Shock Factor: American Snipers in the War on Terror

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN Origins

Daniel Morgan never once backed down from a fight. Six feet tall with broad shoulders and bulging muscles gained from a lifetime of physical labor, Morgan had a knack for finding trouble. Bar brawls, gang fights, and back-alley beat-downs characterized his hard-drinking youth. Ambitious, loyal to his friends, and possessing a sharp mind, he was equally feared and admired by his fellow Virginians.

In 1755 he joined British general Edward Braddock’s march against the French at Fort Duquesne, seeing profit and adventure in this first major campaign of the French and Indian War. Serving as a civilian contract teamster, he drove the rule-bound British nuts with his independent spirit and flippant mouth. He also suffered no fools, no matter who they were. When a British officer angered him, he beat him raw and was sentenced to five hundred lashes with a whip for his crime. For most men, this would have been a death sentence. Not Morgan. The British tied him to a post and whipped him until “his back was bathed in blood and his flesh hung down in ribbons.” Morgan never lost consciousness, and he even counted each strike of the whip. After that incident, he hated the British Army with singular passion.

Daniel Morgan is the father of the American sniper corps.

After the American Revolution broke out, the Continental Congress voted on June 14, 1775, to raise ten companies of “expert riflemen,” including two from Virginia. At the time, Morgan was serving in the Virginia Militia. A patriot committee elected him to be the captain in command of one of these new rifle companies. Morgan leapt at the opportunity. For days, he rode through the county, using his skills as an orator and leveraging his legendary reputation to recruit the area’s best marksmen into his new unit. At each stop, he would challenge all those interested into joining his unit to a series of marksmanship tests. Morgan’s assistants would set up a board with the outline of a man’s nose painted on it. From a hundred fifty yards away, each candidate received one chance to hit the target. Only those who did so, or came close, were allowed entry into Morgan’s elite new company. When he finished recruiting after only a couple of weeks, his company included some of the best sharpshooters in the colonies.

They were a nonstandard lot. Some things just don’t change.

Morgan’s men soon made waves with both the enemy and within the nascent American Army. They never considered themselves average, nor did they react well to Army chickenshit. They were hard-drinking, hard-fighting frontiersmen, born and raised in the woods. They thought for themselves, took pride in their fierce independence, and could live off the land with a self-sufficiency few could match. They had also learned to shoot from the moment they were old enough to hold a rifle.

The other militia and Continental units hated Morgan’s men. Officers reviled them and wrote scathing assessments of their unmilitary behavior. Truth was, they did not fit the army mold. They dressed different, walked with a swagger, and chafed against routine. They brawled with each other and others at the drop of a hat, and never once doubted they were better than everyone else. They developed their own style and rituals. They became a breed apart, as we still are today.

When they went into battle, they put all doubters to shame. They may have been a pain in the ass in camp, but in the field they showed their lethality time after time. Light on their feet, masters of concealment and stealthy movement, Morgan’s men inspired terror in the British with their sudden and deadly accurate attacks.

After serving in the siege of Boston, Morgan’s company took part in the invasion of Canada later that year. In the middle of blinding snow, he and his men helped storm Quebec, only to be surrounded and forced to surrender. In early 1777, Morgan was exchanged and returned to the American Army, where George Washington gave him command of an elite, five-hundred-man battalion of riflemen. Every man had been handpicked from their Continental regiments based on their precision accuracy with their weapons. Morgan’s Riflemen went on to play a key role in the Saratoga Campaign and helped turn the tide against the British. He and his men later helped defeat Lord Cornwallis at Cowpens, and were present at the end of the war.

Daniel Morgan and his original citizen-snipers set the standard for our community in the years to come. In every subsequent war except Vietnam, militia and National Guard shooters have played valuable roles at the front. Today, that citizen-sniper heritage is embodied in the National Guard infantry units and their scout platoons. These part-time snipers are rarely noticed by the media, and most Americans don’t even realize they may have a National Guard shooter working with them in their office or their community’s Wal-Mart. Yet since 9/11, these men have served with distinction in both Iraq and Afghanistan, scoring some of America’s most notable successes against our enemies.

In the summer of 2003, Oregon’s 2nd Battalion, 162nd Infantry was mobilized for service in Iraq. Composed of a mix of college students, mill workers, Hewlett-Packard engineers, cops, and paramedics, 2–162 possessed a backbone of talented noncommissioned officers who had served in their platoons and companies for decades. Some of them had seen combat in Grenada, Panama, and the Gulf. Others had yet to hear the crack of bullets passing overhead, but had trained together for so long that they had become a bonded and well-oiled team. Their bond of friendship and brotherhood ran deep; their families celebrated holidays together, their sons had grown up playing war together, and when they turned eighteen, they joined the battalion. The Volunteers, as they called themselves, were a family — sometimes fractious, sometimes feisty, but loyal to each other to the core.

This small band of seven hundred Oregonians, keepers of the citizen-soldier heritage, would find themselves in the bloodiest and most violent battles of the Iraq War. To that point, no National Guard unit since the end of World War II had seen the level of combat 2–162 would experience in Baghdad, Najaf, and Fallujah. Right there with them, protecting their fellow Oregonians and innocent civilians caught in the violence, were the long riflemen of Staff Sergeant Kevin Maries’s sniper section.

CHAPTER NINETEEN Yellow Shirt

At five foot five, with John Lennon spectacles and an easygoing smile, Staff Sergeant Kevin Maries does not look like a deadly sniper. If you were to encounter him on the street, his soft-spoken, friendly nature might deceive you into thinking he was an accountant, or perhaps a math teacher. But underneath the benign exterior beats a warrior’s heart.

Born in Iowa, his folks moved the family to Oregon in 1976 when he was nine years old. They settled in Albany, a small Willamette Valley rough-and-tumble mill town. As a kid, he developed an interest in firearms — no surprise since his father was a sportsman — and he learned the mechanics of marksmanship long before he was able to drive a car. He has shot competitively most of his life, and has a room full of trophies from those events.

In 1985, after high school, he joined the Oregon National Guard, where he served initially as a TOW missile anti-tank gunner. Later, he became a medic and transferred to an engineer unit. In 1991, he found his true calling in the Guard when he joined 2nd Battalion, 162nd Infantry’s scout/sniper platoon. He graduated from the National Guard’s scout-sniper school in Little Rock, Arkansas in 1993. At the time, most of the instructors were Marines, and Maries was part of the first class to graduate from it.

The Volunteers considered the scout/sniper platoon to be the battalion’s elite element. Only the best soldiers were selected to join it, and only after they underwent an extensive series of tests and interviews. Each prospective candidate had to be a seasoned infantryman whose tactical acumen was challenged with a weekend of field exercises known as the Scout Indoc. One bad decision during those training battles and the candidate would be rejected.

The scout platoon had two components: a reconnaissance, or recce, section designed to serve as the eyes of the battalion, and a sniper section composed of three two-man teams. The thirty men who filled the platoon’s ranks represented the best light infantrymen in the entire Oregon Guard.

The surest shots and the most patient, observant soldiers who were admitted into the scout platoon were selected to become snipers. Kevin Maries made it through the selection process thanks to his stone-cold demeanor while under stress and his ability to recall incredibly minute details. He spotted things through his scope that others never saw. He was persistent, cerebral, and impossible to fluster. He made a natural candidate for the sniper section.

When Maries joined the scout platoon, the Vietnam-era M21 rifle was long out of the Guard’s inventory. This was the Vietnam-era variant of the M14 made famous by such men as Chuck Mawhinney. In 1988, the Army transitioned to a new sniper weapon system called the M24. Based on the Remington 700 civilian bolt action rifle, the M24 has an effective range of eight hundred and seventy five meters. It holds five 7.62mm rounds, though some units use .300 Winchester Magnums. The Volunteers received their M24s starting in 1992. By the end of the decade, the 2–162s snipers carried a mix of M24s and the deadly .50 caliber M107 Barrett semiautomatic. Maries’ loved both weapons, but he had a special affinity for the M14. Later on during his service with 2–162, he acquired several match grade M14s from the Guard’s marksmanship unit and pressed them back into service with his snipers.

2–162.

Sergeant Wes Howe, a fellow National Guard sniper, served with Maries for years and was awed by Maries’s natural shooting ability. After Kevin won the state’s sniper competition in 2001, which made him Oregon’s top shot, Howe marveled at Maries’s “incredible score with an M24.” Kevin had long earned a reputation among his peers as the state’s preeminent sniper.

By 2003 Maries had become the sniper section NCO. In that role, he molded the 2–162 shooters into a close-knit, meticulous bunch who prided themselves on their attention to detail. He was also responsible for recruiting and mentoring new candidates for the sniper section. He handpicked each man for the unit and imparted his knowledge to them with the acumen and patience of a schoolteacher.

In the summer of 2003, the battalion received orders to deploy to Iraq. The Volunteers’ commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel Dan Hendrickson, ordered Maries to increase the sniper section to include five two-man teams. To do so, Kevin had to accelerate his normal recruiting process. He pulled in a number of talented privates, including a prior service veteran named Keith Engle. Through the course of that summer, the scouts tested those privates relentlessly. When the process ended, Maries had sent almost two dozen of the prospects back to their line companies. He kept only Engle and Private Nate Gushwa.

That fall, the Volunteers were allotted only one slot at the sniper school in Little Rock, Arkansas. Jim Schmorde was originally slated to go, but he suffered a knee injury in training that delayed his depature. So Maries gave the slot to Nate Gushwa, who left the battalion to attend the school in January 2004. He graduated on Valentine’s Day and caught up with the Volunteers at Fort Polk, Louisiana, shortly before the unit headed out the door for Iraq.

Engle grew up in the mountains south of Bakersfield, California. Before age five, his dad had taught him to shoot with a .22 Marlin 18, which he used to hunt rabbits and squirrels. His Marlin had no rear sight, yet he developed a knack for nailing targets on the fly that confounded his older brother, who later joined the Army. When Engle was fifteen, he outshot his brother when he came home on leave from Korea. Keith teased him about that for years afterward.

His brother was the second man in the family to serve in Asia. Engle’s dad had done a combat tour as a medic during the Korean War. Though he rarely talked about it, his military service helped to inspire his sons to join the Army. Out of high school, Keith enlisted as a TOW antitank missile gunner.

After his four-year contract ended, Engle got out, came to Oregon, and settled at the coast. He found a job as a commercial fisherman — hard, rugged work that demanded long hours and physical stamina. He was at sea on 9/11 when the Towers fell, but as soon as his feet hit dry land, he reenlisted. He joined the Oregon Guard and was pulled into the scout platoon after a series of drills with the 2–162. Maries saw his potential and picked him for the sniper section.

The two formed an interesting combination. Engle’s blood ran hot; Maries’s ran cold. Engle tended to be more emotional and excitable, while Maries was analytical and detached. As the two learned to work together, Maries made a concerted effort to show Engle how to control his emotions while out in the field.

Six months after mobilizing for duty overseas, the Volunteers departed the United States. They flew to Kuwait in March of 2004 just as Sunni and Shia insurgent groups forged an alliance intended to create a nationwide uprising against the American-led Coalition. In April, as the battalion drove north across the Kuwait border destined for their new base in eastern Baghdad, the Shia and Sunni groups struck simultaneously throughout the country. In the once-quiet southern provinces, members of the Badr Brigade and Moqtada al-Sadr’s ragtag Mahdi Militia attacked Coalition bases, convoys, and patrols. Al-Sadr’s men seized control of dozens of southern Iraqi towns, including the holy city of Najaf. Meanwhile, Sunni groups west of Baghdad rose up against the U.S. Marines, leading to ferocious fighting around Fallujah, Ramadi, and other key cities.

With only a minimal load of ammunition, the Volunteers had to fight their way into Baghdad a year after the initial invasion. As they reached the southern suburbs, a sixty-man force of Syrian foreign fighters ambushed their column, wounding three Americans. After blowing through the ambush and evacuating their casualties, the Oregonians finally reached their destination later that night.

The battalion took over a small base built around the former Iraqi Olympic training facility. Known at the time as Forward Operating Base Provider, later renamed Patrol Base Volunteer, Kevin Maries and the other snipers found some interesting things in their new home. Saddam’s psychotic son, Uday Hussein, had frequented this place, and the scouts discovered his mangled Ferrari abandoned in one of the base parking lots, towed there after U.S. forces blew him up in late 2003. Inside the Olympic training facility, his snipers discovered a bloodstained room with a drain in the floor that their interpreters later explained was Uday’s personal torture chamber. Apparently, he used it to punish the Iraqi national soccer team whenever they lost a match.

The scouts spent their first nights in Baghdad sleeping first in a gravel parking lot, then later in a drained Olympic-sized indoor swimming pool. Rocket strikes echoed through the city. Mortars exploded, gunfire rattled periodically in the distance. This was not at all what the Volunteers had been led to expect while training up for the deployment at Fort Hood, Texas. There, they’d been told resistance in the capital was minimal and the few roadside bombs encountered were small, Coke-can contraptions that had little effect. Instead, they’d driven into the middle of a well-armed national uprising that rocked the entire country. They faced roadside bombs so large they were destroying M1 Abrams tanks, and an enemy both skilled and capable who knew the terrain.

Getting a handle on the situation became Lieutenant Colonel Hendrickson’s first priority. He deployed the sniper teams out onto hide sites all over their new area of operations, and Maries’s men soon found excellent spots in Baghdad’s busy high-rise buildings from which to observe the goings on around their patrol base. In downtown, they actually took over the observation point my sniper section had built on the Sheraton Hotel in 2003 after our Marine battalion helped capture the capital. It provided an excellent vantage point of the area, and Maries’s snipers were sent there to help protect the Western press corps still working out of the hotel.

The Ministry of Interior (MOI) building was another one selected by Maries as a prime vantage point. From the fifteenth floor, his sniper teams could watch several key intersections in northeast Baghdad. On the floors below them, American civilians and military personnel worked from shabby offices and cubicles as they propped up the Iraqi bureaucracy that would eventually replace them when the transfer of authority took place later on in the summer. The place hummed with activity at all hours of the day.

The Oregon snipers took over the entire fifteenth floor. Being workout fanatics, they dragged exercise equipment into one of the interior rooms and created a makeshift gym. During scrounging trips to lower floors, they acquired chairs, tables, and even a mini-fridge that made life on their floor a little more comfortable.

During one of those scrounging trips, six-foot-two-inch-tall Sergeant Darren Buchholz discovered there were more than just bureaucrats in the building with them. Buchholz, whom Maries had pulled into the sniper section in 2001, wandered onto a lower floor none of the other snipers had yet visited. To his surprise, he found a Caucasian female secretary sitting at a desk outside a closed office door.

Dressed in nothing but BDU pants and a tan undershirt, Buchholz approached the secretary with an air of brassy authority.

“I wanna talk to your boss.”

The secretary smiled warmly and led him through the office door.

Buchholz stopped in his tracks. He had intended to requisition a few chairs from the woman’s supervisor. Instead, he found himself in an ornate room full of elegant wood furniture that was totally out of place in a building that looked like it had been decorated by the Salvation Army. It felt like he’d walked into a CEO’s office in an otherwise down-at-the-ears strip mall that had been leased out to county services.

The walls were covered with photographs of world leaders and generals posing with the dapper, gray-haired man sitting behind a desk at the other end of the room. He was dressed in an expensive suit. A pistol lay on his desk within easy reach.

Buchholz stared at the man, who quietly asked, “Can I help you?”

The Fortune 500 setting knocked the swagger out of Buchholz. Deferentially, he introduced himself and explained his purpose and mission in the building. The man rose from his chair. For a second, Buchholz thought the man might reach for his pistol, but he simply came around his desk to shake the Oregonian’s hand.

Despite the suit, the man possessed a steely, almost sinister sort of aura that unnerved Buchholz. The man was clearly used to this reaction, and took charge of the encounter. He gave Darren his business card that indicated he was one of the senior-level members of a particular “Other Governmental Agency,” and asked if he could do anything for the Oregon snipers working upstairs.

Buchholz was surprised by his helpfulness, but he wasn’t about to take advantage of it. Politely, he extricated himself as quickly as he could and beat a hasty retreat upstairs, never to return to that floor.

It was the first indication that things were not as they seemed in the Ministry of Interior building.

Maries established a rotation for his five teams that kept them moving between the Sheraton, the MOI, and rolling out with the scouts as they patrolled the city. Usually, two teams would man each observation post for a week to ten days at a time. A fire team from the scout platoon usually provided security. At the MOI, the Oregonians took to sealing themselves onto the fifteenth floor by chaining and locking the stairwell doors.

Every few days, a logistics run would be made and food would be delivered to the men under the guise of normal working traffic into the building. The snipers and their spotters rotated time on their weapons, ensuring that Lieutenant Colonel Hendrickson had eyes on his section of Baghdad 24/7.

During those first weeks in Baghdad, Maries and his men saw a lot of things go down from their observation points. Suicide bombings, car bombs, mortar and rocket attacks took place almost every day. It did not take long for Moqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Militia, the primary Shia insurgent force in Baghdad, to discover that the Volunteers had moved into their neighborhood. They targeted 2–162’s base every day with sudden mortar and rocket strikes. Periodically, a car or van would cruise by the entrance and blast off a few rounds from an AK. Once in a while, they’d even fire RPG’s at the base.

On the MOI observation point, the snipers made a concerted effort to pinpoint the mortar and launch sites used to hit their base. This was no easy task, and even when they did see a launch, the Coalition forces in the area usually could not react fast enough to catch the mortar crews before they vanished into the byzantine streets of Sadr City, a massive slum that made up most of eastern Baghdad.

Between long stretches on the OPs, the snipers took turns going out on dismounted and vehicular patrols with the rest of the scout platoon. These missions led to the snipers’ first taste of battle.

One night in the late spring of 2004, the scouts had dismounted from their unarmored Humvees in what turned out to be a very hostile neighborhood. Darren Buchholz was with the platoon that night. Usually, he carried a Barrett .50 caliber sniper rifle and a scoped M14 that he loved for its semiauto capabilities, but on this mission he’d brought along his M4 with a PEQ-14 laser designator for use with his night vision goggles. While in the street, the scouts spotted a light flashing intermittently on a rooftop two hundred yards away. Moments later, somebody sprayed the street with automatic weapons fire. The scouts took cover and searched for targets. After a moment, the scene went quiet.

As the scouts continued with the patrol, the light flashed again from the same rooftop. Seconds later, somebody laced them with machine-gun fire again. This happened several more times until the scouts realized what was going on. There was an insurgent standing on the rooftop, signaling his fellow fighters with a flashlight. Each time he used it, the other insurgents would make a hit-and-run attack on the platoon.

Buchholz found a stable firing position in the street and waited for the man on the rooftop to return. Through his night vision goggles, he spotted the insurgent reappear. Buchholz illuminated him with his PEQ-14. Wind was minimal; the night was warm and still. He pulled the trigger and smoke-checked the insurgent with a single shot from his M4.

After the patrol, the platoon learned that the man on the roof was an Iraqi cop, and he’d been signaling the enemy while atop the local police station. It was one of the first indications the battalion picked up that the Iraqi Police, which was predominantly Shia, had been penetrated by Moqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Militia.

Others evidence accumulated. That spring, the Volunteers received numerous distress calls from the neighboring police stations claiming to be under attack. The Oregonians would send a platoon out to the rescue, only to be ambushed en route. Other times, they would show up and find everything normal at the station. As they drove back to Patrol Base Volunteer, Mahdi Militiamen would spring an ambush. At times, the police even gave the Mahdi fighters free access to their armories. The insurgents took what they wanted, then vanished into the streets where they used those weapons against our troops.

From the observation point I had established the year before on the Sheraton Hotel, the 2–162 snipers witnessed many unsavory acts by the Iraqi Police. More than once, Buchholz saw them beating people during routine traffic stops. Engle observed them doing similar things as well. The Oregonians grew disgusted by the behavior of their erstwhile allies, but could do little about it besides report it up to the battalion operations center.

In 2004, most of the police had been recruited since the invasion from the ranks of the Shia Iraqi population. This was part of our de-Ba’athification program designed to sweep away the last vestiges of the despotic Saddam Hussein regime. Before the 2003 invasion, the police were largely composed of Sunni, who served as the oppressive bulwark for the dictatorship.

