Read Online Shooter: The Autobiography of the Top-Ranked Marine Sniper by Gunnery Sgt. Jack, Capt. Casey Kuhlman, Donald A. Davis Coughlin - Free Book Online Page B
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war. As the house grew small in my rearview mirror, I began to morph from father and husband into my alter ego of remorseless and cold-blooded Marine sniper.
I joined the advance party and climbed aboard the big birds for the long flight over to Kuwait, which was totally boring and uneventful, other than the grousing about not being able to see the Super Bowl game. We would not be landing to the sound of guns, only to the requirement to get the camp set up for the rest of the troops. When we stepped off the plane, a stiff, chill desert wind whipped us, but other than that, it almost seemed as if we had not really gone anywhere. We lived in a California desert ourselves, so the flat vistas and dry weather were familiar. The weather was only about ten degrees hotter or colder than it was back home.
The Kuwaitis had been busy. Buses took us to a vast plain some thirty miles south of the Iraqi border, where a city of white canvas tents had been erected for us. The land was virtually flat as far as theeye could see, except for the occasional dune and the great fields of pointy-top tents. It looked as if a giant circus had come to town.
The drooping tents were the type Bedouin tribesmen had used for centuries in this hot, sandy region, not crisp military style, only ours had wooden floors instead of Persian carpets. Since I was in charge of assigning spaces for everyone in the battalion, I gave myself one of the best and created a private area, walled off by pallets of bottled water and rations, in one corner.
Everything that had been disassembled back in 29 Palms began arriving and had to be put back together and readied. Once in place, the battalion bulked up with a trade that swapped a company of our riflemen for a company of tanks from the 1st Tanks Battalion. We all watched with awe when the fifteen huge M1A1 battle tanks of Bravo Company rumbled over to live with us. The things are huge! With those and our own assault amphibious vehicles (AAVs), better known as “Amtracs” or just “tracks,” we now had quite an armored punch. Then we added units of engineers, artillery and air-strike spotters, guys who specialized in detecting chemical weapons, the translators and intelligence dudes of the “Human Exploitation Teams,” and miscellaneous other support personnel. All of them came to us eagerly, because getting attached to the 3rd Battalion of the 4th Marines was like being drafted by the New England Patriots. Our job was to move and attack, not hold and pacify, and we had a reputation for getting the job done.
“You’re all gonna die,” called the skeptics. “No,” we corrected. “We’re going to kill people.”
Joining the Bull carried a price for these newcomers, however, because we worked them like dogs. It was not unusual for me to storm into a tent before dawn, yelling, “Get the hell up, you sons of bitches!” I would grab some lazy bastard out of the sack and force him outsidefor an exhausting physical training exercise in full combat gear. The newbies kept waiting for us to lighten up, but we never did, and slowly they adjusted to life in an elite combat unit. We knew that being brilliant in the basics would keep them alive when the shooting began.
We trained in every conceivable format, and when we learned that our first target in Iraq would be the southern city of Basra, we scripted that battle as if we were planning a Super Bowl, right down to watching Falcon View computer imagery that exactly painted the route to the city. A Dragon Eye unmanned drone gave us real-time aerial pictures until somebody goofed with the automated controls and rammed it into the side of an Amtrac during a training exercise. It seemed that we had everything but the home telephone numbers of the defending soldiers.
Casey and I worked the troops hard in shooting, moving the convoys, and getting into and out of dangerous dispersal areas on a crowded and shifting battlefield. A sense of urgency seeped into the
I joined the advance party and climbed aboard the big birds for the long flight over to Kuwait, which was totally boring and uneventful, other than the grousing about not being able to see the Super Bowl game. We would not be landing to the sound of guns, only to the requirement to get the camp set up for the rest of the troops. When we stepped off the plane, a stiff, chill desert wind whipped us, but other than that, it almost seemed as if we had not really gone anywhere. We lived in a California desert ourselves, so the flat vistas and dry weather were familiar. The weather was only about ten degrees hotter or colder than it was back home.
The Kuwaitis had been busy. Buses took us to a vast plain some thirty miles south of the Iraqi border, where a city of white canvas tents had been erected for us. The land was virtually flat as far as theeye could see, except for the occasional dune and the great fields of pointy-top tents. It looked as if a giant circus had come to town.
The drooping tents were the type Bedouin tribesmen had used for centuries in this hot, sandy region, not crisp military style, only ours had wooden floors instead of Persian carpets. Since I was in charge of assigning spaces for everyone in the battalion, I gave myself one of the best and created a private area, walled off by pallets of bottled water and rations, in one corner.
Everything that had been disassembled back in 29 Palms began arriving and had to be put back together and readied. Once in place, the battalion bulked up with a trade that swapped a company of our riflemen for a company of tanks from the 1st Tanks Battalion. We all watched with awe when the fifteen huge M1A1 battle tanks of Bravo Company rumbled over to live with us. The things are huge! With those and our own assault amphibious vehicles (AAVs), better known as “Amtracs” or just “tracks,” we now had quite an armored punch. Then we added units of engineers, artillery and air-strike spotters, guys who specialized in detecting chemical weapons, the translators and intelligence dudes of the “Human Exploitation Teams,” and miscellaneous other support personnel. All of them came to us eagerly, because getting attached to the 3rd Battalion of the 4th Marines was like being drafted by the New England Patriots. Our job was to move and attack, not hold and pacify, and we had a reputation for getting the job done.
“You’re all gonna die,” called the skeptics. “No,” we corrected. “We’re going to kill people.”
Joining the Bull carried a price for these newcomers, however, because we worked them like dogs. It was not unusual for me to storm into a tent before dawn, yelling, “Get the hell up, you sons of bitches!” I would grab some lazy bastard out of the sack and force him outsidefor an exhausting physical training exercise in full combat gear. The newbies kept waiting for us to lighten up, but we never did, and slowly they adjusted to life in an elite combat unit. We knew that being brilliant in the basics would keep them alive when the shooting began.
We trained in every conceivable format, and when we learned that our first target in Iraq would be the southern city of Basra, we scripted that battle as if we were planning a Super Bowl, right down to watching Falcon View computer imagery that exactly painted the route to the city. A Dragon Eye unmanned drone gave us real-time aerial pictures until somebody goofed with the automated controls and rammed it into the side of an Amtrac during a training exercise. It seemed that we had everything but the home telephone numbers of the defending soldiers.
Casey and I worked the troops hard in shooting, moving the convoys, and getting into and out of dangerous dispersal areas on a crowded and shifting battlefield. A sense of urgency seeped into the
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