Twenty-nine Palms, California, is a company town, and its business is the United States Marine Corps. It has more barbershops than convenience stores, and apartment leases run month to month instead of by the year because Marines are transferred at a moment’s notice. Fast-food joints stay open late, knowing that we may be in the field long past normal closing times, and the dry cleaners keep their doors open on Sunday nights so we can pick up pressed uniforms after a long weekend. Despite the name, it is an arid desert so devoid of majestic palms that we call it “the Stumps.”
I am stationed there as part of the 3rd Battalion of the 4th Marine Regiment, attached to the 7th Marine Regiment of the 1st Marine Division. The reasons for this numerical soup are complicated and confusing, even to those who understand them, and make little difference anyway. We are called “the Three-Four”-it’s written like a fraction, 3/4-and because of our aggressiveness, our nickname is “the Bull.”
Out here, in nine hundred square miles of emptiness, we have as much room to play as the mind can imagine, and roaring, thunder-clapping, live-fire exercises are common as we train to the breaking point. We fire our weapons in a totally tactical environment that we make as realistic as we dare: Real bullets are fired right over the shoulders of the troops, tanks attack with real cannon fire, and planes drop real bombs. Then we do it all over again because we never consider ourselves ready enough. There are no days without gunfire or Marines running in the sand at 29 Palms, although only a few miles away down Highway 62, the rich folks play golf and enjoy a champagne brunch in Palm Springs.
Other units are sent here for specialized training, but this is our home turf, and we know every inch of it. An area called “Range 400” is considered one of the scariest stretches of territory in the Corps for training, but that range is so familiar to us that it is no longer challenging, so we devise different, and more difficult, scenarios to practice. The result is a unit so razor sharp that we walk with a swagger and are always ready to be the opposing force in some war game. The Bull is the home team, the varsity.
But it didn’t feel like that on September 11, 2001, when terrorists drove two hijacked airliners into the Twin Towers in Manhattan, crashed another into the Pentagon, and sent still another spiraling down into the placid countryside of Pennsylvania. Thousands of American civilians were murdered that day, and there wasn’t a damned thing the Bull could do about it. Not yet.
Only the month before, in August, most of the battalion had packed up and departed for Okinawa. This small island in the Pacific had been one of the most contested battlegrounds of World War II. Now Japan owned the place again but allowed the United States to keep the 3rd Marine Division, our official parent unit, on the island to respond to area threats. The 4th Regiment headquarters was also out there, along with a rotation of its fighting units. It was the Bull’s turn to go sit on the Rock for a while and do some jungle training. Among those who made the trip was Lieutenant Casey Kuhlman, the platoon commander I had “shot” during ProMet. We still barely knew each other, because we were in different companies within a large organization, and while he went to Okinawa as the executive officer of a rifle company, I stayed in the Stumps.
Colonel Steve Hummer, the commanding officer of the 7th Marines, was what we call a warfighter, the highest accolade an enlisted man can bestow upon an officer, and he was always preparing for the fight he was sure was coming. Hummer didn’t know exactly who, when, or where-only that it was coming and that he would have his Marines ready.
He had become a fan of my idea for a Mobile Sniper Strike Team that could yank snipers out of the shackles of yesteryear, and his eyes would almost glow when we discussed turning such a team of highly trained killers loose on a battlefield. A sniper platoon with fast-attack vehicles would give him a valuable new asset that would combine reconnaissance with a lethal strike team. So while the rest of my battalion went to Okinawa, Hummer kept me in California as his regimental chief scout/sniper, gave me bankers’ hours, and told me to stop talking and bring my idea to life.
With the colonel behind the plan, pushing and cajoling and opening doors, things actually began coming together. I needed special weapons, and a fellow sniper at another base was maneuvering that paperwork for me. For vehicles, I wanted to leapfrog over the available Humvees in favor of quicker desert-rat dune buggies. Hummer said, “Do it.”
I also needed men for my plan to work. Not just any troops, but those finely tuned overachievers from advanced schools such as Recon and Sniper. I wanted to take five to seven men from each battalion, personally train them in the new tactics, then have them train others. That’s where I ran headlong into the regimental operations officer, a bear of a lieutenant colonel named Bryan P. McCoy. Since Marines don’t grow on trees, any men I gained for my team would be subtracted directly from McCoy’s roster of combat personnel. He didn’t like that.
Casey once described me as not being very subtle: “If Jack likes you, he curses and insults you. If he doesn’t like you, he does the same thing, only nose-to-nose and louder.” McCoy and I had a number of spirited discussions.
While I could bully a lot of officers, he was a stone wall. He stands about six-six, weighs a muscular 240 pounds, keeps his light brown hair high and tight, and usually has a big cigar stuffed in his mouth. He tried to stare holes in me with his beady hazel eyes. McCoy is brilliant and kept cluttering up our arguments with quotes from Napoleon and Rommel. Nevertheless, the Boss supported my plan to put snipers on wheels, and I wasn’t going to let some S-3 regimental operations officer, even a tough dude like McCoy, stop me. I didn’t think anything could.