During the 2003 drive on Baghdad, my sniper section discovered how brutality was a mainstay of Iraqi police operations. We had been scouting toward the capital, several kiloyards in front of the main body of our battalion, when waves of nausea overtook me. I’d come down with some sort of stomach bug the night before, and I’d languished all morning in our Humvee’s right seat, trying not to puke all over our Blue Force Tracker as we searched for the enemy.

We rounded a bend and I ordered our driver to halt. As soon as the Humvee stopped, I bailed out, grabbed an ammo crate, and made a beeline toward the side of the road. In seconds, I was running at both ends, praying that we wouldn’t end up in a firefight. All I had was my 9mm pistol, which I kept holstered on my flak jacket for easy access. Between retches, I drew it and held it at my side, wishing I’d brought my rifle with me when I had slid off the truck. Of course, my gunner thought this was hilarious, and he busted out laughing while manning his weapon in the turret of our Humvee.

Meanwhile, the rest of my men dismounted and set up security. Several of them pushed up the road to clear the police station. They came back a moment later and said, “Hey, Boss, you’ve got to come see this.”

When I was finally able to get off the crate, I followed them into the station. At first glance, it looked like a typical small-town, down-at-the-ears constabulary office. That was until the men showed me the torture chamber. The Iraqi cops would take prisoners back there, strap them onto a metal bed, and go to work on them. A car battery sat nearby with jumper cables attached. The other end of the cables dangled from hooks in the nearby wall. During sessions, these would be clipped to the bedsprings to electrocute the prisoner. The sight of such a barbaric thing filled us with grim resolve. This regime had to be destroyed.

We saw that sort of thing in nearly every police station we cleared. In April 2003, as the Iraqi Police returned to work for the first time, our unit went out on joint patrols with the cops to help put an end to the looting going on. Lieutenant Casey Kuhlman, my company executive officer, rolled out on one patrol that encountered a bank robbery in progress. The Iraqi cops caught one of the looters as he tried to escape and began beating hell out of him. On one hand, this was their country and their way of doing business. Stuff like this was going on all over Baghdad. On the other hand, this was not the way we did business, and we were here to bring a new era to the Iraqi people. Clearly, this wasn’t the way to start it off. Plus, a news crew had come along for the ride, and Casey worried that this could end up being a very bad media moment. Finally, he walked up to the Iraqi police commander and said, “If you or your boys beat someone else like that today, I’ll put a bullet in the back of your head before you can throw the second kick.”

The cop nodded in understanding. The prisoner was loaded into a vehicle and taken away to the nearest police station, where I have no doubt a metal bed and a car battery awaited him.

Some things you cannot change overnight. When the Volunteers showed up a year later, they discovered the same behavior, different actors. The Iraqi police uniform still represented repression and fear to the people, and beatings were just part of a day’s job on the street. The Shia cops turned out to be just as bad as the Sunni ones. There was a lot of payback to dish out after decades of brutal repression by the Ba’athists.

That spring, as the Oregonians tried to get a handle on the chaos, a small number of American military police injected a dangerous new dynamic into the equation. It started at the end of April when media reports surfaced alleging that American MPs were torturing detainees at Abu Ghraib prison. Photos taken by the abusers found their way into the press, and these shocking images made international news for months afterward. America lost the moral high ground in Iraq and received near universal condemnation for the twisted behavior of a few bad American cops.

The media spent weeks publishing scores of horrific photos from Abu Ghraib. The story not only didn’t go away, the scope and depth of the scrutiny increased. The Economist called for Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s resignation. Editorials blasting the administration, the U.S. Army, and the effort in Iraq filled hundreds of newspapers from the Denver Post to France’s Le Monde.

This happened just as the American occupation of Iraq was about to enter a delicate new phase. Since the end of the initial invasion in the spring of 2003, Iraq had been governed by the Coalition Provisional Authority, a civilian agency headed by Paul Bremer, a career diplomat. This was a temporary arrangement, and Bremer planned to hand power back to an interim Iraqi government on June 30, 2004.

For the men and women patrolling the streets, Abu Ghraib stirred up massive anti-American sentiment. The ranks of the various insurgent groups swelled with indignant and hate-filled volunteers, some of whom came from all over the Muslim world to join the battle.

In the weeks that followed, the violence in Iraq intensified. In retaliation for Abu Ghraib, al-Qaida kidnapped, tortured, and beheaded American civilian contractor Nicholas Berg. His execution was videotaped by his murderers and posted on the Internet.

The Oregon snipers saw an uptick in attacks from their vantage points at the hotel and the MOI. While out on patrols with the scout platoon, they also detected a shift in the mood of the locals. Everyone in an American uniform was paying the price for what had happened at Abu Ghraib.

On June 4, 2004, the battalion lost two enlisted men and a promising platoon leader during a firefight on the edge of Sadr City. The Oregonians had rushed to the rescue of a New Jersey MP unit that had been hit by rockets, roadside bombs, and machine-gun fire. A secondary bomb detonated, killing five Americans altogether. The ambush was carried out by a cell of Mahdi Militiamen and was witnessed by several Iraqi reporters who were working for Western news agencies, including the Associated Press. Within minutes of the attack, film and photos of the dead and dying Americans were published on the Internet. Various news outlets picked them up and used them for months after. One of the reporters embedded with the enemy that day, Karim Kadim, later received an American Pulitzer Prize for photojournalism for his work during the uprising.

Aside from the firefight downtown, the snipers had yet to do anything they felt to be substantive. Maries and the rest of his section seethed at what was going on. A week after the June 4 attack, the scout platoon captured several members of the Mahdi Militia cell that carried out that operation, but the snipers were minimally involved in that coup. It seemed that everyone else in the battalion was contributing while they were sitting on their hands in the two observation points. Their frustration level grew daily.

On June 17, the snipers rotated assignments again. Kevin Maries and Keith Engle took the MOI observation point along with Darren Buchholz and one other team. Darren had lost his spotter a few weeks before and had not picked up a new one yet, so he had been working with Maries and Engle. This time, the snipers brought with them two “Fisters”—forward artillery observer — whom they hoped would help them take out the mortar and rocket teams operating out of eastern Baghdad. They would be up there for almost two weeks this time, and the snipers settled in as best they could. They shucked off their heavy body armor, left their helmets and BDU tops with the rest of their gear to stay as comfortable as possible, then took turns glassing the neighborhood. Each team had an M24, a semiautomatic Barrett .50 cal, several M4s, and Buchholz’s venerable scoped M14.

One night, while Buchholz was on watch, two gunshots rang out. They seemed to have come from the nearby Iraqi Police Academy. Buchholz began glassing it. A few moments passed. Suddenly, a door to one of the academy buildings flew open and a hunched-over Iraqi cop appeared. He dragged a limp body across a courtyard and into another building. A second cop pulling another limp figure followed not long afterward.

Buchholz called Maries and Engle. The snipers conferred. This smelled like an execution. Maries radioed the battalion operations center and reported the incident. The Volunteers were later told that prisoners at the academy had rioted, leading to a crackdown by the Iraqi Police that resulted in several injuries, but no deaths. The Oregon snipers didn’t buy it, but they hadn’t seen enough to prove the story was a cover for something more sinister. They couldn’t even be sure that the bodies dragged from the building were dead or just unconscious. Maries told his men to keep a close eye on the academy and watch for anything further that was suspicious.

A few days later, the Iraqi Police conducted a raid in Al Betawain, a Sunni Baghdad neighborhood that included a small population of African immigrants. They rounded up dozens of men, about half of whom were Sudanese. Some of them lacked passports and work papers. The police arrested them on the spot. Others displayed their documentation, which the Iraqi cops confiscated and demanded a bribe for their return. The police detained anyone who couldn’t pay the bribe. They also arrested a few who did shell out the money. The detainees, which included elderly men and young boys, were bound and blindfolded and packed into waiting buses.

That afternoon, Keith Engle was on watch. He had his own .50 caliber Barrett beside him, Maries’s M24 bolt-action rifle, their spotting scope, and a pair of M22 binoculars. Instead of using his scopes, he happened to have the binos in hand when a bus drove up alongside the Police Academy’s main wall and lurched to a halt. A bunch of police officers appeared, some of whom were armed with sticks and rubber hoses. They began pulling men off the bus and lining them up single file.

Keith observed this with great interest. He had heard nothing of the Al Betawain raid, and this was the first time any of the Oregon snipers had seen prisoners delivered to the academy.

The Iraqi police shoved and kicked their detainees until they were lined up to their satisfaction. Engle counted thirty of them. Toward the front of the line, two cops grabbed a prisoner, who tried to resist. Bad move. The cops dragged him out of the line and threw him into the dirt. Another Iraqi policeman rushed over to help. Together, the three began whipping the detainee with rubber hoses.

Engle’s jaw dropped. He’d seen police beatings before, but the sheer viciousness of this one left him spellbound in horror. He pulled his eyes from the binos and called to one of the forward observers, “Go get Sergeant Maries. He needs to see this.”

Maries, who had been on his sleep cycle, appeared next to Engle a few minutes later and asked, “What’ve you got, Keith?”

He pointed down to the bus. Maries got behind his spotter scope and watched the tail end of the beating. It had lasted five minutes. The detainee had been flayed from head to foot by the rubber hoses and was flopping around in the dirt, wracked with pain. At length, the police pulled him to his feet and pushed him back into the line.

After that, nobody else offered any resistance.

About a dozen police now patrolled the line of detainees. After a few minutes, the entire group was led into a walled compound next to the Iraqi Police Academy, where they disappeared into a rectangular-shaped building.

More buses arrived. Each one parked in the dead space between the compound and the academy. The drill was always the same: the police would herd the detainees off the bus, line them up, and lead them into the rectangular building. By the end of the day, Engle counted ninety-three detainees offloaded from three buses.

This compound, which had been virtually unused prior to this development, began to bustle with activity. More cops showed up until eighteen stood guard around the rectangular building. Others periodically went inside, retrieved a prisoner, then took him to a smaller building on the other side of the compound.

The next morning, Maries, Engle, and Buchholz watched as a group of cops congregated on a small concrete pad in front of the rectangular building. A wooden overhang shielded them from the summer sun as they stood around, talking animatedly to each other. Some of them held rubber hoses and aluminum bars that the snipers recognized as spreaders for U.S. Army — issue cots.

They smoked and joked for a while, then two cops tied handkerchiefs behind their necks, covered their mouth and noses with them, and approached the main entrance to the building, hefting a rubber hose and a bar. They flung the door open and plunged inside. Some of their brethren gravitated toward the windows, which the snipers could not see through.

Minutes passed. The two cops emerged, smiling and laughing. The others clustered around them as they began talking. Through their scopes, the Oregonians saw the two cops use their hoses and the cot spreader to pantomime beating somebody. They hammered at their invisible subject, then pretended to be their victims. They cringed and cowered. The other Iraqi cops burst out laughing. Two more of them put on handkerchiefs and went into the building. They came back with fresh tales to tell the others.

Maries reported this to the battalion operation center, but since the Volunteers had already become jaded about the behavior of the local police, the battalion took no action. To those who weren’t witness to the beating beside the bus, this seemed like normal Baghdad cop behavior — thuggish and wrong, but not the U.S. Army’s problem.

The refusal to do anything rankled Maries. He had seen enough of how the cops operated to know that what was going on in this little compound beside the academy represented a level of violence not seen on the street. Though he had no conclusive proof, it appeared that the police were systematically torturing their detainees.

And it continued throughout the day. Pairs of cops would enter the building with blunt weapons, emerge and be replaced by two more. Each time they came out, they would recount to the other officers waiting outside what just happened.

While the snipers kept watch over the compound, forces far above their pay grade clicked into motion. Paul Bremer disbanded the Coalition Provisional Authority two days ahead of schedule and turned over control to the interim Iraqi government. After a year of occupation, Iraq was once again a sovereign nation, which meant that the U.S. military had to defer to the new government in the course of its operations.

Bremer boarded a flight home on the morning of June 28, 2004, just as Keith Engle took a shift behind his Barrett. For the past few days, the activity in the compound had settled down to a grim routine. The eighteen guards on hand took turns going inside the building carrying blunt objects or hoses. They never took food or water inside, and the snipers hadn’t seen the prisoners since the first day they’d been brought in. As a result, they had no way to determine their condition, or whether they were actually being harmed.

The police broke the routine later that morning when two of them dragged a prisoner out of the building and dumped him in the middle of the compound’s courtyard. A gaggle of cops piled on him, hoses and spreader bars flailing. They kicked, punched, and beat him as he rolled in the dirt, hands tied behind his back and his eyes blindfolded. Finally, the police lifted him off the ground and flung him, headfirst, against the side of a white pickup truck. The detainee collapsed in a heap, knocked cold from the impact.

Maries joined Engle in time to watch the beating. Keith fumed with anger and wanted to start shooting cops to put an end to the mistreatment. Kevin Maries calmed him down, “Look, we’re going to sit tight, observe, and report.” Besides smoke-checking guys who need it, this is the primary mission snipers have. Engle, who had not yet been with the section for a full year — and had not gone to sniper school yet either — forced himself to be more patient. He stowed his emotions, though inside he still seethed. Later he recalled, “I was indignant. It was like watching your neighbor abuse his dog and being unable to do anything about it.” He felt sick.

As the cops hauled the unconscious man back inside the building, Maries reported the incident over the radio to the battalion operations center. This time, the level of violence the snipers witnessed, combined with the other reports, alarmed Lieutenant Colonel Hendrickson. Had the incident happened the day before, he would have gone to investigate. But that morning, Bremer was somewhere in the air en route home and that left the Iraqis in charge. Hendrickson no longer had the authority to burst into an Iraqi Police facility and demand to know what was going on. It was their sovereign business now, no matter how ugly.

The next morning, June 29, 2004, Maries was on watch behind the scope when a group of guards gathered at the concrete pad. All at once, they poured into the rectangular building, armed with 2x4 wooden boards, more hoses, and cot spreaders. A few cops remained outside and took station at the window to watch whatever was going on inside. About a half hour passed with no further activity, then a group of Iraqi civilians approached the compound from a driveway that led to the Ministry of Interior’s main entrance. The snipers concluded that these new arrivals had come from the very building they were observing from.

The guards rushed to open a gate, and the civilians walked into the compound with an air of authority. Leading the group was a paunchy and balding middle-aged Iraqi who sported a Saddam Hussein mustache and spectacles. He wore a pale yellow button-down shirt, green slacks, and carried a holstered pistol on his right hip. He held a sheaf of papers in one hand.

Maries called the rest of his team. Buchholz and Engle showed up and got behind their scopes. Maries had the M24. Buchholz and Engle manned the Barretts. All three fixed their eyes to their optics, dreading what they might see next.

Right away, they noticed how the Iraqi cops deferred to the man in the yellow shirt. Some took it to the extreme and acted obsequious. Upon Yellow Shirt’s command, several of the uniformed officers scurried off to the rectangular building to fetch a table and some chairs. They carried them outside and placed them in the shade of a tree in the courtyard. Another cop placed a ream of blank paper on the right side of the desk. The man in the yellow shirt passed his paperwork to a minion, who sorted it and created two haphazard stacks on the desk. Somebody else put a black ballpoint pen beside one stack.

Maries, Engle, and Buchholz realized something very bad was brewing. They grabbed their digital cameras so they could document whatever would go down next. By now, there was a mix of uniformed cops and men dressed in civilian clothes hanging around Yellow Shirt. Who the plainclothed guys were kept the snipers guessing, but the uniforms seemed almost afraid of them.

Yellow Shirt gave another order. The uniforms armed themselves and went into the rectangular building. A few minutes later, they whipped, beat, and pushed about thirty prisoners out into the courtyard. Maries noted the detainees seemed weak and unsteady on their feet. They stumbled across the courtyard until the police shoved them to the ground near a Toyota pickup truck. Without shade, the mid-morning sun beat down on them. Already the temperature was over a hundred degrees. This new development had cowed the prisoners, who crossed their legs and kept their heads bowed. Some trembled with fear.

The cops went back in and pulled another twenty more men out. Arrayed in four loose rows, some of the detainees couldn’t even stay upright. They slumped to the dirt, bound and blindfolded.

The man in the yellow shirt stood by the desk and waited. A few other Iraqi Police, dressed in dark gray slacks and sky blue uniform shirts, hovered nearby. Several other men, all in civilian clothes, wandered around near the table, talking amongst themselves.

Then some cops strutted over to the rows of detainees, selected one man seemingly at random, and dragged him over to the table, where the man in the yellow shirt tried to get him to sign some kind of document. To Maries, it looked like they were trying to coerce him into signing a confession.

The man refused. An Iraqi policeman and a civilian Iraqi, both holding rubber hoses, threw him to the ground. He landed on his bound hands and lay on his back, still blindfolded. A cop carrying an AK-47 in his right hand stood nearby, watching casually with his left hand stuffed in a pants pocket.

An order was given. The two men wielding hoses slammed their weapons down on the prisoner. They tore his shirt open so the rubber would do more damage to his skin. Another Iraqi police officer appeared with a cot spreader. He began to beat his legs. The man in the yellow shirt peered down at the prisoner, then stepped forward until he was by his side. He spoke to him, but apparently did not get the answer he wanted. The beating continued. Another hose-carrying policeman stepped up to take his turn. Looking down at the prisoner, he rolled his sleeves above his elbows and laid into the man, who was still lying on back. Moments later, yet another policeman boot-stomped the prisoner’s head. The man in the yellow shirt reached for his pistol. His fingers touched its butt, but he didn’t draw it from the holster. The police continued the beating.

Engle had seen enough. Behind his Barrett, he begged Maries to let him engage. Buchholz was at the same point. All three snipers had their crosshairs trained on Yellow Shirt and two of the most violent police officers. One word, and their fingers would have slipped into their trigger guards, and three men would die.

The man in the yellow shirt did nothing for a few moments, choosing to regard the action while still next to the writhing man. Then he thrust his hands out, as if to halt it. He began making hand gestures that appeared to indicate he was coaching them on their technique. The cops paid close attention to the lesson. Meanwhile, another detainee, this one in dark pants and a dark shirt, was culled from the ranks and taken over to the table. They forced him to sit and listen, blindfolded, as the police continued working over the first man.

It dawned on Buchholz right then what was going on. He said later, “We were watching a torture-training exercise. With live victims.”

Engle could barely contain his rage. He had Yellow Shirt in his scope. Three hundred yards, an easy shot. “Do you want me to take him out?” he asked Maries.

“No.”

“Come on, Kevin.”

“No.”

The beating finally ended, and the police pulled the prisoner over to the desk. The man in the yellow shirt stood next to him, as did several police officers and a civilian-dressed Iraqi. Not long after, he was pushed back to the main group of detainees.

Then it was the dark-clothed prisoner’s turn.

This went on for about half an hour. Maries radioed reports to the battalion operations center, giving a running commentary at times of the beatings.

A few prisoners signed the paperwork, and they were not beaten. Most did not, and the police unleashed an escalating level of violence. They struck one detainee in the head repeatedly with a spreader bar. Engle captured one of the blows with his camera. The cop was in mid-swing and the bar glowed silver with the reflection of the morning sun.

The police seemed to grow frustrated. When the next prisoner was dragged to the table, the beating commenced before Maries even saw the man’s mouth move. He never had a chance to sign the confession. The police simply lit into him. The man in the yellow shirt reached for his pistol again as two cops knocked the detainee down and slid a spreader bar under his legs in order to raise his feet off the ground. A third police officer began whipping the soles of the man’s feet with a black hose.

That was enough for Maries. Though outwardly calm, he’d watched the situation grow ever more violent with growing disgust and moral outrage. The battalion staff had taken his reports, but had offered no guidance or response. Now, as the man in the yellow shirt played his fingers across the butt of his pistol again, Maries decided it was time to end this.

He keyed his radio, “Okay, you’ve been taking my reports all morning. Nothing’s been done. If they continue to escalate, I’m going to shoot somebody.”

The NCO on the horn at the ops center replied, “That is not within the Rules of Engagement.”

Maries bristled at that. “I know what the ROEs are,” he barked, “and if they escalate, I will engage with deadly force.”

