Sunday, March 30, began with a brilliant sunrise and bad news from home. We had bedded down outside of Al Budayr after the long day of fighting on Saturday, and the memory of the smiling little Iraqi girl I had touched on the head had lingered with me overnight. The thought made me homesick. I missed my family.
As dawn broke, I went to find Paperboy-John Koopman, our embedded newspaper reporter from the San Francisco Chronicle- who had been receiving periodic e-mails for me on his laptop. All my sisters and their families, my mom, my mother-in-law, my kids, and my friends had sent warm messages, but there had been nothing from Kim.
Paperboy said there were no e-mails for me today, but he lent me the satellite telephone that he used to file his stories, and I stepped away to find some privacy as I dialed my home number far, far away. The call all the way from the battle zone to our house in 29 Palms went through without a problem, an amazing feat of technology, but the telephone was answered by the babysitter. Kim was once again away at school, she said. Cassie and Ashley filled me in on what was happening in school and at day care, and their happy voices were sounds from a different planet, a balm to me in troubled times. The babysitter sounded flustered, though, falling all over herself with apologies that my wife was not at home. The connection terminated with a forlorn little beep. I returned the phone to Koopman and walked off to find a quiet piece of desert.
Smack in the middle of the thousands of men of the 1st Marine Division, I felt isolated and alone, as if I were the only person out there on the desert sands. I had called home six times since I left California, and my wife had been there twice. I’d had more conversations with the babysitter than with her.
Then I thought about the time difference. California is eleven hours behind Iraq, so since it was about 6:30 A.M. on Sunday where I was standing, it would be 5:30 P.M. Saturday at home. Suddenly I realized that the babysitter had said my wife was at school, but I knew she didn’t have any classes on Saturday night! Why wasn’t she home with the kids? Was she out at a happy hour with some other teachers? Was she off at a library? Or was it something else? Shivers went up my spine. To me the word “wife” no longer seemed a term of endearment, home was on the far side of the world, and there was nothing I could do at the moment about the obviously out-of-whack domestic situation.
I was feeling crushed by demoralizing doubt. Killing enemy soldiers had not bothered me, but not hearing from Kim did. Churchill once called his own deep depression the “black dog,” and I could hear that same sort of drooling beast panting hotly in my own ear. Hell of a way to start a day.
I needed to shake up my brain. Too much emotion was creeping into my consciousness, and I could not operate as a shooter that way.
Jack (right) and Casey (left) are outside Ba’ath Party compound in Al Budayr.
(Courtesy of Gunnery Sergeant R. P. Simpson)
Jack on the plane to Kuwait.
(Courtesy of Major B. T. Mangan)
Sergeant Jerry Marsh is at his machine gun in the turret of Casey’s Humvee in the streets of Baghdad.
(Courtesy of Major B. T. Mangan)
First Sergeants Norm Arias (right) and Guy Rosbough (left) rest atop a mountain of money after we break up a bank robbery.
(Courtesy of Major B. T. Mangan)
Sergeant Major “Uncle Dave” Howell.
(Courtesy of Major B. T. Mangan)
Our secret chemical identification specialist-Little Bastard.
(Courtesy of Major B. T. Mangan)
Lieutenant Colonel Bryan P. McCoy (right) addresses the men of the Bull at Camp Ripper, Kuwait. Jack is on the left, and Casey, wearing glasses, is in the middle.
(Courtesy of Major B. T. Mangan)
Corporal Mark Evnin at Camp Ripper, Kuwait.
(Courtesy of Staff Sergeant M. S. Mattson)
Jack shooting from atop of Casey’s Humvee, Afak.
(Courtesy of Gunnery Sergeant R. P. Simpson)
Marines of the 3/4 Battalion, the Bull, move on Ad Diwaniyah.
(Courtesy of Staff Sergeant B. R. Bochenski)
Colonel Steve Hummer, commanding officer of the 7th Marines, gives the order to attack into Baghdad to Lieutenant Colonel McCoy (left), and Major J. M. Baker (right).
(Courtesy of Staff Sergeant B. R. Bochenski)
Jack throws a grenade in Az Zafaraniyah.
(Courtesy of Gary Knight)
Casey goes over a wall in Az Zafaraniyah.
(Courtesy of Gary Knight)
A column of smoke from an air strike rises on the far side of the Diyala Bridge.
(Courtesy of Major B. T. Mangan)
The Diyala Bridge, with the body of an Iraqi fighter.
(Courtesy of Major B. T. Mangan)
The new bridge we built across the Diyala River.
(Courtesy of Gunnery Sergeant R. P. Simpson)
The statue of Saddam Hussein, as seen between U.S. Marines, moments before it is pulled down.
(Courtesy of Major B. T. Mangan)
Cheering Iraqis gather before the statue falls.
(Courtesy of Staff Sergeant B. R. Bochenski)
Iraqis with Casey’s flag at the base of the fallen statue.
(Courtesy of Major B. T. Mangan)
Lieutenant Colonel McCoy (center) and Sergeant Major Howell at a memorial service for fallen Marines in Iraq.
(Courtesy of Major B. T. Mangan
Jack is presented his Bronze Star by Major J. M. Baker, 29 Palms, California.
