Read Online Shock Factor by Jack Coughlin - Free Book Online Page B

Civilians they’d tortured and killed were laid to rest there atop Jihadists and foreign fighters alike.
    All the while, the civilians trapped within their devastated neighborhoods sought any means to survive. With shops closed and the economy destroyed, for many men the only way to feed their families was to do al-Qaida’s dirty work. The terrorists hired children to be lookouts, or to scout locations for IEDs. They paid adults to plant the bombs or to assist in their construction. Others received a bounty for the Americans they killed.
    There were even contract snipers working for al-Qaida. One used a van as a mobile sniper hide. Concealed in back behind a curtain, he killed a U.S. soldier with a shot to the head, only to be overrun and captured a short time later. When he was interrogated and identified, the Americans discovered the gunman was a teacher at a nearby vocational school for women. For extra money, he moonlighted as a sniper for al-Qaida.
    The Anbar Provincial Government was located in downtown Ramadi. It was a sole enclave in a sea of hostility. The governor and his staff were frequent targets of assassination attempts, and they lived under siege surrounded by a protective cordon of Marines. Anytime the governor tried to go anywhere, he and his security detail almost always came under attack. In such a situation, the government had no hope of functioning. The governor controlled nothing beyond the rifle barrels of the Marines keeping him alive.
    Day after day, the fighting demolished Ramadi a little at a time. Where Fallujah had been a full-on onslaught, a set-piece battle that ended after two months of fighting, Ramadi was the battle without end. It became the Guadalcanal of the Iraq War, a brutal struggle of attrition that wore away the souls of the Americans caught in its vortex of violence and misery.
    Every time an American patrol left an outpost, they were sure to encounter some sort of opposition. The threats were everywhere—bombs buried under the asphalt in the streets they used, buildings wired to blow. Random gunmen lurked in the shadows to spray AK fire and run. Zealots wearing suicide vests, grenades, and mortar fire launched from tubes mounted in the beds of flatbed “bongo” trucks so they could keep mobile were just a few of the threats the Americans faced every day. On average, any patrol in the city that summer would get attacked within eight minutes of heading out the front gate.
    Despite the lethality of IEDs and suicide bombers, al-Qaida’s snipers were the threat American troops feared the most. In an IED environment, slow movement is the best way for a foot patrol to detect that sort of threat. But with al-Qaida snipers lurking in the shadows of broken buildings, atop minarets and mosques, slow movement was a death sentence. Marines and soldiers alike took to sudden rushes from one concealed position to another. They dashed down streets in one-hundred-thirty-eight-degree heat, laden with eighty pounds of gear or more, hoping the speed and sudden changes of direction would throw off the aim of any marksman who had them in his crosshairs.
    Though IEDs killed more Americans in Ramadi, the sniper shots were the ones that affected the troops the most. In three months, 2nd Battalion, 8th Marines (2/8) suffered eight casualties to enemy snipers. Two journalists embedded with 1/506th Parachute Infantry at Camp Corregidor (located just outside Ramadi) also fell wounded to sniper rounds.
    On June 21, 2006, Lance Corporal Nicholas Whyte prepared to depart from a forward outpost on a foot patrol through a Ramadi neighborhood. Whyte, who was two days shy of his twenty-second birthday, had served in Fallujah and had done an earlier tour in Haiti before his company from 3rd Battalion, 8th Marines joined the central battle of the Iraq War. He’d been raised in Brooklyn, New York, in a tough neighborhood near East Flatbush, graduating from James Madison High School in 2002.