Lieutenant Colonel Dan Hendrickson, who was at one of the downtown hotels, heard this. He cut into the conversation, “Negative. You will not engage. I’m on my way.”

It was a direct order from his commanding officer. Maries seethed, but acknowledged it.

Maries checked the time. It was about 1130. The beatings had been going on since 0900. He knew it would take Hendrickson up to an hour to get to the compound from the hotels. In the meantime, all he could do was watch and wait.

Right about then, the police officers returned to the cluster of detainees. They reached down and yanked a teenaged boy to his feet. Blindfolded and bound like the rest of the prisoners, the boy quailed in his captor’s grip. He looked perhaps fourteen years old.

Eye in his scope, Maries saw this and recoiled. He was a father of two young children, and the thought of what lay in store for the boy made his stomach churn. For just a moment, he lost his legendary composure.

“Oh Jesus Christ … what are they going to do to that kid?”

The cops led the teenager over to the table, where the man in the yellow shirt was waiting.

Maries fingered his trigger and whispered, “Not the kid. Not the kid.”

Things were about to get really ugly.

CHAPTER TWENTY Where Shades of Gray Are Found

Every sniper has faced a moral choice while looking through his scope. When your career involves watching people who don’t know they are being watched, you’re bound to see sordid and questionable things. You’ll see the worst of human nature; you may see the best as well. Life behind the scope is not one of moral black and whites, not when so much of the world exists in shades of gray. In those moments, our spiritual constitution is tested. In our profession, we have to make choices, we have to take that leap into the chaos of moral ambiguity. When we do, some of us never recover from the hardest decisions we’ve had to make.

Head down and stooped like an old man, the boy looked like he had already been worked over and now sensed he was in for more. His narrow, lime green blindfold was wrapped tight against his face, and the Iraqi police had tied his wrists with yellow cord. The cops parked him in front of the table and untied his hands. The boy’s shoulders sagged; his arms fell to his side. One of the uniforms pointed to the paperwork as he said something to the boy, which seemed a pointless gesture since the boy obviously could not see anything.

The boy shook his head.

The Iraqi cop pointed to the paperwork again. The boy shook his head one more time. The police were not pleased.

Eye glued to his scope, Maries watched this with a sick sense of helplessness. He had been ordered not to engage and kill our erstwhile allies. The consequences of an American sniper killing a uniformed Iraqi police officer could have severely damaged the United States’ relationship with the freshly established interim Iraqi government. Unlike the street fight several weeks before, these cops had not made any overt hostile act against U.S. troops. There would be hell to pay if they started dropping these guys. It would mean inquiries, maybe even a court-martial and jail time. At the very least, their careers would be over.

Kevin understood all of that. But how could he allow these thugs to beat a boy with an aluminum bar? He began to run through his options. There weren’t any.

Then, to his surprise, the cops gave him an out. They gave up on the boy without inflicting any punishment on him. They tied his hands again and returned him to the main group of prisoners. The police pushed him down next to an older man whose left hand hung at an odd angle. Maries studied the two and concluded the older man was the boy’s father. The father’s wrist looked broken.

Right then, a green Humvee rumbled through the compound’s main entrance. Maries and Keith Engle breathed a sigh of relief as they watched the rest of their scout platoon reach the scene. Lieutenant Colonel Dan Hendrickson dismounted from the lead truck, his face set with an expression of pure anger as he sized up the situation.

Dan Hendrickson did not see the world in shades of gray. He’d spent his life as a protector and warrior — first as a regular army officer, then later as a lieutenant in the Corvallis, Oregon, Police Department. Now he served as the battalion commander for 2–162. To him, laws were in place for a reason; he adhered to them and upheld them with everything he did as a cop and a Guardsman. He expected his men to do the same. Before leaving for Iraq, he’d repeatedly told his staff to “do the right thing.” He was determined to get the battalion through their Iraq deployment by seizing and holding the moral high ground. He had to be the example for the other seven hundred American citizen-soldiers he’d taken into Baghdad with him.

Hendrickson stood next to his Humvee regarding the prisoners. Bound, bloody, and bruised, they languished in the sun. Some appeared to be unconscious. The Iraqi Police, some of whom were holding AK-47s and other weapons, congregated under the overhang at the front of the rectangular building. Engle and Maries saw anger and surprise on their faces.

Flanked by members of his staff, Hendrickson strode up to the Iraqis and demanded, “Who’s in charge here?”

One of the Iraqi police officers countered, “What’s the matter? Why are you here?”

To their left, some of the prisoners were moaning. A few screamed in agony. Through the battalion interpreter, Hendrickson repeatedly asked who was in charge. The Iraqis evaded the question. An argument broke out. The uniformed Iraqi Police grew still and docile. The civilian-clothed ones became belligerent.

Maries and Engle watched this unfold from their scopes. The man in the yellow shirt remained at a distance. Then a small group of scouts, led by the platoon leader, Lieutenant Ross Boyce, moved around to the back of the rectangular building. The snipers kept a close eye on the police just in case the tension broke into outright violence.

At the back of the building, Lieutenant Boyce and his men discovered a bamboo enclosure. Upon entering, the Americans found bloodstains on the building’s rear wall. Then the stench hit them: the pungent, heavy reek of rotting corpses. The air was thick with it, and the men would smell it in their uniforms for days after.

There was a door in the rear wall. Sergeant Tyson Bumgardner, a keenly intelligent NCO of about twenty-two, moved to it and made ready to gain entrance. “Bum,” as he was known within the platoon, had joined the Guard at age seventeen while still attending Churchill High School in Eugene, Oregon. Now, half a world away from the sleepy college town he called home, he opened the door to a charnel house beyond his worst nightmares.

From his sniper hide three hundred yards away, Maries saw them disappear inside and swung his scope over to his battalion commander. Lieutenant Colonel Hendrickson remained locked in an argument with the civilian-attired Iraqis. They continued to stonewall, and his pissed-off meter was clearly about to be pegged. Hendrickson was known around the battalion as a blunt, no-nonsense officer who did not tolerate red tape or bullshit. The Iraqis were throwing shovelfuls of the latter at him.

Finally, the man in the yellow shirt stepped forward and announced he was a major with the Iraqi Police. Hendrickson directed his attention on him and demanded to know what was going on. The Iraqi major ignored his question and wanted to know why Hendrickson had burst into his compound. The situation escalated further, and both leaders were soon shouting at each other through the battalion interpreter.

Just inside the back door, Bumgardner and Boyce stopped in their tracks as the acidic reek of urine assailed their nostrils. Beneath it lingered another odor, one of corruption and filth. Recalled Boyce, “It smelled like a Third World morgue.”

The men were in a narrow hallway with two doors set in intervals on the left wall. Bumgardner stepped to the first one and flung it open. Three surprised Iraqi police officers swiveled their heads to him and froze. The Oregon sergeant had caught them in the middle of torturing a bound and blindfolded prisoner.

Blind fury spurred Bumgardner into the room. He pushed the prisoner out of the way as the Iraqis began yelling in broken English, “No! No! No! This is not what you think! Is okay!”

Bumgardner grabbed the nearest police officer by the neck and pushed him into a wall. Tyson, who stood well over six feet and was built like an NFL tight end, dwarfed the cop. He pinned him in place and held the cop’s neck in a vise grip.

“What the hell are you doing?” he shouted at the terrified policeman.

“Hey Tyson, why don’t you come on out now?” said a calm voice from the doorway. Bumgardner tore his eyes from the cops’ and saw Master Sergeant Jeff McDowell, his old platoon sergeant, waving for him to step back into the hallway.

That broke the spell. He released his hold on the man and went into the hallway to compose himself. Meanwhile, Boyce and McDowell cut the prisoner loose and gave him some water.

Captain Jarrell Southall, a middle school history teacher in his civilian life, stood beside Tyson and trembled with rage. He was the battalion’s personnel officer, but he also spoke Arabic and was a practicing Sunni Muslim. For those reasons, Hendrickson had brought him along. Southall had his nine millimeter pistol unholstered and held low.

McDowell and Boyce finished tending to the prisoner — to the utter bafflement of the Iraqi cops, then walked back into the hallway. The Oregon Guardsmen exchanged glances and wondered what lay behind door number two.

In the courtyard, the scout platoon’s medic and combat lifesavers went to work assessing the prisoners. Kyle Trimble was one of the latter. He’d gone to high school with Tyson Bumgardner and had made the decision to join the Guard together with him. Tyson had become a squad leader in the scouts while Kyle had been waiting to go to sniper school when the deployment came up.

The wounds the prisoners had sustained affected Trimble deeply. The men showed signs of being burned. Their faces, backs, and arms were covered with lacerations and purple-red bruises. One had a suppurating gunshot wound to the knee. The bullet’s entry wound was a ragged, infected hole ringed with blue-black rotting flesh.

As the Oregonians began triaging the prisoners, Trimble noticed several of the Iraqi policemen staring at him. They seemed puzzled. He got the sense that the Iraqis did not know they were doing anything wrong, as if flaying flesh off captives with rubber hoses was just a normal day at work.

Recalled Trimble, “The vibe they were giving us was very, very strange.”

Under the unsettling gaze of the Iraqi cops, Trimble opened his combat lifesaver bag and busied himself with tending to some of the lesser injured men. Mike Giordano, the platoon’s medic, focused his efforts on the most severely affected, some of whom lapsed into unconsciousness as the Americans moved them into the shade.

Back inside the building, Lieutenant Boyce nodded to Bumgardner and told him to open door number two. The young sergeant turned the knob and pushed through it into a room about the size of half a basketball court.

It was jam-packed with moaning, suffering men. Some lay semiconscious in their own urine and feces, bleeding from open wounds. Some seemed delirious. Others had fallen into stupors. The prisoners who still had the strength sat cross-legged, chins draped on their chests. The smell was so overpowering that Bumgardner nearly vomited.

To Jarrell Southall, the room looked like photos he’d seen of Dachau and Buchenwald — the Nazi concentration camps the U.S. Army liberated at the end of World War II. The room felt like a furnace. Without open windows or air-conditioning, it was easily over a hundred degrees inside. There was no water in sight. Even if there was water available, the prisoners would not have been able to drink. Every one of them had their hands tied behind their back with the same yellow rope Maries had seen on the teenaged boy.

The Iraqi Police had been nothing if not thorough.

Southall tried to talk to a couple of the prisoners, telling them in Arabic that he was a Sunni Muslim. At first, nobody responded to him. Then Southall recited the Shahada, the Muslim profession of Faith.

“I bear witness that there is no deity (none truly to be worshipped) but Allah, and I bear witness that Muhammad is the messenger of Allah.”

That broke the silence. Several of the Sudanese captives began to tell their story. Southall listened as they recounted their sudden arrest, how their passports and work visas had been confiscated by the police. A few told him that even after they paid bribes for the return of the documentation, they were detained anyway. Others didn’t have the money for a bribe. They were among the first arrested.

Southall reported all this to Lieutenant Boyce, who had seen enough. He went back outside and found Lieutenant Colonel Hendrickson in mid-argument with the man in the yellow shirt.

“Sir,” Boyce interrupted, “I think you need to come see this.”

Hendrickson followed his young lieutenant into the building and saw for himself the condition of the other detainees. Captain Southall, Bumgardner, and Master Sergeant McDowell reported to their commander that they had found torture implements and photographs taken while the police officers tortured the fourteen-year-old boy Maries and Engle had seen dragged to the table.

Southall had learned that the cops had been pouring some sort of chemical agent into the eyes of their prisoners during these torture sessions. Others told him they had been burned, or had been electrocuted with a lamp whose bulb had been broken. The scouts searched the area and found the chemicals and the lamp, as well as more hoses, sticks, and aluminum bars.

Already furious at being stonewalled by the Iraqi police, the sights and smells roused him to immediate action. He ordered Sergeant Major Brunk Conley to get all the prisoners outside so they could be assessed and treated. As Conley set to that task, Hendrickson stormed back outside and told his men to disarm the Iraqi cops.

The move stunned the police. They gave up their weapons grudgingly, but made no move to resist. Soon, a stack of AK-47s rose in the courtyard. The torture implements were laid out nearby. Some of the scouts began taking photos to document this evidence.

From their observation point, Maries and Engle watched all this unfold with a sense of tremendous satisfaction. Engle saw Lieutenant Colonel Hendrickson spin one police officer around and pin his hands behind his head. Hendrickson had been a cop himself for too long not to take part in the disarming and detention of these thugs.

When Conley began getting the rest of the prisoners outside, Engle spotted the man who’d been knocked unconscious when he had been slammed into a car a few days before. He got on the radio and told Lieutenant Boyce what had happened to the man so Giordano could check him for head trauma. Within minutes, the platoon’s medic had put him on a stretcher with a neck brace and began giving him intravenous fluids.

As the other scouts rounded up the Iraqi Police and put them in one spot so they could be watched, Hendrickson turned his attention back to the Iraqi major. The major flatly told Hendrickson, “We have done nothing wrong here.”

Behind them, the scouts carried a writhing, screaming man out of the building and set him under the overhang. Kyle Trimble and Doc Giordano rushed to his side.

“How can you say that?” Hendrickson demanded.

“These are hardened criminals!” the major declared.

Hendrickson thought of the fourteen-year-old boy and guffawed. The major demanded that his men receive their weapons back. The Oregon commander refused. The shouting match continued for a few more minutes until, seeing nothing was going to be accomplished, Hendrickson turned and walked away. He radioed the battalion operations center and talked directly to his executive officer, Major Edward Tanguy. Tanguy reported the situation to 2–162’s higher headquarters, the Arkansas National Guard’s 39th Enhanced Brigade. He reported the situation and the conditions at the compound to the brigade executive officer, who told Tanguy to stand by while he talked with the 39th’s commander, Brigadier General Ronald Chastain.

While Tanguy and Hendrickson waited for guidance from General Chastain, the scouts continued to work on the prisoners. The Americans went from man to man, removing their blindfolds and cutting the yellow cords that bound their arms so painfully. Kyle Trimble and Giordano focused on the writhing man who had been carried out of the building a few minutes before. His filthy blindfold had been tied so tightly to his face, and had remained on for so long, that it had damaged his eyes. Trimble had to cut it off, then peel it from his face. The man’s eyes were shrunken back, a sure sign of extreme dehydration. He wailed in agony as the two Americans spoke gently to him and tried to start an IV.

Trimble attempted it first, but he couldn’t get the tiny flash of blood in the cotton stuffed in the backside of the needle that indicated he had found a vein. He tried again. The man began to sob. Unable to open his eyes, his hands scrabbled weakly in search of whoever was assisting him. His fingers found Trimble’s boot, and he grabbed hold for a moment.

“Thank you, thank you,” he said in English through broken teeth.

The man was wearing a sweat suit soaked with perspiration. Trimble knew he had to get fluids into the man or he would most likely die. Fluids would only be a start — he needed hospitalization fast.

He punctured the man’s skin again with the needle, gently moving the tip into what he thought was a vein. This time, he saw a tiny dot of blood bloom on the cotton. Then the vein collapsed. He started over. Same result.

Giordi tried next. As he worked to get the IV started, Trimble cut the man’s sweatpants off him and began pouring bottles of water over his legs to cool him off.

“Thankyouthankyouthankyou,” the man cried to his unseen saviors.

Trimble cut his sweatshirt open to get more cool water on his body. His chest and stomach were a latticework of bruises, gashes, and lacerations.

“Kyle, he’s too dehydrated to get a needle in him,” Giordi said. Kyle nodded, knowing that the only solution was to go in rectally.

“I got this, keep working,” the medic told him.

Kyle stood up and went to find another patient. As he moved through the rows of prisoners, the Sudanese called out, thanking him over and over. The Iraqi detainees were quiet, sullen, and looked tense.

Against the wall of the rectangular building, Trimble noticed an Iraqi prisoner with a brown-black bandage wrapped around one arm. He went to his side and the stench of rotted flesh hit him before he could even kneel down. The man regarded him with utter hate in his eyes. Trimble later said, “He gave me the look of death.”

Trimble helped him to his feet. The man offered no resistance. After moving him away from the main group of prisoners, the Oregonian eased him to the ground and unwrapped his bandage.

A suppurating, prurient wound ran along the length of his arm. He’d been gashed by some sort of ragged weapon, and without antibiotics or immediate medical care, it had become infected. The infection had turned gangrenous. It seemed almost pointless to treat it. Kyle knew it would almost surely have to be amputated at this point to save the man’s life.

He began to clean it anyway. Carefully, he covered the wound in iodine to disinfect it, then he poured antibiotic ointment on it. The stench appalled him, but Trimble forced himself to make no sign of the revulsion he felt. As he started to wrap the wound with fresh gauze, he chanced a look in the prisoner’s eyes. They were softer now, the hate replaced by gratitude.

Lieutenant Boyce was standing near Lieutenant Colonel Hendrickson when Ed Tanguy came back over the radio.

“Sir, the Thirty-Ninth Brigade says to stand down.”

Dan Hendrickson was a man of supreme self-possession who concealed a deeply caring and emotional nature with a gruff and stoic demeanor. The scenes around the compound had already caused his indignation to crack that wall. Now Ed’s words left him dumbfounded, unable to hide their effect.

Ross Boyce stiffened. He thought he hadn’t heard the order right. “What? What?!” he sputtered.

In the MOI, Kevin Maries had tuned a radio to the battalion frequency. He, Keith Engle, and Darren Buchholz heard the order and stared at each other in complete astonishment.

“What are they talking about?” Engle managed. “We’re doing the right thing here.”

Maries, ever the picture of calm, could only utter a curse. Buchholz, who had been watching his friend Kyle Trimble treat the prisoners, felt a swell of pure outrage. To him, the entire operation looked like a “torture training” exercise. How could this be acceptable in anyone’s rulebook?

Especially coming less than two months after Abu Ghraib.

The order left the snipers in momentary disarray while Hendrickson stood next to his Humvee and battled to regain his composure. At length, he keyed his radio and told his exec, “You need to tell the Thirty-Ninth Brigade this is not something we can walk away from.”

“Roger.”

Ed called the 39th Brigade and relayed the message. In the meantime, the rest of the scouts learned of the order. Once they recovered from their shock, they worked even faster. Hendrickson had given them a few extra precious minutes to do what they could for the worst affected prisoners.

The seconds ticked off too fast. Tanguy’s voice came over the radio, “The order stands.”

Hendrickson was not having it. “We cannot turn this over to the Iraqi Police.”

The Oregonians had no legal authority to be there. Thanks to the early changeover of power, they were infringing on the activities of a sovereign nation’s police force. Had this all happened three days before, the scouts could have arrested the entire Iraqi Police detachment and released the prisoners themselves. Not now.

No legal authority, perhaps. But the moral authority was clear to every American in the compound. Kyle Trimble recalled, “No matter who these prisoners were, you have to provide medical aid to those in need. That is common humanity.”

Nobody was under any illusions here. If Hendrickson pulled out, the police would win. It would vindicate their sense that they had done nothing wrong. The beatings and torture would continue. Several of the prisoners were already urgent medical evacuation casualties. If the Americans left, these men faced agonizing deaths.

“Volunteer Six,” Tanguy called to Hendrickson, “The Thirty-Ninth Brigade says you need to leave. Now. There is no discussion here.”

The cop from Corvallis refused to give up, “Have you talked to First Cav?” The 1st Cavalry Division was the 39th Brigade’s higher command. Hendrickson was trying to go above Brigadier General Chastain’s head, a very risky move.

Major Tanguy had heard enough from the 39th Brigade to sense that the Volunteers were skating on thin ice. If Hendrickson pushed this, Tanguy feared he would be relieved on the spot.

“Six, Thirty-Ninth Brigade says you need to leave now,” Tanguy reiterated.

Hendrickson frowned in abject disgust and looked at Boyce. Options?

An idea came to Boyce, “Sir, Brigadier General Jones’s office is in the MOI main building. We can walk over there and we can grab somebody from his office to come see this. Or, if he’s there, we can get him to come see this for himself.” Jones was the 1st Cav’s assistant division commander.

“Okay, let’s do it.”

Boyce, Hendrickson, and a couple of the scouts began walking toward the compound’s main gate. They had three hundred yards to cover. They walked in silence.

