to the limits. The men had just picked up their civilian lives when they were thrust into this new nightmare. Some of the wives refused to believe they were even in the city, and at least two moved out while the Volunteers were gone. Many of the men, including Tyson Bumgardner, were scheduled to start college in the fall. The New Orleans deployment wrought havoc with those plans.

The cost of this deployment to his men was not lost on Lieutenant Colonel Hendrickson. Within a week, he began to send the student-soldiers within his battalion home so they could make the start of the term at the University of Oregon and Oregon State. Others with family hardships soon joined them. The battalion's footprint shrank until a kernel of one hundred fifty devoted men remained.

Through it all, the sniper section shined. During an early patrol, Specialist Jim Schmorde took one of the battalion's few thermal sights with him. While moving along a raised railroad embankment at night, he spotted a heat signature in a neighborhood that had been particularly hard hit by the floodwaters. After studying it, he was convinced he'd found somebody. Was it a looter? One of the gangbangers known to be in the area who were shooting at passing rescue crews?

The next morning, the scout platoon went to find out. Using boats scrounged from the area, they motored across opaque black water filmed with rainbow slicks of oil. Schmorde led the search effort to the block where he'd seen the signature. The water there was still at least six feet deep. In places, the flood line reached the eaves of the one-story buildings.

They maneuvered from house to house, unsure of what they would encounter, but ready for anything. At last, as they knocked on one waterlogged front door, they heard a muffled and weak cry for help. Using crowbars, they broke into the house and found a dying eighty-nine-year-old woman. She'd been trapped inside her house for almost two weeks. When the floodwaters receded, they left her doors so swollen that she did not have the strength to open them. Same with her windows. Her rescuers eased her and her wheelchair into one of their boats and returned to the high ground where Patrol Base Volunteer, New Orleans, had been established. There, an ambulance sped her away to Belle Chase Hospital, leaving her wheelchair abandoned in the middle of Chef Menteur Boulevard.

She survived only because Jim Schmorde had brought a thermal sight on patrol with him. As in Baghdad, here at home the Oregon snipers saved lives.

At the end of September 2005, the last of the Volunteers returned home. Staff Sergeant Maries left the battalion soon after and joined an aviation unit. Buchholz left the Guard, but his desire to make a difference burned inside him. Six months after leaving the Guard, he found himself in a meaningless, dead-end job drawing a paycheck. It was a hollow existence for the man who always wanted to do more for his country and community. After a client yelled at him for an inconsequential error, he walked out and never looked back. He became a police officer in Independence, a small town just outside of his native Dallas. He was accepted onto the county SWAT team and served with distinction before moving on to the Salem Police Department. He continues to patrol the state capital today.