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Attacking the Marsh

I stayed with Lima for roughly a week, then went back to Kilo. It was terrible to hear who’d been hit and who they’d lost in the time I’d been gone.

With the assault about finished, we were given a new task: set up a cordon to make sure no insurgents were able to get back in. Our sector was over by the Euphrates, on the western side of the town. From this point on, I was a sniper again. And figuring that my shots would now mostly be at longer range, I went back to the .300 Win Mag.

We set up in a two-story house overlooking the river a few hundred yards down from Blackwater Bridge. There was a marshy area immediately across the river, completely overgrown with weeds and everything. It was near a hospital the insurgents had converted into a headquarters before our assault, and even now the area seemed to be a magnet for savages.

Every night, we’d have someone trying to probe in from there. Every night I would get my shots off, taking out one or two or sometimes more.

The new Iraqi army had a camp nearby. Those idiots took it in their head to send a few shots our way as well. Every day. We hung a VF panel over our position—an indicator showing we were friendly—and the shots kept coming. We radioed their command. The shots kept coming. We called back and cussed out their command. The shots kept coming. We tried everything to get them to stop, short of calling in a bomb strike.

Runaway’s Return

Runaway joined me again at Kilo. I had cooled off by now and more or less kept it civil, though my feelings toward him hadn’t changed.

Nor, I guess, had Runaway. It was pathetic.

He was up on the roof with us one night when we started taking shots from insurgents somewhere.

I ducked behind the four-foot perimeter wall. Once the gunfire subsided, I glanced over the roof and looked to see where the shots had come from. It was too dark, though.

More shots were fired. Everybody ducked again. I went down just a little, hoping to see a muzzle flash in the dark when the next shot came over. I couldn’t see anything.

“Come on,” I said. “They’re not accurate. Where are they firing from?”

No answer from Runaway.

“Runaway, look for the muzzle flash,” I said.

I didn’t hear a response. Two or three more shots followed, without me being able to figure out where they’d come from. Finally, I turned around to ask if he had seen anything.

Runaway was nowhere to be found. He’d gone downstairs—for all I know, the only thing that stopped him was the blocked door where the Marines were pulling security.

“I could get killed up there,” he said when I caught up with him.

I left him downstairs, telling him to send up one of the Marines pulling security in his place. At least I knew that guy wouldn’t run.

Runaway was eventually transferred somewhere where he wouldn’t go into combat. He had lost his nerve. He should have pulled himself out of there. That would have been embarrassing, but how much worse could it have been? He had to spend his time convincing everyone else that he wasn’t really a pussy, when the evidence was there for everyone to see.



Being the great warrior he was, Runaway declared to the Marines that SEALs and snipers were being wasted on sniper overwatch.

“SEALs shouldn’t be here. This isn’t a spec op mission,” he told them. But the problem wasn’t just the SEALs, as he soon made clear. “Those Iraqis are going to regroup and overrun us.”

His prediction turned out to be just a little off. But hey, he has a bright future as a military planner.

The Marsh

Our real problem was with the insurgents using the marsh across the river as cover. The river coast was dotted with countless little islands with trees and brush. Here and there an old foundation or a pile of dredged dirt and rock poked up between the bushes.

Insurgents would pop up from the vegetation, take their shots, then squirrel back into the brush where you couldn’t see them. The vegetation was so thick they could get pretty close not just to the river but to us—often within a hundred yards without being seen. Even the Iraqis could hit something from that distance.

Making things even more complicated, a herd of water buffalo lived in the swamp, and they’d tromp through every so often. You’d hear something or see the grass move and not know whether it was an insurgent or an animal.

We tried getting creative, requesting a napalm hit on the marsh to burn down the vegetation.

That idea was vetoed.

As the nights went on, I realized the number of insurgents was growing. It became obvious that I was being probed. Eventually, the insurgents might be able to get enough men together that I couldn’t kill them all.

Not that I wouldn’t have had fun trying.

The Marines brought in a FAC (forward air controller), to call in air support against the insurgents. The fellow they sent over was a Marine aviator, a pilot, working on a ground rotation. He tried a few times to vector in air attacks, but the requests were always denied higher up the chain of command.

At the time, I was told that there had been so much devastation in the city that they didn’t want any more collateral damage. I don’t see how blowing up a bunch of weeds and muck would make Fallujah look any worse than it already did, but then I’m just a SEAL and obviously don’t understand those sorts of complicated issues.

Anyway, the pilot himself was a good guy. He didn’t act stuck up or high and mighty; you’d never know he was an officer. We all liked him and respected him. And just to show there were no hard feelings, we let him get on the rifle every so often and look around. He never got off any shots.

Besides the FAC, the Marines sent a heavy-weapons squad, more snipers, and then mortarmen. The mortarmen brought some white phosphorous shells with them, and they tried launching those in an attempt to burn down the brush. Unfortunately, the shells would only set small pieces of the marsh on fire—they’d burn a bit, then fizzle and go out because it was so wet.

Our next try was throwing thermite grenades. A thermite grenade is an incendiary device that burns at four thousand degrees Fahrenheit and can go through a quarter-inch of steel in a few seconds. We went down to the river and hauled them across.

That didn’t work, either, so we started making our own homegrown concoctions. Between the Marine sniper detail and the mortarmen, there was a great deal of creative brainpower focused on that marsh. Of all the plans, one of my personal favorites involved the creative use of the shaped “cheese” charges the mortarmen typically carried. (The cheese is used to propel mortar rounds. Distance can be adjusted by varying the amount of cheese used to fire the projectile.) We’d shove some cheese in a tube, add a bunch of det cord, some diesel, and add a time fuse. Then we’d heave the contraption across the river and see what happened.

We got some pretty flashes, but nothing we came up with worked real well.

If only we’d had a flamethrower…

The marsh remained a “target rich environment” filled with insurgents. I must have gotten eighteen or nineteen myself that week; the rest of the guys brought the total up to the area of thirty or more.

The river seemed to hold a special fascination for bad guys. While we were trying various ways to burn down the marsh, they were attempting all sorts of ways to get across.

The most bizarre involved beach balls.


Date: 2016-01-03; view: 578


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