They had only taken a few steps when Major Tanguy radioed, “Six, we need confirmation that you are leaving.”

Hendrickson tried to buy time, “I’m having trouble hearing you.”

Tanguy wasn’t buying it. The 39th Brigade was breathing down his neck. It felt to him like they were not going to wait much longer to fire his battalion commander. He needed to impart the sense of urgency he was feeling.

“Six, we need confirmation you are leaving,” he repeated.

“You’re breaking up,” Hendrickson said again.

Ross Boyce could hear the tension rising over the radio. The escalation made him fear his commander was about to be relieved, too.

Hendrickson stopped walking. He’d grown up the son of a U.S. Air Force F-86 Sabre Jet pilot who had fought in the Korean War. He’d played football in high school and at Cabrillo Junior College in Santa Cruz, California. His life had been founded and built around discipline, attention to detail, and following orders. He had never disobeyed a direct order.

He wanted to disobey this one. Badly. If he did, and he was fired, Major Tanguy would take over the battalion and the Volunteers would be withdrawn anyway. What purpose would it serve to push the 39th into firing him?

He turned to Ross Boyce and spoke over the radio, “Okay, 2–162, we’re leaving. Now.”

Sheer disgust greeted the order among the scouts. Captain Southall initially refused to leave. So did some of the scouts. Kyle Trimble tried to get the prisoners in need of urgent medical care evacuated with the platoon, but that request was denied. “At least let us finish what we’re doing here,” he pleaded.

No luck. Trimble was able to finish wrapping the gangrenous arm in a new bandage, grab his combat lifesaver gag, and get to the Humvees as the rest of the platoon mounted up. Mike Giordano was forced to stop working on the desperately dehydrated man and join the rest of the platoon as well.

The Iraqi Police looked triumphant. Several started for their AKs and torture implements. Fearing reprisal and a possible shoot-out, the scouts lowered their weapons and warned the Iraqi cops away from their guns.

When the last Humvee passed through the main entrance, the Iraqi cops knew they were in the clear. Captain Southall watched them pick up their weapons and head for the prisoners. With hope of salvation gone, the Oregon snipers saw terror bloom in the eyes of these helpless men.

Maries pulled his eye from his spotter scope and spoke to his snipers. Back in Oregon, he had handpicked each one of them. He was their leader, their mentor. Most had learned more about the sniper’s craft from Maries than they had at the schoolhouse in Little Rock.

What had just happened left them reeling. The high ground was gone, stolen from them by their own chain of command. The ugly, real world grayness had swallowed them whole.

Yet, this thing wasn’t over. The snipers were Hendrickson’s trump, and Maries knew it. The 39th Brigade hadn’t said anything about pulling out of the MOI position. For now, he and his men weren’t going anywhere.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE The Lifesavers

All afternoon, the snipers studied every move the Iraqi cops made. A small American military police unit showed up. They talked with their Iraqi counterparts for a short time, then left. As soon as the last American cleared the compound, the cops went right back to beating and torturing the detainees.

Keith Engle seethed at the sight. He wanted to engage. So did Darren Buchholz, who lay beside Maries with his Barrett .50 cal. Maries controlled his own helpless rage by going stone cold. They documented everything and continued to report each development to the battalion operations center.

The American MP unit returned that afternoon. With their return, the beatings ceased. Not long after, a motorcade of black armored SUVs rolled into the compound and parked near the overhang. They were armored and had smoke-black tinted windows. Maries, Engle, and Buchholz all began taking photographs as men dismounted. Engle snapped his photos through a pair of binoculars. Maries worked with his spotting scope. So did Buchholz.

The Oregon snipers recoiled when they saw who they’d just caught on camera. The men who dismounted were all Caucasian Westerners. They had black bulletproof vests and carried folding stock variants of the AK-47. All of them were dressed in civilian clothes. They moved swiftly and with professional acumen to set up security around their rigs. A moment later, another white male, this one dressed in a slate gray business suit, appeared from one of the SUVs.

“Who the hell is that fucking guy?” Engle asked in shock.

He had medium-length gray hair that almost looked like a pompadour from three hundred yards away. He walked with a stiffness that seemed to Maries to indicate he was not an American.

Maries studied these new arrivals as they headed to meet with Yellow Shirt. The guys with the AK-47s were clearly the gray-haired man’s personal security detail. Since reaching Baghdad in April, the snipers had seen all sorts of contract security types, especially down at the hotels. All of the American companies issued their people M4 rifles and .45 caliber pistols. The only mercenaries he’d encountered carrying Soviet bloc weaponry worked for a British company called Parson Limited.

Because of this and the more formal way he walked, Maries began to think of Gray Hair as a Brit.

Whoever he was, the Iraqis treated him with deference. He met them at the overhang in front of the rectangular building. The cops clustered around him. In the far back of the circle stood a tall Caucasian-looking male in a black shirt. Nobody had any idea who he was.

The MP’s moved to the gray-haired man’s right and listened to him as he addressed the Iraqi Police. Heads nodded. A few of the Iraqis spoke. The meeting lasted a half hour, then the gray-haired man walked out of the compound and headed for the Ministry of Interior’s main building. Maries leapt to his feet and told his men to stay put and keep their eyes on the compound. He set off to find the gray-haired man.

He dashed downstairs as quickly as he could, but by the time he got to the lobby, the man was nowhere in sight. He searched several floors and then gave up.

Maries returned to the hide site just in time to see a gaggle of civilian Iraqi officials show up at the compound. The man in the yellow shirt talked with them for several minutes, then turned and gave some orders to his minions. A few minutes later, the cops began lining all the detainees up in the courtyard again. The snipers counted ninety-three altogether.

The Iraqi cops brought the prisoners cigarettes, food, and water. Those who could ate. Others were too far gone to do so. They smoked in silence as the snipers covertly examined them through their scopes. Thirty-five of the ninety-three were Sudanese. They also noticed a Caucasian detainee in the mix.

The Iraqi officials left just before 1800. The MPs were long gone by that point, and the snipers figured their departure would herald a new round of beatings.

Not this time. The cops appeared to be in enforced merciful mode after the arrival of so much brass. Soon, they let the prisoners bathe in the courtyard. Just before sunset, they selected a dozen men, escorted them to the main gate and let them go. The prisoners hobbled out into the street in front of the Ministry of Interior and disappeared into Baghdad traffic.

The next day, the police released another batch of prisoners. With great satisfaction, the snipers saw the fourteen-year-old boy and his broken-wristed father in the mix. They were lucky to escape. Eventually, Maries and his men saw the police release about sixty of their prisoners. What happened to the last thirty-three remains a mystery.

While the snipers kept watch over the torture compound, Lieutenant Colonel Hendrickson tried to find out who gave the order to withdraw from the compound. He could not get a straight answer. Instead, the 39th Brigade ordered the Volunteers to remain silent about the incident. It was not to be discussed anywhere.

Kept in the dark and told to stay quiet about what they had seen did not sit well with the Oregonians. There’d already been friction between the Arkansans and the Volunteers, and this caused even more. Here, in the wake of Abu Ghraib, was a story of a group of citizen-soldiers who had done the right thing. They had displayed compassion, humanity, and mercy at a time when the world’s media was flaying the United States for the abuses caught on camera at Abu Ghraib.

After 2–162 pulled out, the torture at the compound was eventually stopped. Between the arrival of the MPs, Gray Hair, and the Iraqi officials, two-thirds of the prisoners survived their treatment. Had Maries’s sniper section not escalated the situation and forced Hendrickson to go check it out, many of those ninety-three men surely would have vanished. This would have been the perfect counter to Abu Ghraib had the chain of command seized the public relations opportunity and released the news through U.S. Army channels. The gag order ensured that wouldn’t happen.

Throughout history, America’s citizen-soldiers have proved to be independent souls and often resistant to Army regulations and discipline. In this case, the moral outrage the Volunteers felt trumped the 39th Brigade’s gag order. They wanted answers, and they wanted the story of what had happened to those prisoners known.

Several of the Volunteers, including Lieutenant Colonel Hendrickson, detailed the events of June 29, 2004, to Oregonian reporter Mike Francis. Mike embedded with the Volunteers several times during the deployment and proved to be a stalwart friend of the Oregon soldiers. They trusted him. The photographs the snipers shot found their way into his hands, and he gathered numerous eyewitness accounts through the summer of 2004.

The men believed they were violating an unjust order, but were also well aware that by doing so, they put their own careers at risk. That didn’t matter. Hendrickson’s mantra — do the right thing — had permeated down to the youngest privates. The hard right is never easy, but they were prepared to suffer the consequences. To them, the country needed to know what had happened.

The story broke with a front-page feature in the Oregonian. Media outlets all over the world picked up on it. Instead of focusing on the selfless actions of the Volunteers, the majority of the ink spilled over the incident lambasted the order to withdraw from the compound. Numerous attempts were made to find out exactly who that order came from. While there was suspicion that it came from above division level, nothing was ever confirmed.

After Francis ran his story, an Air Force major general held a press conference in the Pentagon, where he announced that none of the Oregonians would be punished for violating the gag order. The truth was, any JAG officer would have known that it was an illegal order in the first place. Hendrickson and his men had every right to disobey it.

During the research for the story, Mike Francis discovered that the interim Iraqi government felt enough outrage over the Volunteers’ arrival in the compound that one of its first official acts was to lodge a protest with the U.S. ambassador. The diplomats were walking on eggshells in hopes of building a solid relationship with the new Iraqi government. Instead, the incident had created sharp tension between the new Iraqi government and the U.S. authorities, which was probably one of the reasons the gag order was issued. Nobody wanted to make a bad situation worse.

On July 4, 2004, the Boston Globe ran a story about the incident based on an interview with a Coalition Provisional Authority official named Steve Casteel. Until June 28, Casteel had been in charge of the Ministry of Interior. When the changeover took place, he became a senior American adviser to the MOI and was primarily responsible for building and structuring Iraq’s law enforcement capabilities. He helped organize a number of Iraqi police units, including the special commando battalions that were later accused by international organizations of many heinous crimes.

In the article, Casteel described the incident on the twenty-ninth as a turf war between some American MPs and the Iraqis at the MOI, a battle that went all the way to the prime minister’s office. His version of events categorically denied the Iraqi Police were abusing prisoners. Instead, he claimed the MPs overreacted after seeing the Iraqi cops drag some detainees outside into the sun.

Casteel’s version of events did not match the reality documented by 2–162’s scout platoon. When Mike Francis’s story ran, complete with photographs of the Iraqi Police in the middle of beating the prisoners, Casteel’s account and the Boston Globe article were completely discredited.

Upon returning home, 2–162’s snipers identified Casteel as the gray-haired man who entered the compound late in the afternoon on the twenty-ninth. Though he declined to be interviewed for this book, it is probable that whatever he said to the Iraqi Police that day helped secure the release of the prisoners.

Exactly who the prisoners were and why they were arrested also remains unclear. The Sudanese swept up in the Al Betawain raid claimed they were innocent of any wrongdoing, and quite possibly that was true. However, many of the Sudanese males we encountered in 2003 had come to Iraq to fight as volunteers for the Saddam Hussein regime. Some were tied to al-Qaida, which had used Sudan as a base of operations for years prior to 9/11. During one fight in the spring of 2003, I smoke-checked three Sudanese who were fighting alongside a Fedayeen group that had launched a counterattack against our regiment.

In 2004 and 2005, the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHRA) documented repeated instances of forcible eviction, assaults, murders, and blackmail against the Sudanese immigrants living in Iraq. This campaign of terror was carried out by Shia militia groups — the same ones that had penetrated the Iraqi police force. Between December 2004 and February 2005, seventeen Sudanese immigrants were killed in these militia attacks.

Why were the Sudanese targeted by the Shia militia groups? The easiest explanation is that many of them had come to fight for Saddam in 2003 and the fall of the regime trapped them in the country. They had been volunteers of a Sunni regime that had oppressed the Iraqi Shia population for decades. The militias went after them as payback.

Another answer is that at least some of the Sudanese were a link in the al-Qaida Iraq network that was just taking shape in 2004. By targeting them, the Shia militias and the police had hopes of unraveling, then destroying, as many al-Qaida nodes as possible.

Whatever the case, many of these Sudanese tried to flee Iraq, only to end up confined in camp K-70 in Al Anbar Province only a few kiloyards from the Jordanian border. They languished there for years in harsh conditions until the Romanian government opened up a special refugee facility for them in Timisoara. By early 2009, 138 Sudanese had reached Romania safely, including 40 children.

Whether innocent or not, the fact was the Shia militia had made terrorizing the Sudanese in Baghdad a priority. The Al Betawain raid could have been part of that campaign.

As for the other prisoners, Lieutenant Colonel Hendrickson and the other men on the ground that day believed that some of them may have been criminals or insurgents. This was the main reason why Hendrickson did not immediately order the prisoners untied when the Volunteers first entered the compound. Only after seeing the torture facility inside the rectangular building did he give that order. Whatever the case, one thing was abundantly clear to the Volunteers: guilty or innocent, no human being should ever have to endure what those prisoners had. Though many aspects of what happened that day are clouded in shades of gray, that part will always be black and white for the Oregonians.

For 2–162’s scout sniper platoon, the day represents a lost opportunity. Ninety-three prisoners were in that compound on June 29. Had they been left to do the right thing, all ninety-three would have made it out alive. Despite the order to withdraw, they saved sixty men. Their actions that day were noble and just. They could take pride in what they were able to accomplish given the minefield of politics, ethnic warfare, and international diplomacy they encountered.

Yet it is the fate of the lost thirty-three that continues to weigh on the Oregonians. They had entered a chamber of horrors, one that scarred them as Buchenwald scarred the GIs who stumbled upon it in 1945. Even eight years later, the memories of that day are raw and spiked with pain. Recalled Kyle Trimble, “We were denied closure. We never got it. And now, we live with that every day.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO Off the Chain

Maries’s snipers spent July in the triangular rotation established earlier in that spring. The routine soon devolved into tedium. Day after day, they sat atop the MOI and the Sheraton watching and waiting. The Shia Uprising ended in late June, crushed by additional American forces. A tenuous calm marked the mid-summer days as the Mahdi Militia melted away to lairs throughout the city to recruit, reequip, and rebuild.

To a man, 2-162’s snipers felt they could have been doing much more than watch and report activity around northeast Baghdad. They drafted creative plans designed to maximize their value on the battlefield. Some of the men wanted to use the scout platoon to insert them into key locations around the city where they could set ambushes or take out local Mahdi leaders that the battalion’s Intel shop identified for them.

Lieutenant Boyce, the scout platoon commander, wanted to employ his snipers more dynamically as well. He listened to his shooters and looked for ways to exploit them if and when the lull in the fighting ended. Until that day arrived, the rotation continued, and the snipers grew increasingly frustrated.

For the time being, the rotation stayed the same. Truth was, the battalion was still searching for the best way to approach its mission. Finding the balance between helping rebuild the neighborhood and killing the bad guys living in it took a delicate hand, and Lieutenant Colonel Dan Hendrickson understood all too well that every civilian casualty simply increased the level of resistance his men would face the next time they patrolled the streets.

In an environment like Baghdad in the summer of 2004, snipers can bring all sorts of force multipliers to the table. They can overwatch specific areas to deny them to the enemy. This is particularly useful when trying to keep major roads open to vehicular traffic. Put a sniper team atop a building near a freeway, and those shooters lock that area down. They could deal out death to any cell of insurgents unlucky enough to enter the kill zone to plant a roadside bomb. The minute their shovel hits the dirt, they will end up well aerated by our shooters.

Snipers can also take out heavy weapons teams. Machine guns, mortars, artillery — they are the best casualty-producing weapons on an asymmetrical battlefield. In 2004 the Mahdi Militia possessed ample quantities of all three weapons. They had even mounted heavy machine guns on flatbed trucks, like the “technicals” seen in the movie Blackhawk Down. While the firepower these weapons can pour out at our troops can be deadly, the crews themselves are almost defenseless to a well-emplaced sniper team. When covering a friendly patrol, we make a point of searching for these weapons, and they become our top-priority targets. We remove those threats with our precision fire. Take out the machine-gun crew and that deadly weapon won’t rake through our men. Kill the mortar team and no more rounds explode among them. Once again, our capabilities on the battlefield can be used to save American lives.

A smart enemy knows that these crews are vulnerable, and they will support them with whatever forces they have available. I learned this firsthand during a mission in Somalia in the spring of 1993. At the time, the security situation inside Mogadishu, the capital, was spinning out of control. Dime-store warlords carved out mini-fiefdoms in the city’s streets, stealing food relief supplies from the UN in order to gain power over the starving populace. He who had the food controlled the people in desperate need. We had been sent in to create order out of the anarchy and help the UN regain control over the distribution of relief supplies. Not surprisingly, the tin-pot warlords did not like this at all, and as our deployment wore on, the level of violence escalated.

One night, we established a hide to overwatch several large warehouses full of heavy weapons, tanks, and armored vehicles that belonged to Mohamed Farrah Aidid, Somalia’s most powerful warlord at the time. We had inserted into the area ahead of an American raiding force whose mission it was to seize Aidid’s weaponry. Nobody expected a fight, but when we planned the operation I did not want to take any chances. Should Aidid’s men decide to give us a scrap, my men would be out on a limb, in need of speedy support or reinforcement. Just in case that happened, I brought a machine-gun team and a forward air controller with us and set up on a rooftop overlooking the warehouse complex. That gave us additional firepower, plus access to air power and all the killing force of our AH-1 Cobra helicopter gunships.

In hopes of dissuading Aidid’s men from fighting us, we planned a major show of force just before the raiding element hit the warehouses. In this case, a pair of Cobras were to roar overhead and intimidate the crap out of the street warriors. Believe me, there is nothing more gut-liquifying than the sight of an AH-1’s business end pointed your way, bristling with Hydra and Zuni rockets plus a 20mm machine cannon.

The best laid plans …

While our hide remained undetected that night, we heard all sorts of unusual sounds coming from the warehouses. Engines rumbled in the darkness. Men shouted orders. Come dawn, we discovered they’d set up two ZSU-23 antiaircraft gun systems around the warehouses. Manned and ready to fire, they posed a deadly threat to our Cobras. I had a direct line to our task force commander, General Jack Klimp, who ordered me to disable the first ZSU without hurting the gunner. Our objective that day was to seize weaponry, not start a firefight and cause casualties among Aidid’s men.

I aimed at the ZSU’s ammunition feed tray and took the shot with a Barrett .50 cal. The bullet went straight through the feed tray and struck the gunner, blowing him back over his seat and out of sight.

Okay, so that didn’t go so well.

What followed wasn’t any fun either. The other ZSU opened fire on our building, its quad 23mm cannons raking the front facade. My spotter screamed, “They’re tearing the building apart! You gotta stop them!”

I swung my heavy rifle over until the sight settled on the ZSU’s gunner. He went down with one trigger pull. At that point, Aidid’s men opened fire from all over the warehouse complex. Bullets keened and whined around us. So much for avoiding a fight with a show of force. We’d been compromised.

Two Russian-built tanks had been pulled out of the warehouses during the night. Some of Aidid’s men broke cover to try and crew them. We could not afford to face those monsters; their main guns would turn our building to rubble in minutes while their coax machine guns pinned us in place. We ignored everyone else to stop this threat. Not a Somali made it to the tracks, but we had a tiger by the tail. There were too many fighters for us to tackle, and they knew where we were. I could see this ending badly if we didn’t have help soon.

Thank God we planned ahead. Our forward air controller spoke into his radio, and a moment later two Cobras thundered directly over our building and waded into the fight. Their twenty-millimeter guns spewed shells, knocking Aidid’s men right out of their sandals and leaving the battlefield dotted with dead and dying Somali mercenaries. Soon they were dropping buildings with well-placed rocket shots.

We prevailed that day. Looking back, it could have ended much differently. Without the air support, I’m not sure we would have been able to survive. Fortunately, we had backup. But I often wonder what would have happened had those Cobras not arrived so quickly after we had neutralized the antiaircraft guns.