On September 11, 2001, our eighth wedding anniversary was less than a month away. My wife was in the kitchen, and I was getting out of the shower to start another day in Marine paradise. We would take our kids to day care, then Kim would go to her teaching job and I would head off for another argument or two with McCoy.
The telephone rang, and I picked it up in the bedroom.
No hello. “Turn on the television set!” It was the battalion commander’s wife, who was running the home front while her husband had the troops in Okinawa. “We’re being attacked!”
I snapped the power button on the remote, and New York swam into view on CNN. A tower of the World Trade Center was on fire, and as I watched, a big jetliner slammed into the second tower. I was stunned into disbelief and silence for a moment. “OK,” I said, and hung up the telephone, then jumped into my uniform and sped to the base, growing angrier by the minute. I didn’t know who had done this, but they were not going to get away with it.
A savage typhoon had stalled over Okinawa, where it was now about nine o’clock at night at Camp Schwab, the northernmost base on the island. A few poor bastards were pulling outside guard duty in the storm, while most of the battalion’s senior officers were in Korea for a conference. One major and a bunch of lieutenants were left in charge at the camp, including Casey, the executive officer of Kilo Company. He finished checking his e-mail, went to his room, and turned on the radio. At first, he thought he was listening to some War of the Worlds kind of fake broadcast. He quickly called his four platoon leaders together for a briefing, and someone found a television set in time for them all to see that another plane had crashed into the Pentagon.
Soon after that, Threat Condition Delta was ordered by President Bush. That meant Marines were to “man the lines,” but there was little that the men of the mighty Bull could do other than snarl at the television set and check in by radio with the near-empty battalion headquarters. The word came down to just sit tight until things got sorted out, because it was pretty unlikely that Camp Schwab was going to be attacked that night. The twenty-five-year-old lieutenant and his fellow officers settled down to watch over their flock as the bad news unfolded. They felt helpless. It was a strange feeling.
Casey had come a long way to reach the Rock, on the far side of the world from his home in sunny Florida. He had grown up in the northwest section of Orlando, between the ocean at New Smyrna Beach and Disney World. As a kid, he visited the magical universe created by Walt Disney so many times he was almost on a first-name basis with Mickey Mouse.
Great distances did not trouble him, for Casey was almost migratory by nature. His father was from Michigan, his mother from Tennessee. Casey had been born in Chattanooga on September 3, 1976. A few years later, the family, now including a younger brother, moved to Florida, and from the third grade until he left for college, he lived in a 1,500-square-foot three-bedroom home that his mom had decorated with Mexican tiles. The family pets started small, with a basset hound, but by the time Casey left home, their pet was a 180-pound Newfoundland named Bailey, who liked to rest his huge head on the dining room table.
Casey once told me, “When I think of my childhood, it was complete normalcy.” His mother was a nurse, and his father became director of budgeting at a hospital and was fascinated by the early wave of home computers. He provided his boys some nifty games while he worked up a business in computer consulting for medical practices. That was Casey’s first step into engineering, and he never stopped.
He enjoyed sports but was more of a bookish kid, and reading Hemingway and Kerouac was more appealing than learning to surf. With a swimming pool in almost every backyard in the neighborhood, he and his friends didn’t need to go to the ocean to while away a summer. What he was really good at, and enjoyed, was the math and science classes in school, where he could make intricate sets of numbers add up, the formulas made sense, and attention to detail paid off with correct answers. A physics teacher guessing the future occupations of some students looked at Casey and said, “Engineer.”
He followed that very path, and narrowed his college choices to the University of Illinois and the University of California at Berkeley, although he had also been accepted at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Georgia Tech. His parents, both Republicans, quickly weeded the free-spirited Berkeley out of the possibilities, and Casey went to Illinois. He would graduate cum laude from the top structural engineering school in the country.
That’s also where his life changed dramatically and what he calls “the duality of me” emerged. He was paying his way through college with a Naval ROTC scholarship when he realized there was more to life than calculus and physics. It’s hard for me to believe today, because Casey stands more than six feet tall and is a muscular 190 pounds, but he was small in high school. Reading all of those books had instilled a yearning for adventure, and in his sophomore year he decided to test himself physically and to become a Marine-not just any kind of Marine but an infantry officer, a grunt.
He graduated in 1999, into a world that was generally at peace, and started his climb through the tough Marine training schools. Now, on this historic day, that was all over, and he found himself on Okinawa, with a typhoon howling outside, watching burning buildings on television and hearing President Bush tell the nation that its military forces were at the highest state of readiness. He had wanted adventure, and now, he had found it.
Nine-eleven put an end to my dream for a Mobile Sniper Strike Team, at least for a while, and I didn’t care. Even had it been authorized that day, it still would have taken another year to get off the ground, and now there was a risk that it had become my own personal albatross. We were suddenly planning for war, and I worried that I was going to be left behind, shuffling papers, while a shooting scrape was going on.