(Courtesy of Lance Corporal H. E. Laredo)
As a sniper, you are supposed to be coldhearted and must be able to control yourself, no matter what is going on. But you are still human. If you don’t have feelings and emotions, then you step over the line and are just a psychotic killer. It can be a difficult balancing act.
No one was allowed inside my head while I worked, and I had spent almost twenty years building my invincible gunslinger persona, and I never let my guard down in front of anybody, not even Casey. It was okay for me to bitch about other things, but I always stopped short of exposing any personal feelings.
So although I listened to other people’s problems on a daily basis out in the field, there was really nobody there for me, which was as it should be. Now there probably was no one at home, either. We all have a private room in our soul for our deepest secrets, but I have a whole warehouse down there in which I keep my personal stuff, because I carry so much of it. Since I had no control over what might be happening back home, I put my girls safely on a shelf that was out of harm’s way and turned my growing anger and frustration onto the soldiers of Saddam Hussein, closing off any thoughts other than those directly related to where I was and to my job. Life was easier when my worldview was narrowed to what I could see.
So far in this war I had fired six shots and had six kills, exactly the right ratio. I considered the ill-trained, poorly led soldiers of Iraq to be hamburger in my scope, practically begging me to kill them, and I was more than ready to grant that wish.
Then came the second slice of Sunday-morning bad news, and we learned that the war was about to grind to a dead stop for three full weeks! Coalition forces all across Iraq were to stop in place for a twenty-one-day “operational pause” to refit and secure the exposed lines of supply. McCoy was summoned to take a helicopter back to regimental headquarters for an official briefing.
We were stunned and almost felt the earth tilting beneath our boots, because we could not understand the reasoning behind the decision. We still had plenty of supplies and had just ripped through four towns in a single day to kick open a vital supply line. So what was the problem? To us, stopping made no sense at all, but orders are orders.
Now we believed that dusty, nowhere Al Budayr on Route 17 was to be our home for the next month, so we planned to go back into the town and set up shop in the old Ba’ath Party offices. McCoy could be the mayor for a while, and we could erase all traces of the Saddam regime. We would saturate the area with patrols for security, maybe reopen schools, get the utilities running, and prove to the locals that the dictator and his men were no longer to be feared.
It was a good hearts-and-minds program, but I found it all to be totally depressing. My boys were trained as scouts and snipers, not carpenters or bricklayers, and we had come to fight, not to occupy. Yes, we wanted to help the people, but we also needed to get on with the real job. Having my boys put down their rifles to do reconstruction work would be like hitching up a thoroughbred racehorse to pull a beer wagon.
And personally, the sooner I finished in Iraq, the sooner I could get back home, and a lot could be happening back there in an extra thirty days, none of it good. I was struggling to keep apart the two phases of my life, the professional and the personal.
Thank God that op-pause nightmare only lasted a few hours.
I was checking the Main’s defenses when Gunnery Sergeant Don Houston came running up with good news. “Jack!” he announced with a big smile. “It’s off!”
“What’s off?”
“The stupid fucking op-pause. I just heard it on the radio.”
“No shit?” I thought he was trying to be funny, and I was in no mood to get excited about a joke.
“No shit, Jack.” He threw a little jab at me, tapping my shoulder. “You get to kill more people tomorrow.” I could almost feel the monkeys jumping off my back.
Immediately we went back to being Marines instead of administrators. We received orders to collect the noncombat battalion units that we had stripped off for the Afak Drills, then move up to the big cloverleaf intersection and prepare to attack into Ad Diwaniyah.
As we returned along Route 17, small groups of civilians emerged from their homes to wave, a hopeful sign that they were beginning to believe that Saddam and his thugs were finally gone and that they could perhaps have a brighter future. I was riding atop the Humvee, with my rifle across my lap, watching them watch us, when among those standing in the crowd outside of Afak I recognized someone: straight black hair, light-blue-and-white-striped shirt, greenish-brown pants, white shoes, and a big mustache. It was the guy who had been down in the street, the man I had come within a kitten’s whisker of killing. He saw me, too, and there was a strange moment of recognition as our eyes locked and he looked at the big sniper rifle. I patted the weapon and gave him a look of “Man, you don’t know how lucky you are.” He returned a look that seemed to say he understood how-close he had come to dying, and then gave a slight nod, perhaps a silent “Thanks for sparing me.”
Over the next twenty-four hours, the 5th Marines pulled out of Ad Diwaniyah, heading farther north. Our first units arrived at the cloverleaf before their final trucks left, so there was no break in the chain.
We smelled the place even before we could see it, an overwhelming stench of rot and filth that grew even worse as the hours passed and the afternoon temperatures rose. Bugs of biblical-plague proportions attacked us, along with swarms of blackflies and gnats and battalions of fleas. Good God, what an awful place. It had been the landfill for the city, and stinking trash was everywhere. As the day passed, it rained, and the gathering pools of water turned the disgusting area into stinking mud syrup. When the rain stopped, the saunalike humid heat returned, as did the bugs.
The final night of March was one of the most miserable points of the war for us, for the flies became absolutely unbearable. Marines looked as if they were having fits, flailing their arms over their heads as they swatted the flies while creepy little bug feet walked on their necks and snacked on their skin. Some men put on the full MOPP gear for protection.
We looked forward to morning, when we could attack the city, preferring battle to the purgatory of that stinking cloverleaf.