Being detected and overwhelmed by numbers or firepower is a sniper’s worst nightmare. In the unconventional fighting we employ, we are in our element when isolated and working in small teams. Our ability to move with stealth and speed, use concealment to avoid detection, and carry out surprise attacks where the enemy least expects them are key assets that make snipers a force multiplier on the battlefield.

Unfortunately, American infantry leaders are often loath to use us to the best effect. If given a choice, a battalion commander is almost always going to try to overcome resistance with firepower and crushing weight of numbers. The idea of sending a sniper section forward to break the enemy’s will, or eliminate key weapons, seems far too risky. Naturally casualty-averse (and rightfully so), the prospect of seeing their snipers detected and overwhelmed before help can arrive causes our chain of command to be reluctant to employ us. We’ve tried to change that mind-set and show our battalion commanders what we can do by giving them sniper employment classes, but the conventional mind-set remains. When our brethren have been overwhelmed on the battlefield, such as in late 2004 when Iraqi insurgents took out two USMC sniper teams, those commanders who tend to err on the side of caution see their decisions justified. And so, when serving with regular line infantry units, snipers are often underutilized.

But there are always some battalion commanders willing to think outside the box. They’re the ones we love. They give us the flexibility we need to maximize our effect on the battlefield. They take risks, and they pay big dividends. I loved working with those officers during my time in the Corps. They exist all over the U.S. military and can rise to the occasion in creative and unusual ways when circumstances demand it.

Fortunately, the Volunteers had just such a commander. Lieutenant Colonel Dan Hendrickson, 2–162’s police officer and citizen warrior, never considered “inside the box” a comfortable place to be. He could be a stern disciplinarian and taskmaster, but he also listened to the officers and men in his command. Ideas percolated from the bottom up within the battalion, and Hendrickson was open to new ideas from anyone in his chain of command. That flexibility would serve the Volunteers well in the dog days of summer when all hell broke loose once again in the streets of Baghdad.

After going to ground toward the end of the Shia Uprising in the spring, Moqtada al-Sadr gave a rambling, hate-filled speech on July 23, 2004. In it, he attacked both the United States and the current Shia-dominated Iraqi interim government.

A week later, a joint Iraqi-American operation in Karbala captured al-Sadr’s senior commander in that city. The Shia cleric demanded his release to no avail. The situation escalated until August 3 when American troops surrounded al-Sadr’s house and tried to kill or capture him. Somehow he managed to escape. Once clear of the American trap, he contacted all his senior leaders and told them to send the Mahdi Militia into the streets. Kill Americans. Resist to the death.

Two days later, the Second Shia Uprising broke out. For the next week, the Oregon snipers found themselves in the fight of their lives.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE Gushwa’s Thirty

The best snipers are men who make the most out of whatever circumstance they find themselves in. They are versatile, skilled, and intelligent. The best of us are fleet of foot and fast to react to the chaos of combat. Once in a fight, they dominate the enemy.

Sometime this happens from behind their scopes. Sometimes it happens with whatever weapon is at hand. When a fight comes to them, it is the enemy who suffers. In a fluid environment like Baghdad — or any other urban area — a sniper’s got to be ready to fight at a moment’s notice in any situation, mounted or dismounted. Countless times during the war in Iraq, our snipers were ambushed while either infilling or exfilling an area. Those sorts of situations become run-and-gun-type firefights that resemble some of the scenes in Blackhawk Down.

I had this happen to me while in Somalia in January 1993 after our sniper section wrapped up a patrol to the UN food distribution site in downtown Mogadishu. We climbed into our three Humvees and drove back through the city toward our base of operations at the soccer stadium. That day, I rode in a soft-top Humvee that had no turret or heavy weapon. Our other two rigs carried a Ma Deuce (a Browning .50 caliber M2 machine gun) and a Mark 19 grenade launcher. Those two Humvees were armored, our soft top was not.

We’d been traveling down Route 31 October, the capital’s main drag, when we came to an intersection about a kilometer and a half from home. So far, it had been a milk run.

But at the intersection, Aidid’s fighters were waiting for us with a “technical”—a Toyota pickup with a machine gun mounted in the back bed. They’d emplaced the rig on a side street that ran parallel to our road and used the intersection that connected the two as their kill zone. When we drove by, they poured fire at all three of our vehicles. The surprise attack riddled our lead truck with bullets. Our trail one got hit, too. Somehow my truck lucked out.

In these sorts of situations, the best thing to do is just blow through the kill zone. Aidid’s men had figured that out and had deployed technical at every intersection for five blocks. Every time we crossed a side street, they hammered us. We put the pedals to the floor as our gunners opened fire. The technical crews would blast away at us, then speed down the parallel road to another intersection, leapfrogging the other Toyotas already waiting for us. This way, they rolled the ambush down closer and close to the soccer stadium and gave us no respite.

I had a kid named Lassiter on the Mark 19 that day. He was a great Marine, very reliable, and extremely trustworthy, which is why we took him out on missions with us. At the third or fourth intersection, he was ready for the ambush and sent a 40mm grenade right into the waiting technical. Granted, Toyotas are excellent, reliable vehicles, but they just can’t take a grenade strike. This one exploded and burned quite nicely.

We reached the stadium and the surviving technical pulled off and raced into the city’s dark heart. After we rolled through the gate, we discovered the enemy had shot out all four tires in our lead rig.

Our gunners and our speed made all the difference that day. It also taught us that part of a sniper’s job is to be prepared for any kind of combat, be it a stalk in a ruined cityscape or a road warrior — esque running gun battle. That was a lesson I took to heart, and in the years to come I always tried to train my sniper teams to be as versatile and flexible as possible.

There’s no other way to fight an asymmetrical war.

Fortunately for the 2–162 Scouts, Kevin Maries recognized that need for versatility long before the Volunteers deployed to Iraq. He made sure his snipers cross-trained on every weapon available to the scout platoon. His section drilled with machine guns, M4 carbines, M16 rifles, pistols, and even grenade launchers. They learned to clear jams, load, break down, and clear each weapon.

When the battalion moved to Fort Hood for its predeployment workup, the snipers even manned Humvee turrets and practiced hitting targets while on the move. Anytime the snipers could pick up an additional skill set, Lieutenant Boyce and Staff Sergeant Maries were all for it. They pressed ahead and made the most of every training opportunity.

Specialist Nate Gushwa missed that part of the battalion’s time when Maries gave him the one available (and coveted) slot to the sniper school at Camp Robinson in Little Rock. Maries had seen in this young soldier something unique. He had a fire, a grit that impressed everyone. He kept himself in superb physical shape as well. Since being pulled into the scout platoon, he earned a reputation as a workout fanatic. His tattooed arms were roped with muscles.

Some men are born shots. They have that instinct coded into their DNA. Some men have a phenomenal knack for math and can do the ballistics and environmental calculations in their head on the fly while in the middle of high-stress situations. Others, like Nate, just seemed to know where to lay the crosshairs. It didn’t matter the weapon either. Nate could shoot the hell out of anything from a Crossman pump to an M240 Bravo machine gun.

Born and raised on the Oregon coast, Nate’s dad was the pastor for the local Baptist church. His maternal grandfather taught him to shoot when he was old enough to carry a rifle, and he would hunt raccoons at night with his grandfather, armed with Ruger 10–22 rifles. He was twelve when his grandfather gifted him with his first firearm, a Winchester 94 30/30. Later on in high school, he purchased a Remington 700, the civilian version of the M24 bolt-action rifle he later used in Baghdad. No matter the weapon, one elemental lesson from his grandfather stuck with him. Time and again, he told Nate to take a few easy breaths before taking each shot as a way to calm his system and steady his aim, a lesson he took to heart so well it became an ingrained part of his shooting style.

He grew obsessed with precision accuracy. He practiced his marksmanship nearly every day on a mini-range he’d set up for his BB gun in his backyard. As he got better, he made his targets smaller and smaller. Whenever he could, he went off into the woods to shoot targets or hunt black-tailed deer. He grew into a confident sharpshooter, and before he left high school he could take out a milk jug at six hundred yards with a scoped, customized rifle.

Being a trained shooter, not a natural one, I have nothing but respect for men like Nate Gushwa. Before I joined the Marines, I’d never fired a weapon. I learned everything in the Corps, and while I excelled with an M40 and the Barrett .50 cal, I never developed that touch with our pistols. That’s actually not unusual. Most of us shooters are better on one weapon than others.

Nate Gushwa was the exception to that rule. On a lead-filled day in Baghdad, that unusual ability played a key role in the largest battle fought by 2–162 Infantry since the end of World War II.

The frantic call reached 2–162’s operations center just after lunchtime. An Iraqi police station north of Sadr City reported it was being blitzed by an all-out Mahdi Militia attack. Without assistance, they were sure to be overrun and killed to the last man. Minutes later, the Iraqi Police called in to say another station was under attack as well. Mahdi Militiamen were boiling out of the Sadr City slums and pouring en masse into the area, which on American maps was labeled Zone 22. They were battling the cops (supposedly), laying roadside bombs, and setting up fighting positions and barricades in the streets.

Lieutenant Colonel Dan Hendrickson launched the scout platoon to go investigate. Lieutenant Ross Boyce had five Humvees that day. Four were armored M1114s that could withstand direct hits from most types of RPGs. The fifth, which Boyce put in the middle of his column, was the platoon’s “Rat Rig.” This was a soft-topped, unarmored Humvee commanded by Sergeant Andy Hellman. Andy was a low-key, unassuming scout of average build and stature whose dark eyes hinted at the cagey intellect he possessed. He’d driven around Baghdad all spring in the Rat Rig, taking pride in the ridiculous level of risk such excursions entailed.

Boyce was running lean that day, as many of his men were home on leave. Maries and several sniper teams were still deployed to the MOI and Sheraton, leaving only fourteen men to crew five rigs. Out of necessity, sniper Nate Gushwa manned the turret-mounted M240 Bravo machine gun in the lead Humvee. Darren Buchholz was supposed to go along, too, but he injured his back shortly before the platoon departed and could hardly move. Nate saw him suddenly crumple to the ground next to his Humvee as he was loading his gear aboard. The men carried him to the battalion aid station, where the medics shot him full of painkillers and corticosteroids. He dragged himself back to his room and passed out, feeling utterly awful that he could not roll with his brothers.

Boyce’s platoon reached Zone 22 and checked in at the first police station. This time, the cops looked legitimately terrified. They reported that they’d been under fire all morning, and that the enemy was moving in large numbers throughout the area. Right about then, the platoon heard gunfire, and Lieutenant Boyce mounted up his scouts and headed off in search of the fight.

Moments later, the platoon rolled northward up to a three-way T-intersection. Just as they slowed down to figure out which way to turn, a column of Humvees came barreling through the intersection, running flat out east to west. The last rig screeched to a stop directly in front of the Oregon platoon, and one of the dismounts popped open his door and spun out into the street. The 240 gunner went cyclic on his weapon, spraying bullets down the street. The soldier in the street took a knee and fired his M203 grenade launcher in the same direction.

In the lead Oregon Humvee, Trimble and Gushwa watched this unfold only a few yards from their hood. The dismount in the street blew through his entire chest rack of 40mm grenades in a matter of seconds, then turned to the scouts and shouted in a thick Arkansas accent, “Do not go down there! RPGs. RPGs.”

Their truck began rolling. The dismount fired a last M203 round as a parting “fuck you” to the Mahdi army, then pivoted and dove into his Humvee, which sped away with the 240 gunner shouting one final warning, “Do not go down there!”

Sergeant Dustin Paul, Trimble’s truck commander, asked, “Hey, Lieutenant, what do you want to do?”

Boyce radioed his rigs, “This is our job, guys. Let’s go check it out.”

Gushwa heard the order and was startled by it. “What? Right? Isn’t that the way they just told us not to go?”

Paul relayed that to Boyce, but the platoon leader insisted, “We’re recon, we gotta check this shit out.”

Dreading what would happen next, Trimble turned right and gave it some gas. The rest of the platoon followed. They drove into a ramshackle slum full of ugly, low-slung buildings built one atop the other. They passed a broken rocket-propelled grenade lying in the street. UXO — unexploded ordnance — is never a good sign. Heads on swivels, the platoon inched deeper into the neighborhood.

Gushwa scanned the road ahead, swinging his turret left and right in a forty-five-degree arc. The scouts had attached a .50 caliber ammo can to this 240 Bravo and linked four belts together to give Gushwa eight hundred rounds of ready lead. The machine gun sported a Trijicon TA648MGO 6x48 green dot scope — perfect for knocking down targets at long range, but awkward in a close-quarters fight. The street was so narrow that if they did roll into an ambush, the scope would not be an asset. Nate handled the 240 with confidence, though he had not fired a live round through a machine gun since basic training some two years before.

They’d only gone a short distance when Kyle Trimble spotted a crowd of black-clad figures in the street ahead. They wore the green armbands of the Mahdi Militia, but did not appear to be armed. Some of them turned in surprise as the Oregon Humvees approached. Others bolted for nearby alleyways and buildings.

The rain of shit began right there, and it was on like Donkey Kong. Gunfire erupted along the left side of the street sending bullets spanging off the lead Humvee.

Gushwa shifted the turret to the left and saw three men with weapons. A quick six-to-ten round burst dropped all three. He spotted another man shooting from the corner of an alley. He shifted fire and killed him with another controlled burst.

Suddenly, a figure stepped out of an alley to the right of Gushwa’s rig. Trimble glimpsed him just as he raised an RPG launcher. He could not have been more than fifteen yards away. A puff of smoke, a flash, and the rocket shot from the launcher’s barrel. It skipped across the hood of Trimble’s Humvee and detonated beside his left window. The blast rocked their truck just as Gushwa dropped him with a snap-shot from his 240.

The rest of the platoon drove forward into a sea of muzzle flashes. Dozens of Mahdi Militiamen appeared on rooftops, in the street, in alleys, and atop compound walls. They fired from windows and gardens and from the road itself, standing fearlessly and fully exposed. The Oregonians poured lead downrange, cutting them down one after another. Undeterred, more Mahdi rushed to join the fight until it seemed like the platoon was fighting its way upstream. The level of enemy incoming never slackened despite the carnage the scouts inflicted.

Another RPG sizzled past Gushwa and clipped the truck’s radio antennae. Bullets laced the armor plating, raking their Humvee from fender to fender. Trimble floored his accelerator, but the Humvee’s turbo failed and the heavy, armored rig wallowed along at less than thirty-five miles an hour. It was a slow motion nightmare for the Oregonians. Another RPG flew at them, only to ricochet off the street and explode under their Humvee. The blast lifted the rig into the air and flung them around in their seats. A split second later, a roadside bomb detonated, studding the Humvee with hunks of shrapnel that Trimble later found embedded in their vehicle’s armor plating. One fist-sized piece of metal spanged off the back of Gushwa’s turret just above his head, then fell behind the rear shield with a dull thud.

“Go! Go! Go! Blow through it!” Boyce ordered. Trimble’s rig wasn’t up to the crisis. It limped along and was savaged by the incoming. Fourteen men in five Humvees were at the mercy of the Mahdi Militiamen. If they scored a mobility kill, the platoon was sure to be faced with a terrible choice: leave those in the crippled rig behind, or make a last stand and die together.

Gushwa meted out short bursts, playing his machine gun like an instrument. He fired, shifted, fired, shifted again. Trimble was in awe of his skill on that weapon. Though it had been two years since he’d fired a 240, and had never pulled the trigger on one while in a moving Humvee, Nate’s natural ability to shoot anything with a stock and barrel made him deadly effective that day. He hunkered down behind the scope, making split target acquisition decisions as he scanned the forty-five-degree arc in front of the platoon. If the person had a weapon, Nate pinned him with the green dot sight and pulled the trigger. He kept his ammo use to a bare minimum as he carefully triggered off less than ten rounds a burst.

Behind him, though, the Mahdi hammered the other trucks. An RPG skipped across Andy Hellman’s Rat Rig, singeing its soft top but miraculously doing no damage. Behind the Rat Rig, Tyson Bumgardner saw the desperation of the moment and rolled down his window. He was in the front right passenger seat, serving as a truck commander that morning. Now he stuck his M4 through the window in his door and opened fire. The fight had engulfed them so quickly, he hadn’t had time to switch off his iPod, which had been connected to the Humvee’s speaker system. They rolled through the fight with Pantera’s “Cowboys from Hell” as their soundtrack.

Death metal filling his ears, Tyson drained his magazine, dropped it out, and grabbed another one. Just as he slammed it home, a Mahdi fighter stepped into the street and opened fire with his AK-47 from only a few yards away. Bumgardner swung his barrel and triggered a three-round burst that hit the man in the chest. Seconds later, more Mahdi boiled from an alleyway, armed with a mix of AK-47s and RPGs. The scouts fought back furiously.

Lieutenant Boyce’s truck was directly behind Gushwa’s. His gunner, John Ash, was a mountain of a man, at least six foot three. His height worked against him in this fight, as he was probably the most exposed American that afternoon. Manning the .50 caliber machine gun, he saw a Mahdi Militiaman dash from the alley and aim an RPG at his truck. The man was less than ten feet away and clearly had no fear for his own safety. Just as he raised the weapon, Ash blew him apart with his Ma Deuce. Boyce watched one of the man’s arms cartwheel over his Humvee’s hood spraying blood and gore.

The fight continued, block after block. The Mahdi had studied the way the Americans would fight from their Humvees and tailored the ambush to counter those techniques. Instead of picking only one side of the road for a linear ambush, they alternated sides at each block. Just as the American gunners zeroed in on targets, they’d reach an intersection and take fire from the opposite side. The gunners had to spin their turrets one hundred eighty degrees to reengage.

Behind the platoon, a group of militiamen pushed a pair of cars across the road, then set them afire. This effectively blocked the scouts from backing out of the firefight should the lead truck go down. Seconds later, mortar fire rained down on the street. The Mahdi had also preplanned indirect fire for their kill zone, but the platoon had managed to push farther down the road than they had anticipated.

For all their cunning, the ambush had been triggered prematurely. The Mahdi had been preparing roadside bombs when the Volunteers showed up, and now the Humvees passed stacks of mortar rounds and artillery shells arrayed alongside the street to await emplacement as IEDs.

For over a kilometer, the seesaw, slow-motion battle raged. In the trail Humvee, Sergeant Randy Mitts blazed away with his M4, just as Bumgardner was doing. Mitts was a former Marine of imposing stature who came to Oregon after his service to work as a computer software engineer. Deeply religious, he arrived in Baghdad with the spirit of an avenging angel, determined to exact revenge on the Muslim world for 9/11. Now he found himself in the fight of his life, in a race to take out RPG men before they could fire their weapons on his brothers.

A brazen Mahdi fighter sprinted into the road behind Mitts’s truck. Before his gunner could take him out, he triggered an RPG that exploded directly under the Humvee’s rear axle. The back half of the rig lurched upwards, then slammed down with enough force to jar fillings loose.

Mitts grabbed his radio and reported, “We just took an RPG in the ass!”

It was a Groundhog Day moment. Every block brought more of the same — rockets, machine guns, AKs. The men fought back with ruthless desperation. In their wake, the road looked like a slaughterhouse. Bodies lay bleeding and torn along the length of the kilometer-long kill zone.

Many of those had been killed by sniper Nate Gushwa. His weight lifter’s muscles bulged as he worked his machine gun and mowed down targets. Swinging left again, he spotted a heap of clothing on the side of the road. It looked suspicious, so he put a burst into it. The 7.62 rounds tore apart the clothing and revealed a 155mm artillery shell hidden beneath. This was the weapon of choice for roadside bombs as they could disable an armored Humvee.

Seconds after he shot up the pile of clothing, Nate’s head whipsawed backward and slammed against the rear of the turret. He remained there, pinned in place for a second before his head jerked forward and hit the turret ring. He disappeared into the Humvee.

Somebody called, “Nate’s been hit! He’s down!”

Trimble heard him fall out of the turret, unconscious, and knew they were in real trouble. Without anyone to crew their 240, the Mahdi fighters in front of them would pour it on without fear of retribution. It would be open season on their rig. If it went down, the platoon would either have to fight in place and hope help arrived, or back out through the kill zone to the nearest intersection to make an escape. Ugly propositions at best.