I went into a big staff meeting that day where contingency plans were being thrown down, changing hourly as more information arrived. Twenty-nine Palms was never far from alert status anyway, and things started clicking together rapidly. Afghanistan quickly rose to the top of the list of potential targets because it was the home nest of the Taliban, which supported the terrorist network that staged the attacks on America. Out came more maps, more studies, more plans.
In a quieter moment, I cornered Colonel Hummer to make my pitch to get into the fight, but before I could say anything, he told me, “Calm down. You’re going to Afghanistan with us as my chief scout/sniper.” That was just what I wanted to hear.
The Afghanistan campaign started in early October 2001, and Northern Alliance forces supported by U.S. advisers took the capital of Kabul in November. Kandahar, the last stronghold of those Taliban nutcases, fell in December.
Meanwhile, far above our pay grades, another sort of war was being waged within the polished hallways of the Pentagon in Washington. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld had come into office in 2001 with a burning desire to restructure the U.S. military into a more mobile force, and the Army generals were balking at the rapid-deployment scheme. Afghanistan became a laboratory in which each side would try to prove it was right. While some Army Green Berets had helped direct air strikes in the north, and elements of the 10th Mountain Division came over from Uzbekistan to secure two northern airfields, the first regular American combat unit to enter Afghanistan was the Marine Expeditionary Force that flew in from five aircraft carriers parked in the Arabian Sea to capture a southern base on November 25, 2001. They had been parked offshore with everything they needed for a long fight, from armored attack vehicles to water purification facilities. Rumsfeld and his top civilian assistants saw the swift, effective deployment of the Marines as proof of their argument for radical changes. The Army chain of command was not impressed.
Ultimately, the Afghanistan campaign did not involve our regiment. Our job was to get ready for whatever came next, and we set about training like we had never trained before. President Bush, in his State of the Union speech in January 2002, labeled Iraq, Iran, and North Korea an “axis of evil” and accused them of supporting terrorism and having weapons of mass destruction.
When the 3/4 battalion returned home from Okinawa in February, new and secret contingency plans were already showing that the next big strike probably was going to be in Iraq, just the kind of sandbox terrain the Bull knew so well. While the 3/4 had a good idea of where they would be going, I still wasn’t sure that I would be with them, because my regimental assignment left me in limbo while my buddies were preparing to fight.
Then, in early May, I almost had a heart attack when the battalion got a new commanding officer, none other than my old nemesis Lieutenant Colonel Bryan McCoy. All of those arguments we had had over the mobile sniper teams rose to haunt me, and my spirits sank like a rock. McCoy did not help things by hooking me back into the fold to be the gunnery sergeant for the battalion’s Headquarters and Supply Company. I recoiled at the thought. Me, the combat veteran who wanted nothing more than to be out in front of the action with my sniper rifle, held back as the “Gunny” of the Hotdog and Soda Company, to shepherd those freaks and geeks into making sure all the real warriors had everything needed to fight a war, from rifle ammunition to toilet paper.
The only person who felt as bad as I did was Casey, who arrived back in 29 Palms only to be snatched away from his rifle company and named the H &S executive officer and its interim commander. But he was immediately dispatched to still another school, and I was handling the company on my own.
In reality, being a Marine company gunnery sergeant is a prestigious job and a good position for promotion, and I might have been more than willing to do it-if we had not been heading for war. Now I was frustrated and hated the idea, so I marched over to confront McCoy. His desk was the size of an aircraft carrier, but he was so large that it seemed a perfect fit. Early summer sunlight blasted through the windows as I sat down, wondering just how much damage I might have caused by arguing with him so much during the past months.
“I want some other job, sir, not H &S,” I said. “Anything but H &S.”
“Sorry, Staff Sergeant Coughlin. I need you right where you are,” he said, chomping the cigar.
“I’m a sniper, sir!”
“You’re my H &S Company gunnery sergeant!”
I paused a moment, then played my ace. “Sir, I’ve got enough time in that I can still shift to another battalion.” I was ready to walk, to actually leave the battalion, something I never thought I would say. But if it would get me into the shooting war, I would do it.
McCoy can be something of a Jekyll and Hyde character, and he let his more reasonable side take over rather than giving vent to the warfighter side. He had a job to do, he needed me, and anyway, he already was a step ahead and had plans much different than I had imagined.
“I’ve got an H &S company that doesn’t have a commanding officer right now,” the lieutenant colonel reasoned. “Your executive officer is gone for the Mountain Leaders Course, which leaves the company understrength and leaderless. That means you take over. We’re getting ready for a war, Staff Sergeant, and we both have a lot of work to do. Don’t let your vanity get in the way of what’s really important.”
“But it means that I’ll be back in the rear with the gear when we go over, sir. I can’t do that.” I could almost feel the sniper rifle being taken from my hands.
McCoy blew a big cloud of smoke. “Look, Jack. You work with me here, and get us to Kuwait, and I promise to let you go play when we go to war. I know and respect your abilities as a sniper, and when the bullets start flying, I promise that you are going to shoot people.”
I took the deal.