The problem was, they didn’t have anyone else to get up on the gun. The platoon was running with such a skeleton crew that only Kyle and Sergeant Paul remained in the rig. Paul was on the radio, calling out targets from the front passenger seat. In full battle rattle, getting Gushwa out of the way and climbing into the turret from that spot in the Humvee was difficult at best. In a Humvee being thrown around by repeated explosions, it would have been borderline impossible.

Sergeant Paul shook him. Blood streamed down Gushwa’s face. One eye was covered with it.

“Nate! Nate, are you okay?” Paul said repeatedly.

Gushwa slowly regained consciousness. He hadn’t been hit by any of the incoming after all. The Mahdi had created a trap, stolen from the pages of the German Army circa 1944 that was tailor made to take out Humvee gunners. They had strung a wire across the road right at gunner level. As Trimble navigated through the kill zone, the wire struck Nate right across the front of his helmet and caught on the mount for his night vision goggles. The sudden impact rammed his helmet into his forehead, opening a gash, then flung his head into the back of the turret. Later, at the Baghdad combat support hospital, he was told that if he hadn’t had the neck muscles he’d developed in the gym during countless workouts, the wire would have ripped his head off. Instead, it tore two of the tendons in his neck and left him with lasting nerve damage.

If the wire had hit Nate three inches lower, it would have killed him instantly. Three inches higher, it would have slipped over him without inflicting any injury. Had that happened, the wire would have struck Ash in the turret of the next Humvee. With his taller frame, the scouts figured later that the wire would have hit him square in the neck at thirty-five miles an hour and decapitated him.

Nate would worry about the wounds later. In the moment, he realized how terribly vulnerable the platoon was without a man on the 240 above him. Groaning in pain, his eye stinging and blurred from the blood that had poured into it, he pulled himself into the turret with sheer determination. Once upright again, he grabbed the 240 and rotated right. Two running figures appeared in the scope. One was wearing a white shirt, carrying an RPG launcher. A teenaged male ran along behind him, carrying extra rockets. Before they had a chance to shoot, Nate walked a ten-round burst through both of them that knocked them off their feet. Launcher and reloads skidded along the ground as Trimble sped past them.

Trimble was amazed by his friend’s grit. The scouts later estimated that Gushwa killed at least thirty insurgents with his 240 Bravo. He’d been so accurate and sparing with his ammunition that he hadn’t even needed to reload. He’d fired about five hundred rounds, all while being pummeled with rockets, bombs, and bullets as Trimble bobbed and weaved through the street. Hitting moving targets from a moving platform is one of the most difficult shooting situations a sniper can face, no matter what the weapon. Nate Gushwa, less than a year removed from sniper school, showed a unique level of marksmanship on a weapon he had not used in two years. The versatility and skill he displayed that day was nothing short of spectacular.

The platoon rolled through the last block of the kill zone, their rigs battered but intact. A UAV, an unmanned aerial vehicle, drone aircraft arrived over the battlefield right after the scouts escaped the kill zone. The UAV’s video camera captured over a hundred Mahdi fighters still alive and moving in the street. Scores more lay dead or wounded. The Volunteers had been outnumbered probably ten to one. Trimble credited their survival to Gushwa. He later recalled, “His shooting was key to getting us out of there that day.”

As they cleared the area, their adrenaline highs drained away, leaving them exhausted and shaking. As they gained some distance from the enemy, they allowed themselves a collective sigh of relief.

That was until the technicals began chasing them.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR The Man Who Lost His Shoes

Kyle Trimble steered the scout platoon out of the fight. His crippled Humvee lurched through the final block of the kill zone and came to an earthen dyke that defined the east side of Zone 22. Rather than trying to take one of the side streets, Trimble drove up the slope and slid onto a narrow dirt road that ran along the top of the dyke. The other four trucks followed, and soon they were running southeast, the city to their right and farms to their left.

Behind them, the Mahdi seethed with fighting ire. Instead of melting away into their urban jungle to nurse their wounded and bury their dead, some of the militiamen piled into waiting pickups and bongo trucks. They sped after the scout platoon, armed with machine guns, AKs, and RPGs.

The scouts were trying to figure out how to clear the area. They’d never been on the dyke before, and they didn’t know this area of Zone 22 well at all. The maps they had were unreliable at best. As they worked through their next move, the gunners spotted the mounted Mahdi force coming at them. The enemy drivers selected a north-south running side street that ran parallel to the dyke. Between breaks in the maze of buildings, the scouts caught fleeting glimpses of the technicals closing on them.

Trimble’s rig still set the pace. With its turbo out, he managed to coax only about thirty-five miles an hour out of the Humvee, which was far too slow to be able to outrun their pursuers. Within minutes, the technical drew even with the American trucks. The two sides runned and gunned through the neighborhood, taking snap-shots at each other whenever there was a clear field of fire.

Gushwa stayed focused on his forward sector of fire. By now, his head throbbed with pain. His neck was so swollen he could barely look left and right. Blood continued to drip into his eye. For him, the chase became a surreal blur of colors, sounds, and shouted commands.

Up ahead, he saw a taxi go right through the dyke from east to west. As it crossed the dyke, all he could see was the vehicle’s roof.

“Stop! Stop! Stop!” he shouted to Trimble. Kyle jammed on the brakes and the Humvee slid to a halt in a cloud of dust.

Some Iraqi bulldozer had cut a makeshift road through the dyke so the people of Zone 22 could move back and forth into the farmland on the east side. Nate had seen it just in time. The Humvee’s front tires stopped less than a meter from a sheer, ten-foot drop. Had the taxi not driven through it at that exact moment, Nate and Kyle never would have seen the cut until their Humvee fell into it.

Those 1114s were tough, but a plunge like that at thirty-five miles an hour probably would have killed or severely wounded everyone inside.

Behind them, the other drivers skidded to a stop as well. Boyce saw their predicament clearly: unmoving now, sitting atop a dyke without cover or concealment, they were easy targets.

He ordered the platoon to back up, then dive off the left slope of the dyke. Down they went onto a rural road that intersected with the one the taxi had been using. There, they swung around in a U-turn and drove north for a ways before climbing back onto the dyke.

The maneuver threw off their pursuers, and the scouts sped north of Zone 22 into another neighborhood, marked Zone 50 on their maps. There, they drove off the dyke, looped west, and linked up with Dan Hendrickson and another company of Volunteers on the west side of the ’hood.

While Lieutenant Boyce briefed Hendrickson, the platoon’s medic climbed aboard Trimble’s Humvee and went to work on Nate’s wounds. Mike Giordano was not your typical medic. Gruff and growly, he often told the scouts, “I’ll save your life if I have to, but I ain’t your personal Jesus.”

The tough-guy comments concealed the medic’s gentle side — at least until he started working gently on Nate’s head. He stopped the bleeding, bandaged him up, and asked him if he was good to go. Gushwa, now that the adrenaline had drained away a second time, felt like crap. His head swam, he was seeing gray dots, and his neck felt like it was on fire.

But there was no one else to man the 240. From the look of things, Lieutenant Colonel Hendrickson was about to order them back into the fight.

“Good to go,” Nate told the medic. Giordano slapped him on the shoulder and climbed off the Humvee to go check the other men out.

In the meantime, the rest of the scouts began to check out their rigs for battle damage. All of them had been shot up. Staff Sergeant Paul’s Humvee had been hit the worst. Its radio antennae had been torn off by the Mahdi gunfire, and shrapnel studded its metal hide. The men even pulled chunks of concrete off the back hatch.

Lieutenant Boyce came back to the platoon a few minutes later. The news wasn’t good. The Mahdi had launched attacks all over Zone 22 and 50. They were in the open, shooting at anything American, attacking Iraqi police stations and Iraqi Army patrols. Hendrickson had brought up reinforcements — everything the battalion had available — and had ordered them to advance to contact down three of the main roads in northeast Baghdad. Hendrickson had tried to get air support. None was available. He tried to get artillery support. That was denied. The 39th Brigade did not want to have to rebuild the neighborhood if the Oregonians chewed it up with 155 and 105mm shellfire.

Failing that, he tried to get tanks. No luck. Everyone had their hands full that day. For heavy support, the battalion could count on a single platoon of Bradley Fighting Vehicles loaned to them from the 2/7 Cavalry. Hendrickson ordered the Brads to patrol down to the ambush site the scouts had just survived. To support them, Boyce’s men would push down into a market area the Americans called Route Rogue, a few blocks north of the morning’s kill zone. Charlie Company would cover the flank.

Hendrickson mounted up and rolled with the scouts. Trimble led the way again, this time turning onto Route Rogue in the heat of the mid-afternoon sun. Normally, this area bustled with activity. Rogue was the place to go in northeast Baghdad if you needed to buy consumer goods — sort of the Iraqi version of a Best Buy outdoor sale. Open market stalls and run-down storefronts lined the street. Iraqi merchants would stand beside their televisions, refrigerators, DVD players, and movie kiosks to hawk their wares and dicker with customers. Every time the Volunteers had visited the area during the day, the place was humming with activity.

Today, not a soul stood on the street. The shops were shuttered, the merchandise dragged inside to leave the sidewalk kiosks and stalls bare. The scouts stayed mounted and crept forward into the silent neighborhood. As they passed alleys and side streets, Nate could see crowds of people moving around on the blocks both north and south of the road they were on, as if business were usual over there. Obviously, they’d been told to stay clear of this one.

They drove past one alley, and Nate saw a man with an RPG lurking in its depths. He traversed left but couldn’t get a shot on him before they drove past the mouth of the alley. He called up the contact, but by the time the second rig reached the alley, the man had melted into the crowd on the other end.

The platoon continued its slow advance down Rogue until it reached a larger intersection. Here, Hendrickson ordered a blocking position established. It was a tough spot to guard. The neighborhood was honeycombed with a maze of little alleys and side streets, none of which were large enough to accommodate Humvees. But they could certainly be used by the Mahdi Militia to attack the platoon. The gunners kept a close eye on them.

The battalion commander dismounted, carrying a Beretta M12 9mm submachine gun he’d grown fond of since the Volunteers had found it during a raid earlier in the year. Hendrickson carried it with him during meetings with local civilian leaders. In case there was trouble, the Beretta seemed like the perfect room-sweeper.

At the platoon’s rear, Randy Mitts climbed out of his rig, as did Tyson Bumgardner. Hendrickson went over to talk with them just as Nate noticed a group of civilians coming toward them from an alley a few blocks away. They seemed to be excited, eager, as if they were about to watch a good movie. Tyson and Mitts spotted them too and kept a careful eye out for anyone with a weapon.

Was this a Bull Run moment? In 1861, as the Union and Confederate armies met at Manassas, crowds of civilians gathered with picnic baskets to watch the show. Some of them got trapped in the pell-mell Union retreat at the end of the battle.

To the south, the sound of gunfire swelled in the distance. The distinct rapid-fire boom-boom-boom-boom of the 25mm autocannon mounted on our Bradleys echoed across the neighborhood. The 27 guys had driven into the kill zone. Rashes of AK-47 bursts resounded next. Explosions followed. A fierce firefight soon raged only a few blocks away. The sounds echoed and bounced around the buildings, streets, and alleys, which made it impossible to pinpoint the origins of the gunfire.

Nate glanced back that way, saw nothing, then returned his eyes to the crowd. They’d inched even closer. He saw no weapons, but the chances of somebody with one pushing through the mass of people to take a potshot at the Americans seemed likely. He flipped the safety off on his M240 and triggered a short burst over the crowd’s head. The warning shots had their intended effect. The people backed off.

To the north, another firefight broke out. The Mahdi ambushed the flank element from Charlie Company with small arms and RPGs. Now, surrounded by the staccato sounds of AKs and 240s, the scouts found themselves in the middle of an oasis in a neighborhood otherwise aflame with combat. It was a weird, eerie sensation, like being in the eye of a hurricane.

Behind the scout platoon, another crowd surged up an alley. Bumgardner, Mitts, and the LTC Hendrickson watched them with suspicion. Where they just curious? Or was this part of some Mahdi plan? Either way, the men held their weapons close and stayed ready for anything.

Something sizzled right over the platoon and exploded against one of the buildings on the south side of the street.

“RPG!” somebody shouted.

An engine roared. Chuck Mangus, who was manning the turret-mounted machine gun on Randy Mitts’s Humvee, saw one of the Mahdi technicals that had chased them earlier sweep into an alley and barrel straight for the platoon. Mangus swung his turret to get his gun on target. The rig skidded to a halt. The militiamen in the bed were armed with machine guns and RPGs. One of the RPG men popped up over the cab and fired. Mangus saw the flash from the launcher. The rocket streaked right over his truck and exploded on the south side of the street.

Mangus went cyclic, tearing the pickup truck to shreds. The driver died instantly, so did his passenger. The RPG man was blown out of the bed by repeated impacts. He flopped to the ground, where Mangus hit him again and tore him apart.

The crowd behind the platoon parted. Two figures sprinted out from the crowd and ran behind a beat-up minibus parked on the side of Route Rogue.

Hendrickson saw them. The lead man carried an RPG. The trail one had a satchel full of rocket reloads. He flipped off his Beretta’s safety and pulled the trigger. The full auto weapon sprayed nine-mil rounds downrange. The glorified Italian grease gun managed only to rip fresh holes in the nearby cars and walls.

The RPG man darted out from behind the minibus and triggered his weapon. To everyone there it looked as if he was aiming at Bumgardner. Tyson thought so, too, and in that split second, he thought he was a dead man. But the rocket deflected downward and exploded in the street fifty feet in front of the scouts. Bits of dirt and rocks and shrapnel flew in all directions. Smoke boiled from the impact site. Chunks of the roadbed pelted Tyson as he took a knee and drew a bead on the RPG gunner.

At the same moment, Mitts dashed behind a blue Chevy Suburban parked on the opposite side of the street. He opened through the vehicle’s windows, shattering them with his first two shots. His third hit his target in the chest. Mangus also let fly with a long, raking burst. Bullet holes Swiss cheesed the minibus and probably struck the militiaman carrying the RPG reloads. Exactly which of the three Americans hit which of the two militiamen is unclear. In the chaos of such a moment, everyone remembers things a little differently. Mitts remembers everyone shooting at the same target, at least initially. But for Tyson, the moment was indelibly imprinted on his mind. He later recounted it, “I … instantly unloaded on that guy (the RPG gunner). I was on single shot but I remember firing so fast that my tracers looked like a red rope being sucked right into that guy’s chest. I hit him with about half the magazine. Then he blew up.”

The American counter-fire had probably touched off a grenade or an RPG reload somewhere on the Mahdi militiaman. The blast vaporized him instantly. When the smoke thinned, the Volunteers saw a charred black circle in the roadbed where he had been standing.

A pair of shoes smoldered in the middle of that charred circle.

Tyson reloaded and ordered his gunner to lay down some fire. Bullets began skipping off the road around them, but it still almost impossible to determine where the enemy was. Meanwhile, Bumgardner saw Trevor Ward trying to unjam his M4. The weapon had double fed, and he couldn’t get it clear. Tyson ran over to him even as more AK rounds ricocheted off the road. When it became clear the M4 wasn’t going to be functional any time soon, he ordered Ward back to their Humvee to get an M249 SAW.

Meanwhile, Hendrickson ordered Mitts to go retrieve the RPG launcher. He headed over to Bumgardner and explained what they needed to do. Tyson wanted support as they moved down the block, so he told Ward to get in the driver’s seat of the Humvee and back it down the road after them. That way, his turret gunner could cover their movement.

Civilians still lingered in the area. Some were hunkered down in front of shopfronts. Others peered from alleyways. It was an eerie feeling, heading toward all those watching eyes. But together, the two Oregonians bounded down the street.

They hadn’t gone far when a small truck suddenly appeared in an alleyway, speeding straight at Tyson. The driver evidently had no idea a firefight was going on, and seemed surprised to see an American soldier in the street ahead. Tyson spun to the left and saw the truck coming unchecked. He fired a single shot from about fifteen meters away and put the bullet through the windshield directly between the driver and the passenger. Message received. The driver slammed on the brakes, then threw the truck into reverse and backed out of the engagement area.

The diversion had slowed Tyson down, and Randy had not noticed. When Bumgardner turned to continue on his way, he saw Randy quite a distance ahead, moving alone as civilians watched from both sides of the street. Tyson sprinted to catch up with his friend.

They linked up, and together moved past the blackened circle where the RPG gunner had been. His shoes still smoldered in the street. They hadn’t gone far when movement caught Tyson’s eye. He glanced to his right and saw a terrified Iraqi woman clutching three small children, cowering in a storefront.

Tyson motioned to her that she should move farther into the shop. For a moment, she stared, eyes wide at him and his rifle, then she did what he wanted.

The two scouts reached the shattered bus. Beneath the vehicle, the loader lay facedown in a pool of blood, his clothes ripped and torn. The stench of burned flesh and hair lingered, mingled with the acrid reek of gunpowder and explosives.

The RPG launcher was nowhere in sight.

An AK cracked. The bullet snapped past Tyson. He and Randy began searching the rooftops for the shooter. A moment later, another round ricocheted off the wall behind them. The two Americans hadn’t seen where it had come from.

Tyson checked under the bus again. The loader hadn’t moved, but the Oregonian couldn’t be sure he was dead. He raised his rifle and was about to pull the trigger when the loader’s eyes flew open. He looked right at Tyson, his face torn and covered in blood. With a shock, Tyson realized he was staring into the dying eyes of a teenage boy.

“Pleez, pleez don’t kill me,” he begged in English.

Tyson froze, staring down his weapon at the broken human under the bus as he pleaded for his life.

“Pleez. Help. Me,” his forlorn voice, weak, in broken English, played across Tyson’s ears.

Mitts saw all this happen from a few yards away and went cold. The Mahdi had been known to wear explosive vests, or detonate hand grenades when American troops approached them. All he could think of was his friend being blown to pieces before his eyes.

“Finish him, Bum,” Mitts said.

Tyson held his weapon to his shoulder, but didn’t fire.

“Pleez … am student…” the loader cried.

“Where’s the RPG?” Randy demanded.

The loader cried, “No RPG!”

“Kill him,” Mitts said.

Another bullet cracked overhead and whined off the wall behind them. The unseen gunman still had them in his sights.

Tyson was a college student back in Eugene. Six months before, he’d been going to school and playing soldier once a month. Now he was staring down his sights at a kid who could have been a classmate.

Until this moment, Bumgardner had never known fear in combat. He’d seen battle as a team sport with guns. But as he stared at the horror in front of him, a raw and primal terror welled within him. It was not fear for his own life, however, but fear he would make the wrong decision, the consequences of which would last a lifetime.

His finger fluttered from the side of his M4 to the trigger.

“Pleez … ple…”

“No. I won’t do it. I won’t kill him,” Bumgardner said.

He motioned to the kid under the bus and said, “Come to me.”

With supreme effort, the Mahdi militiaman crawled from under the bus and somehow found the strength to stand up. He was little more than human wreckage. Blood poured from a dozen wounds around his face, head, shoulders, and chest. One arm dangled limply from shredded tendons. The boy looked down in horror and realized it was barely connected to his body. It swung like a bloody pendulum until he tried vainly to hold it in place with his left hand. But his left hand had been torn apart by shrapnel or bullets. Ruined flesh hung from shattered bones. He stood there, the full magnitude of what had happened to his body sinking in, and he began to scream.

Tyson looked on in horror. He heard himself reflexively say, “Dude, I don’t think you’re going to make it.” Randy heard that and thought it was terrible thing to say. But in such an extreme moment, the mind reacts in unusual ways.

“Save me. Help me. Pleez, pleez,” the teenage militiaman wailed.

He took a shambling, desperate step toward Tyson, but that was all he had left. He fell to his knees, his voice hoarse and fading as he started to beg Allah for salvation. His right arm swung free as he lifted his left hand beseechingly up to the Oregonian in front of him.

Tyson called Lt. Boyce and asked for a medic. Later, he said, “It was the only humane gesture I could offer him in a hopeless moment.”

Lieutenant Boyce denied the request. The situation was just too chaotic, and the column was about to mount up and get out of there.

The dying kid lost his balance and collapsed, face-first in the street. Arm still outstretched, his hand fell atop Tyson’s boot, leaving a smear of blood across it. He bled out in the gutter and died only a few seconds later. Tyson stared down at him, unsure what to do next. Then he remembered the mom and her children. Glancing over his shoulder, Tyson saw them watching him through the storefront’s window.

Mitts heard Boyce’s voice over his Motorola radio ordering them to come back to the vehicles. Mitts relayed the order to Tyson, whose gaze had returned to the kid who had just died at his feet. There was so much blood.

“Let’s go, Bum.”

As if in a dream, Tyson looked up at his friend. He’d come to Iraq to help students, not shoot them. A wave of pure anguish washed over him.

“Come on, Bum,” Mitts said gently as he grabbed his shoulder.

Bullets still impacting around them, they moved back to their Humvees. As they did, Tyson ventured one last look. The loader, arm outstretched in death, lay in a crimson puddle by the fender of the shattered minibus. A pair of shoes smoldered in a charred circle in the street.

The shoes had not been empty.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE Red Mist

Keith Engle sat atop the Ministry of Interior, bored out of his mind. Months had passed since the torture scene had unfolded beneath them at this observation point. Since then, they’d seen almost no activity from the compound. He and Maries had been watching the Shia Uprising unfold around them, but had little ability to influence things from their perch.

He happened to be looking toward Sadr City when somebody started firing mortars at Patrol Base Volunteer. Engle saw the first launch and noted the Point of Origin (POO) — right on the edge of Route Pluto, the north-south highway that divided Sadr City from the rest of Baghdad. The enemy was mortaring their base several times a day, and there was nothing Keith or Kevin Maries could do about it from their vantage point. If only they could call in counterbattery fire, but the 39th Brigade would not allow that. The mortar teams used busy civilian neighborhoods, and smacking them with 105mm rounds would have devastated those areas. The civilian casualties would be high, and the cost of rebuilding the structures destroyed would fall to the American taxpayer. Engle grabbed the radio and called the launch in to the battalion operation center, thoroughly frustrated. It was all he could do.

The first mortar impacted on the American base. The civilian contractors working there scuttled for cover. Inside the scout platoon’s barracks, the detonation roused Andy Hellman, the proud driver of the platoon’s unarmed Rat Rig. Quiet, sometimes to a fault, Andy stayed on life’s periphery, and moved through it as anonymously as possible. At parties, he was the guy in back watching everything, saying nothing. In battle, he always seemed to be a target, and he’d gotten the reputation as an RPG magnet. No matter, he strapped his gear on every day and went to work with a rock solid resolve that overcame all fear.

Curiously, he stepped out onto a second-floor veranda to see what was going on. Another scout, Sergeant George Gordon, soon joined him. As they observed the scene together, a second round exploded near the motor pool.

“Wow, that was pretty close,” Gordon observed wryly.

The attack had caught Lieutenant Ross Boyce out in the open. He and Lieutenant Chris Boeholt, the battalion mortar platoon leader, had been walking back from the chow hall when the first round had landed. Now they ran through the incoming to get back to their men.

The third mortar struck midway between the motor pool and the scouts’ barracks, sending up a thin column of smoke and dirt perhaps a hundred yards away. That was enough for Andy. “That’s too close! Let’s get back inside!”

The two Oregonians abandoned the veranda and went down the second-floor hallway, intending to get on the first floor. They could hear their medic, Mike Giordano, shouting something to some KBR employees who were outside and running for cover.

“That’s right, run you fucking pussies!” they heard him yell in his irascible growl.

Vintage Giordi. Hellman stifled a laugh. He thought the world of the platoon’s grouchy medic and his bah-humbug sense of humor.

The barracks convulsed. A flat, metallic burst of sound deafened Andy in the stairwell. Then a concussion wave slammed into Andy and nearly threw him off his feet. He stumbled down to the first floor.

Giordi lay sprawled on the ground a few feet from the open main door, covered in blood. Tendrils of smoke wafted through the room. Splinters of glass from shattered windows crunched underfoot as Hellman and Gordon rushed to their wounded medic.

Giordano had been hassling the contractors from the doorway of the barracks when a fourth 82mm mortar struck right in front of him. That he was even alive was a miracle.

“Check my eye!” Giordi growled.

“Your eye is fine,” Gordon reported.

“Is my liver okay?” the medic demanded.

“You’ve been hit in the neck, Giordi.”

Angry, seething with pain and fear, Giordano told Gordon how to treat his wound. More scouts and snipers emerged from their rooms to help out. Boyce and Boeholt arrived moments later. The sight of their medic roused everyone to fury. This mortaring shit had to stop.

A meat wagon arrived. The men lifted him into it, and he was sped first to the battalion’s aid station, then to the Baghdad Combat Support Hospital. He had suffered a serious shrapnel wound to his neck and was lucky to be alive. Later, he was evacuated to Germany, then to Walter Reed Hospital in Maryland, where he barraged the doctors with demands to let him rejoin his platoon. It took months, but he finally talked the docs into it. When he returned to the scouts, he received a warm and hearty welcome.

But that was all in the future. In the meantime, the mortar attack had wounded two Volunteers. Enough was enough. Boyce and his men sat down to brainstorm ways they could put an end to them.

Boyce was not a Guardsman, but a regular army officer who’d been a general’s aide at Fort Hood when Hendrickson promoted the scout platoon leader to a company command. The Volunteers were running very lean on officers at the time, and Boyce received an offer to take the platoon. The men greeted him with quiet skepticism at first, but he soon won them over with his willingness to learn, listen, and keep an open mind.

Together with Kevin Maries, Boyce developed a plan that was both bold and fit within the narrow parameters of the current Rules of Engagement. They knew that Hendrickson faced a tough tactical situation, thanks to the cagey nature of the Mahdi Militia. The insurgents had discovered where the unit boundary was between the Volunteers and 2–5 Cav, which was assigned to Sadr City. The Mahdi promptly exploited the boundary by launching their mortar attacks on the Patrol Base Volunteer from inside 2–5’s battle space. Had they just attacked from inside 2–162’s area of operations, Hendrickson would have simply sent his Quick Reaction Force to chase down the mortar teams and kill them in the streets. Instead, the Oregonians couldn’t get permission from 2–5 Cav to cross the unit boundary and hunt down the mortarmen with their motorized infantry platoons.

Lieutenant Boyce and Kevin Maries came up with a solution. Why not use the snipers to locate and kill the mortar teams with precision gunfire? The enemy had been lobbing rounds at their base from the same general area every day since the uprising began. If his scouts could find a tall building with a good view of western Sadr City, his snipers could take them out. That way, they wouldn’t have to cross the unit boundary and run afoul of 2–5 Cav’s commander or that battalion’s own operations. With the sniper teams, they could stay in 2–162’s own battle space and ambush the mortar teams from long range. If all went well, the Mahdi would never know what hit them.

Hendrickson, who had been impressed with the performance of the scout platoon all summer long, gave Boyce the green light. The twenty-six-year-old lieutenant went to work fleshing out the details with Maries and his squad leaders.

The main problem was manpower. With Gushwa hurt and the two outposts needing teams, Maries could only dedicate one team to the mission. Boyce would take enough men and firepower to protect the snipers and their Humvees, while the battalion would have a platoon of Humvee-mounted infantry ready to roll to their aid should they get in trouble. While no air support was available, 2–162’s parent brigade, Arkansas’s 39th Infantry, tasked a battery of heavy artillery to the scouts. Should they get into trouble, they’d have plenty of firepower at their disposal, plus ready backup only a few minutes away at Patrol Base Volunteer.

The plan was brilliant. Boyce had mobility, he had firepower, he had backup. Instead of using a single sniper team — more of an individualistic solution — the decision to use all the available men in the platoon would give them the firepower to tackle most threats should their hide site get compromised.

This was not a standard sniper employment; Boyce didn’t pull it out of any tactical manual or book. But then again, no book has ever won a firefight.

Long after sunset, the platoon mounted up and slid through Patrol Base Volunteer’s rear gate. They were going mortar hunting.

The platoon split up to search for a suitable overwatch position. Tyson Bumgardner led one patrol over to an abandoned amusement park by Martyr’s Monument. They couldn’t get a good vantage point from there, so Tyson and Buchholz climbed into a nearby Iraqi Police tower and observed Route Pluto for a few hours while the rest of the patrol pulled security for them on the street below.

The night was full of fireworks. Mahdi Militia teams kept launching rockets from Sadr City at the Green Zone, the administrative heart of the new government and Coalition forces. The Iraqi Police tower happened to be right under their flight path, and every few minutes one would buzz right overhead before exploding a few kilometers behind them in the blacked-out city.

From time to time, an AC-130 Spectre gunship would open fire from an orbit several thousand feet above Baghdad. Its massive firepower would lay waste to one of the rocket teams, but there always seemed to be more willing men ready to carry out the next launch.

As the night wore on, Tyson and Darren Buchholz decided to head back to the rest of the platoon. As they did, Bumgardner remembered an Iraqi Police checkpoint very close by at the Route Pluto entrance to Martyr’s Monument. Three men manned that position, armed with two AKs and a Dragunov sniper rifle. They’d been told to expect the platoon, and they knew of their presence, but the patrol remained cautious as they passed close by it on their way back to Lieutenant Boyce.

When the scouts reunited, Randy Mitts told Boyce his patrol had found a great hide site in a neighborhood just north of Martyr’s Monument. He led the way, and the scouts stashed their Humvees at the base of a skeletalized eleven-story skyscraper. A wall ran around the perimeter of the building, which provided perfect concealment for the platoon’s rigs. Leaving behind a squad to protect the trucks, the rest of the scouts followed Lieutenant Boyce up into the skyscraper.

The war had not been kind to this building. Above the fourth floor, the fighting had torn away much of the outer wall, leaving the rooms within exposed to the outside. Scaffolding had been erected on the northeast side, a sign that the Iraqis were at least making some effort to reconstruct it. The higher they climbed, the more devastation they found on each floor. In some places, the interior walls had been removed by work crews who had also scattered construction supplies all over the place.

Ross Boyce set them up on the seventh floor, and the scouts settled down to take shifts on their weapons, eat, and sleep. They planned to be up there for several days, if necessary. Even in the darkness, they could tell this place had a prime view of the western edge of Sadr City and the neighborhood where Keith Engle had seen the mortar launches. A perfect ambush site. Now all they needed was an enemy to show up.

The hours of darkness passed slowly. The men grew exhausted. Some dozed. Others scanned the city below. Tyson went downstairs to grab some food from the Humvees. As he chatted with some of the other scouts down there, he remembered that it was his sister’s birthday. For a moment, he wished he was at Volunteer so he could call her.

Around 0600, Lieutenant Boyce watched from the seventh floor as dawn broke over a city aflame. Eastern Baghdad had once again become a battleground. Rocket fire flared and distant muzzle flashes winked in the black streets below even as the sun crested the eastern horizon. The beauty of the red-orange dawn provided a stunning contrast with the skirmishes that seemed surreal to the Americans. At the same time, the sun blazing in their eyes made scanning Sadr City more difficult. Had it not been for the tactical situation, they would have found a hide that let them put the sun to their backs.

To Boyce’s left, Darren “Buck” Buchholz lay catnapping beside his Barrett .50 caliber rifle. The platoon had acquired the semiauto version of the weapon, and already they’d found it their most deadly precision weapon. The Barrett stretches almost five feet long and weighs twenty-eight and a half pounds, making it as cumbersome as one of the platoon’s M240 Bravo machine guns. The Barrett can hit targets over a mile away with a bullet traveling nearly twenty-eight hundred feet a second. The incredible velocity gives the round the ability to penetrate concrete and vehicular armor. Officially called the Special Applications Scoped Rifle, the Barrett is capable of knocking out vehicles and penetrating armor. A popular misconception holds that the weapon cannot be used against human targets under the Rules of Land Warfare — mainly due to the fact that it tends to cause people to explode when hit.

Buchholz was universally respected in the platoon for his dedication and refusal to quit. He spoke his mind and never held back his opinion to anyone regardless of rank. That blunt approach was refreshing, but not surprisingly it sometimes caused friction. If he was tough on those around him, nobody was harder on himself than “Buck,” as the other scouts called him.

Darren was a native of Dallas, Oregon, a small rural community nestled at the base of the Coast Range. He grew up prowling the woods with a .22 that his dad had taught him to shoot. Just as he left high school, he started hunting deer and elk with his grandfather’s pump-action .30–06. He later switched to a Steyr .30–06.

In December 1998, he joined the National Guard and was pulled into Bravo Company 2–162. He stayed with the unit for only nine months, before growing dissatisfied. He wanted to be more than a rifleman, and he wanted to find a way where he could make an impact within the battalion. Buchholz was a man imbued with a sense of service who always wanted to contribute. Not surprisingly, his attitude caught the attention of the scout platoon, and he received an invite to join. Maries pulled him into the sniper section not long after, and he graduated from the Little Rock schoolhouse in 2001.

Until sniper school, Darren’s sense of perfectionism stemmed from a lack of self-confidence. He constantly criticized himself and never measured up in his own eyes. That came to a head in sniper school. Between the stress and the pressure, the PT and the technical work that demanded the utmost attention, Buchholz discovered the key to success for himself. No matter how tired, he had a knack for staying focused. At times, while others grew frazzled from exhaustion and the chaotic environments they were thrown into, Buck could stay calm and learned to trust his training. It all clicked one day in the field, and he knew he’d make it through, though half his classmates did not.

When he missed the August 6 firefight, he beat himself up for days. He raged at himself for not just sucking it up and rolling with his brothers. Never mind the fact that he couldn’t walk. He’d started to spiral, and some of his old self-doubts returned. When this mission came up, he absolutely refused to be left behind. For him, it wasn’t just an opportunity to avenge Giordi’s loss, it was his chance at redemption.

While Darren slept, his new spotter, Joe Blon, kept watch on his scope. With Gushwa wounded and out of action, they’d be partnered up for a while. Blon was an unknown to Buck, and this would be their first mission together.

Downstairs, Tyson finished up his meal and rushed back to join Buck and the others. Along with Tyson’s M240, the scouts had deployed two other machine guns, manned by Staff Sergeant Paul and PFC Albert. The gun Paul lay behind was the same one Nate Gushwa had used during the August 6 firefight. Both Tyson and PFC Albert’s guns had only iron sites.

The snipers had set up their overwatch position in a half-built room on the northeast side of the building behind some of the scaffolding clinging to the exterior that they’d seen the night before. Iraqi construction crews had Sheetrocked one interior wall, and that became the dividing line between Tyson’s M240 and the rest of the platoon. Buchholz had positioned himself next to the interior wall, with SSG Paul’s machine gun and PFC Albert’s deployed to his left. The rest of the men carried M4 carbines. Each scout on watch covered a specific sector of Sadr City. Through their optics, they’d seen considerable movement, but so far the targets they were stalking had eluded them.

The sun rose higher. Some of the men took a break from their observations to tear open MREs, and they scooted back deeper into the building to wolf down their breakfasts while others took their place on watch. The floor Boyce selected lacked outer walls on every side, which gave them a sweeping view of the city. With first light, it became clear to the scouts that the place hadn’t been worked on in months, thanks to the escalating violence in the area. The floor was littered with debris, stacks of drywall, and other supplies. Most of the interior walls had yet to be framed. The men leaned against bare steel I-beams as they ate.

The morning dragged on. By 1100, the sound of gunfire echoed through the city as more battles broke out between patrolling American units and marauding bands of Mahdi fighters. Yet so far the neighborhood they were watching remained quiet. A few civilians went about their morning routines. It amazed the Volunteers how these Iraqis seemed to take the violence in stride. They made do under conditions most Americans would find impossible. Commuting to work under the constant threat of roadside bombs or getting caught in a crossfire between Mahdi RPG gunners and M1 tanks in traffic conditions worthy of Los Angeles had already claimed a lot of civilian lives.

Buchholz woke up and stretched. He sat up and leaned against the Sheetrocked wall far enough into the room to remain out of sight from the street below. Blon, his spotter, was on an M24, glassing the peaceful-looking neighborhood. He would take his place and give him a break in just a few more minutes.

Not far away, Sergeant Paul, who had been Gushwa’s truck commander on August 6, stared intently through his binoculars.

He said, “Hey, Buck? I think we’ve got something.”

The neighborhood was not as innocent as it first appeared.

Darren returned to his Barrett to have a look. Eight hundred yards away, a group of teenaged boys streamed from a house into the quiet street. A few of the boys carried tires, which they piled in an intersection and set afire. The scouts had seen this sort of thing before and knew these pyres functioned either as a rally point for other insurgent cells, or as a way to melt the street’s asphalt so a bomb could be emplaced in the roadbed. Whatever the boys’ intent, it telegraphed to the Americans that something bad was going to happen soon.

Boyce crawled over to watch the tire fire through his binoculars. Meanwhile, the other scouts assembled on the firing line. Tyson Bumgardner slipped behind his M240 Bravo machine gun. Its butt to his shoulder, he lay prone and watched the scene in the street over his weapon’s iron sites.

A rash of gunfire swelled in the distance. A rocket-propelled grenade exploded. Somebody went cyclic on a machine gun. Brunch in Sadr City; the place was a zoo.

The Oregon snipers maintained their sharp watch on the streets. Suddenly, the men heard the hollow thunk of a mortar being fired. The round exploded near Patrol Base Volunteer. Nobody saw the tube.

The kids tossed a few more tires into their bonfire just as a white sedan sped around a corner and came into view. Buchholz and Paul tracked it to a ramshackle dwelling, where it stopped and the doors flew open. Four black-clad men jumped out and ran behind the house into the backyard. Buck kept his Barrett’s scope on them.

The four men paused in the yard. One looked around then nodded to the others. Together, they lifted camouflaged sheets of plywood off the ground, revealing a shallow pit with an 82mm mortar nested inside. They jumped inside the pit and manned the weapon. There was a stack of ready ammunition at hand, and one of the men bent down, grabbed a round, and dropped it into the mouth of the tube. Thunk! The round arced over the city and exploded somewhere to the west of the platoon’s position. The mortar had been preregistered to strike Patrol Base Volunteer. It was a cunning way to get off a few quick rounds before the Americans could locate their launch point and retaliate. They’d probably fire three or four more, then get back in their car and drive to another mortar pit to do the same thing.

It was time to spring the ambush. Boyce quickly assigned the men specific targets and told Buchholz to initiate. Once he fired the Barrett, the rest of the platoon would open up as well. They would smother the mortar teams with firepower in a matter of seconds. Quick, surgical, and deadly effective. With luck, nobody would even see how they died or where the Americans were hiding. The stand-off distance they had would make sure of that — at least for a while.

Boyce’s plan to initiate with the Barrett made sense. Buchholz could take out a member of the mortar team with the first shot. It would not be an easy one to make. He had to factor in distance, elevation difference, wind, air temperature, humidity, and even the bullet’s spin drift. To do it right required multiple, simultaneous calculations in his head. This is one of the reasons why there are two men per team. The spotter’s job is to help with those calculations and even help dial in the shooter’s scope. There are so many factors that need to be kept track of for a long-range shot, you really need two brains working together to be most effective.

Darren called to his spotter. No answer. He tried again. Nothing. He popped his head out of the scope long enough to look around. No sign of him. Where had he gone?

Kyle Trimble saw Buck by himself and moved over to spot for him. Using a pair of binoculars, the two men worked through the tactical and environmental issues. Buck got the range to their target. The first mortar tube was 625 yards away.

He dialed the range into his scope. Then he took a breath. It was time to take the shot. He let out half the air in his lungs before he pulled the trigger. The Barrett sounded like a howitzer in the semienclosed space of the building. The muzzle brake blew the weapon’s gas exhaust ninety degrees to the right — directly into the Sheetrocked wall only a yard away. It sent a concussion wave rebounding off the wall that struck Darren so hard he thought somebody had kicked him in the head. It knocked him off the rifle and left him momentarily stunned.

He’d been so anxious to take the shot, he’d forgotten about the wall — and he’d forgotten to get his ear protection as well. Next to him, Trimble writhed. He’d been knocked flat as well. On the other side of the Sheetrock, perhaps four feet away, Tyson heard the Barrett thunder and felt the floor shudder from the muzzle blast and concussion wave.

Six hundred and twenty-five meters away, the Mahdi mortarman simply exploded. The other scouts saw him one instant, in the next there was nothing but a red mist settling in the air.

That Barrett is a fearsome beast. The ammunition it uses makes it even more destructive and terrifying. High Explosive Armor Piercing Incendiary, or HEAPI, is a jack-of-all-trades bullet that does a little bit of everything to whatever it hits. The outer shell is a mix of lead steel with a copper jacket. Inside the tip is the incendiary mixture, followed by the high explosive compound RX51-PETN. Behind that is a bullet within the bullet. This is the armor piercing part of the munition, made of tungsten carbide and capable of drilling through two-inch plates. When an HEAPI round strikes a target, it burns, explodes, and penetrates almost simultaneously. It’ll stop vehicles, disable crew-served weapons, and cause human beings to disintegrate.

The rest of the platoon opened fire as Buck and Trimble snatched earplugs and slammed them home. Trimble moved over to help Bumgardner with the 240. He didn’t have a spotter, and Kyle could see Tyson’s bursts were falling short. Tyson had set his weapon’s tangent for five hundred yards, and in the excitement had forgotten to adjust to seven hundred before he took his first shots. Before Kyle could settle in, Tyson adjusted fire and tracked the rest of the mortar team as they tried to escape. The Mahdi ran out into the front yard and tried to get into the sedan. Bum’s 240 spat lead, and this time, he was right on target. His bullets tore into the car and left the men of the mortar team lying in bloody heaps around it.

Kyle brought his binos to his eyes just as Bum asked him to get him on another target. He didn’t have to wait long: targets were boiling out into the street from everywhere.

A block away, the boys by the tire fire turned to see the ruined sedan and the dead men bleeding out into the asphalt. Instead of running away, they retrieved mortar ammunition from hidden stockpiles around the neighborhood and rushed them to concealed mortar positions.

Meanwhile, Darren rolled back onto his rifle and settled behind the scope. The scene on the street had changed in a matter of seconds. From the original two mortar crews, the neighborhood now swarmed with Mahdi Militiamen. They came rushing from houses and buildings all up and down the street. Darren glassed the area, watching dozens of armed insurgents running around seemingly at random. Everything was happening so quickly. Heads popped up. Vanished behind walls. Figures darted from one car to another. It was a target-rich environment, but in an overwhelming way. Trying to single an enemy out from the anthill-like circus below required intense focus and discipline.

Seventy yards up the street from the original mortar pit, Buchholz watched a number of Mahdi fighters bolt from what looked like a prefabricated you might find on a Stateside construction project. It was surrounded by a wall of tires, and he could make out several militiamen using them as cover.

Buchholz lased the tire wall. Seven hundred yards. He settled his reticle on an insurgent and fired. The HEAPI flew into the tire wall, blowing rubber in all directions. He fired again. His target still stood, and Darren had no idea where the HEAPI round had gone. He cursed himself and tried again. The Mahdi seemed unconcerned, which meant the .50 cal round had not impacted anywhere near him.

“What the hell? I’m not that bad of a shot,” Darren said to himself.

It was a moment that underscored the importance of the two-man team approach to sniping. With so many enemy fighters in the open, Darren was dealing with an overwhelming environment. They were panicked, dashing in all directions. Unarmed kids were in the mix as well. Before settling on a target, Buchholz first had to positively identify the man as an enemy fighter. The only way to do that was to confirm whether that man carried a weapon or not. With the Mahdi moving around so fast through a neighborhood with plenty of walls, parked vehicles, buildings, and other concealment, this was no easy task.

After acquiring a target, Buck had to run the ballistic calculations alone. Change the scope settings, or “DOPE on the Scope,” and assess the windage himself. When he missed, he had to figure out why and where his shot had gone so he could get on target. In the middle of a madhouse firefight, these complicated steps are best split between two men.

With Trimble gone, Buck was on his own. He pulled the trigger again. Missed again. Enraged, he suddenly realized why. He’d taken his first shot at 625 yards. Now he was trying to smoke-check a Mahdi militiaman at 700.

Through the ringing in his ears, he heard one of the other scouts shout, “Buck, you’re low! You’re low.”

He didn’t have time to redial the scope. He took his best guess, put the crosshairs a few mils above his target, and fired once more. The Mahdi Militiaman exploded.

The shot restored Buck’s confidence. He swung the Barrett toward the prefab building just in time to see more men with guns emerging from it. Darren took them down one after another, then walked his fire through the prefab’s thin walls until nobody else emerged.

He reloaded, paused, and took the time to put the proper DOPE on his scope. He dialed it in to eight hundred yards and went back to work on more distant targets now. His scope had a minute of angle for every hundred yards. At this range, if his aim was off by one inch, the error would be magnified eightfold and result in a missed target.

Buck didn’t miss.

Several insurgents tried to take cover behind a cement mixer. Buchholz hit one with his Barrett. The bullet tore the man apart and sprayed the one next to him with gore. Stunned by what just happened, the man froze. Here was a case study of the Shock Factor at play. The sudden sight of his buddy blowing apart left the Mahdi fighter paralyzed. One minute the man had been running beside his friend, the next his feet melded to the asphalt as he stared at what the HEAPI round had done. His brain could not process that magnitude of trauma within the short time he had left.

He still hadn’t moved when Trimble talked Tyson Bumgardner onto him. Tyson’s 240 swept across the cement mixer, chewed up the wall behind it, and knocked the stricken militiaman out of his shoes.

Within moments, the street started to look like the set of an apocalyptic horror film, The Walking Dead without the zombies. Torn and bloody corpses lay sprawled in gruesome poses. Severed limbs and chunks of bodies littered the scene. A few wounded Mahdi mewled for help in Arabic.

Tyson pushed the 240 to its limits. He ran out of ammunition, called for more and began shouting at the enemy. When the barrel grew red-hot, he swapped it out with another and kept shooting. Brass cartridges bounced off the floor and fell into his shirt sleeves, badly burning his forearms. He never let up on the trigger.

Later, he recalled, “I remember hitting packs of Mahdi looking the wrong way, fully exposing themselves to our fire. I remember watching some of them explode and spray all over. Sometimes others would get caught by multiple ropes of machine gun fire from our converging tracers and get decimated.”

Yet as fast as the scouts took them out, scores of Mahdi armed with AKs, machine guns, and rocket launchers joined the fight. At first, they had no idea the origins of the American fire. They shot back wildly in all directions. Some dove for cover if the incoming had been coming from the north instead of the southwest. This left them totally exposed, and they died without ever figuring out their mistake.

Kyle moved off to help SSG Paul, and Tyson swapped out barrels. Heaps of spent brass lay around his gun, and he took a second to sweep them out of his way with his forearms. In seconds, he returned to the fight, unleashing long bursts on the enemy below.

The scouts made the most of the chaos, killing the enemy with ruthless efficiency. Time and again, as their ranks were bloodied, the militiamen would freeze in terror. The Shock Factor at play once again. They died paralyzed with fright.

Somebody finally spotted the American position, thanks to the tracer bullets fired by the platoon’s machine guns. At first, only a few stray rounds struck the skeletal building. One bullet pinged into an I-beam over Sergeant Bumgardner’s head. Slowly, the incoming grew more accurate.

“We were already way above a maximum sustained rate of fire for the platoon,” Bumgardner later said, “and in those split seconds I wasn’t engaging, I was desperately looking for men to shoot because the incoming was getting heavier all the time. We were not panicked. We just understood our situation was very precarious.”

The machine gunners tore through all their available belts, leaving the 240s surrounded by piping-hot brass shell casings. Buchholz aimed and fired his Barrett as quickly as possible, reloading every time he drained his ten-round magazine. Paul did the same. They finally had a target-rich environment, but they’d caught a tiger by the tail. There were so many targets that if they didn’t kill or drive them off, the platoon could be in for some serious trouble.

Lieutenant Boyce grabbed his radio and called for an artillery-fire mission. When he gave the coordinates, the Arkansas brigade balked at the idea of dropping howitzer shells on such a densely populated Baghdad neighborhood. Not only would the civilian casualties be high, but the Americans would have to pay the surviving homeowners for the damage the shells inflicted on their domiciles. The Arkansans said no to both. Without the firepower, Boyce’s men would have to deal with the threat on their own.

The Mahdi fighters were slowly getting organized now. Most had taken cover behind cars, walls, and the corners of the dilapidated houses in the area. Brave ones would pop up every few seconds to send a few bullets at the Americans. Though Paul, Bumgardner, Albert, and Buchholz had killed most of the mortar crews, new insurgents had back filled them, reinforcing those positions. They were in the pits now, dropping rounds into tubes. The snipers went to work taking them out as the machine gunners swept the streets.

The engagement area originally consisted of about a block and a half of west Sadr City. Now, as more insurgents arrived, Boyce could see muzzle flashes all over the neighborhood. The platoon started taking flanking fire from the right as even more fighters joined the fray. But unlike my situation in Somalia back in 1993 when we had a pair of Super Cobra gunships on our shoulders, the Guardsmen couldn’t get their promised backup.

Even without help, they elected to fight it out.

With the machine guns almost out of ammunition, Sergeant Randy Mitts scampered down the half-completed stairwell to grab more from the Humvees parked behind the building. At the trucks, he joined Andy Hellman, who had been guarding the rigs. Mitts told him what he needed. Together, they began grabbing ammo boxes. Just as they got to work, a mortar round exploded inside the skyscraper’s perimeter. The shrapnel splash laced the building, tearing apart scaffolding and showering the Humvees with debris.

Arms loaded with eight boxes — sixteen hundred rounds of 7.62mm belted ammo, the two scouts sprinted back upstairs to get the machine guns back into the fight. When they arrived, the amount of incoming fire had swelled significantly. Most everyone had flattened themselves against the floorboards to present as small a target as possible.

Bum saw them coming and shouted to Randy to bring him his body armor. He’d left his Kevlar vest in a room deeper inside the building, and had been in the fight without protection from Buck’s first shot.

Boyce kept trying to get more firepower from brigade, but that was a lost cause. He radioed Patrol Base Volunteer and reported the situation. A platoon of New York National Guardsmen attached to 2–162 was standing by, and Lieutenant Colonel Hendrickson ordered them to Boyce’s aid. As they launched through Patrol Base Volunteer’s back gate, the Mahdi slowly gained the upper hand on the scouts. Sheer weight of numbers gave them fire superiority.

Buchholz’s Barrett roared again and again. The horrifying effects of his weapon scattered body parts and gore as his bullets blew humans to fragments. Often, such scenes would break an enemy’s will to resist. In this case, the opposite happened. The more victims Buchholz’s rifle claimed, the more enraged and determined the insurgent militia became.

A deeper report echoed from the streets above the din of full-auto AK-47 bursts. The snipers recognized it right away as a Dragunov, a Soviet-built scoped rifle used by enemy snipers. It seemed to be coming from the right flank, but none of the men could locate the shooter.

An enemy sniper is the worst foe an American sniper can face. Trained for stealth, accuracy, concealment, and patience, they can pin, disrupt, shock, and kill just as effectively as our men can. This is why they automatically become our highest priority targets when encountered on the battlefield.

Whoever had the Dragunov was good. He had located and maneuvered on the Oregon snipers, then found a concealed position on the platoon’s flank. Though forced by the battlefield geography to shoot from a lower elevation than his targets, which gave him a difficult shot, his bullets kept coming uncomfortably close to Boyce’s men.

The scouts searched frantically for his hide, but could not see a telltale muzzle flash or brief flare of sunlight reflecting off a scope. All they could do was keep low and pray that the guy on the other end would make a mistake. He was too good to make a mistake. Despite their efforts, the scouts failed to locate the enemy sniper. Tyson thought that the shooter must have been near the Iraqi Police checkpoint at Martyr’s Monument. That made him remember the Dragunov they’d seen there.

Could the shooter have been an Iraqi cop? It was possible; they knew the scouts were there. But there was no way to be confirm that suspicion. A rocket-propelled grenade exploded a story below them. The building shook from the impact. Machine guns raked the partially finished ceiling overhead. If this got any worse, they could be pinned and trapped in place. The Mahdi might even assault the building, overrunning the small detachment below guarding the platoon’s vehicles. The scouts needed the New York boys, but the inexperienced lieutenant leading that platoon got lost in Baghdad’s mazelike streets. Boyce tried to talk him to the building, but that only seemed to confuse him more. The situation was growing desperate.

Bumgardner reloaded his 240 machine gun with a fresh belt given to him by Mitts and Hellman. With Kyle helping Paul, Tyson asked Andy to spot for him. Hellman moved beside him just as the Dragunov boomed; its bullet slammed into an I-beam next to Andy. He dropped to a knee and returned fire with his carbine, kneeling beside Bumgardner’s left shoulder. The enemy sniper fired again, this time narrowly missing Kyle Trimble.

Bits of ceiling tiles and other debris rained down on the platoon as bullets and rockets swept the building. Without artillery or air support and with their reinforcements roaming around lost somewhere to the west, Boyce could either withdraw or stick it out. Withdrawing under such heavy incoming fire seemed a ticket to disaster. The platoon would be exposed while the men sprinted down the open stairwell, and they would not be able to keep much suppressing fire on the Mahdi as they pulled out.

Boyce didn’t want to make that play unless he had no other alternative. They’d stick it out and hope that the New Yorkers would turn the tide back in their favor. If they showed up.

Meanwhile, the platoon needed every man in the fight to try and wrest fire superiority back from the Mahdi. Lieutenant Boyce knelt beside Sergeant Paul and pulled another M24 to his shoulder. Though not a qualified sniper, Boyce had trained extensively on both the M24 and the Barrett since joining the platoon. Sergeant Maries and the other snipers had tutored him well. On the ranges back at Fort Hood, he’d demonstrated uncanny marksmanship.

Through the scope, he could see Mahdi militiamen, dressed all in black with green arm or headbands bounding through the neighborhood below. He settled his scope on the prefab building seven hundred yards away. He dialed in the range, adjusted for the slight summer breeze, and glassed the ramshackle compound. An RPG man stepped out of the prefab, catching Boyce’s attention. He slid his crosshairs over the man. Finger on the trigger, he began to put pressure on it.

He hesitated.

Though Boyce came from a military family, he had no intention of making a career out of the Army. He’d joined to do his part for his country, and he’d wanted the infantry because it was the one arm that all other elements of the service supported. Yet he was a gentle human being with a deep streak of altruism and compassion. He yearned to go to medical school and become a surgeon.

Now, instead of saving lives, he was about to take one.

He pulled the trigger. His bullet knocked the RPG man off his feet.

He racked the bolt. Aimed again. Sick at heart, but knowing he had no other choice, he squeezed again. With every rack of the bolt, Boyce realized how much he did not want this life. Trapped by the dire circumstances, he killed, and killed again.

The Dragunov roared. Its bullet creased Bumgardner’s helmet, tore off the mount for his night vision goggles and struck Andy Hellman’s right knee. It exited sideways, leaving the wound a near-perfect impression of a 7.62mm bullet in profile.

Bumgardner flung himself protectively on top of Hellman until Sergeant Mitts and Sergeant Ash came over to help. Together, they dragged him clear of the firing line at the edge of the building.

“I’m sorry, sir! I’m sorry!” Hellman kept shouting to Boyce, who was watching the scene from the platoon’s far left. He was in intense pain, alternating between crying out, swearing, and trying to talk to the guys around him.

The scouts tore open Hellman’s pant leg and went to work bandaging the wound. It was well cauterized by the bullet and wasn’t bleeding much. “Looks like you’ll need a new hinge,” somebody said.

Tyson started dressing the bullet hole. He saw the look on Andy’s face and tried to keep him loose. “Fucking hell, Andy, you’re always trying to get out of everything, aren’t ya?”

Hellman, despite the pain the wound inflicted, wanted this documented. “Grab my camera! Take a picture of this thing!”

Seconds later, he went into shock.

“We gotta get outa here,” he suddenly babbled, “we gotta go. We need to go. We gotta go.” He began shaking violently.

The New York platoon still had not shown up. With Hellman wounded, Boyce knew he had to pull the platoon out. They’d have to do it fast. Without the machine guns and the sniper rifles keeping the insurgents down, they were sure to get hit with a ferocious volume of fire.

He ordered everyone back to the Humvees. Trevor Ward helped Hellman to the stairwell as Mitts, Bumgardner, Paul, and Buchholz covered them. Hellman insisted on tackling the stairs alone, though his friends hovered nearby in case he faltered.

To cover the withdrawal, Tyson ran back to his 240 and sent the last of his ammunition into the enemy below. As he ran out, he began to secure his gear. Ash came up and helped him even as a hail of Mahdi machine gun fire laced the room.

When the last man disappeared down the stairs, Bumgardner stood up, hefting Andy’s M4 as Ash slung the machine gun over his shoulder. Then he motioned to Mitts that it was time to leave. Just as they reached the landing, they heard the Barrett roar. The floor quivered. Buchholz was still in the fight.

The two scouts ducked low and went to get him. It turned out he never heard Lieutenant Boyce give the order to displace. He’d opened fire at the start of the engagement without earplugs, and now he was stone deaf, thanks to the Barrett’s thunderous report.

Mitts grabbed Buchholz’s shoulder and pointed at the stairwell. The sniper looked around in surprise at first, then understood what had happened. He still had work to do though. He’d moved his sector of fire out to a thousand yards by this time. The street no longer teemed with confused enemy. They’d taken cover to return fire, making them significantly more difficult to identify and take out.

An insurgent armed with an AK suddenly bolted across the street. Buck tracked him. A thousand yards away, the man moved laterally from right to left. Buchholz had seconds to calculate how to hit him and what technique to use. For such shots, there are two methods of hitting a running man. The first is the tracking shot and is used when you don’t know where the man is going. The key is to know how much lead you’ll need at the range you’re shooting from, a calculation every sniper practices in training until he learns exactly how many mils he needs to lead the enemy. It is a time consuming process that requires a lot of documentation in the sniper’s notebook to perfect. But in combat, that knowledge is the difference between life and death.

The other technique that can be used in this situation is called the ambush. Here the sniper guesses, or knows, where his target is running to and then picks a point somewhere in front of him. He waits until the enemy fighter reaches his mil lead in the scope, then pulls the trigger.

Buchholz didn’t have time for the ambush technique. He tracked the running militiaman, drew the scope in front of him until he had the lead just right. He fired as the man made it almost halfway across the street.

The shot was low. It caught the man in the hip and blew him in half. Randy Mitts had been watching and he was astonished at the shot. “Holy crap, Buck!” he shouted.

Enough was enough. They had to leave. Buchholz’s body armor, helmet, and pack lay scattered on the floor nearby. As the enemy fire intensified even more now that the Americans weren’t fighting back, he scurried around to gather all his gear. Finally, Kevlar on, IBA strapped tight, and the rest of his stuff jammed hastily into his assault pack, he signaled he was good to go.

He got up and moved with Bumgardner for the stairs.

“Hold up,” Mitts said. He’d glanced over his shoulder and had seen a Mahdi Militiaman break cover. Exactly how far away he was will probably never be known for sure. Buchholz estimated he was eight hundred yards away. Bumgardner later estimated about six hundred. Mitts put the range around four hundred. Whatever the actual distance, it was a long shot for an ACOG-equipped short-barreled M4. Randy shouldered the weapon. All the training, all the muscle memory developed over years of field exercises kicked in with that one snap-shot. Tyson and Buck watched the man crumple to the pavement. It was the most amazing feat of marksmanship they’d ever seen. Randy smiled as they shouted at him, then shrugged it off like it was all in a day’s work. The three of them ran downstairs together, the last ones out of the building.

At the base of the stairs, the men loaded Hellman into one of the waiting Humvees. When Mitts, Buchholz, and Bumgardner reached the ground floor, the platoon piled into their rigs while under mortar fire and sped back to Patrol Base Volunteer.

The battalion’s medical staff saw right away that Hellman needed surgery. They called for a MEDEVAC, and a few moments later, a Blackhawk swung onto final approach.

As the chopper landed, the scouts ran to their barracks and grabbed an oversized American flag Hellman kept in his room. It was strictly forbidden to fly it in the open, especially now that Paul Bremer’s Coalition Provisional Authority had turned Iraq over to a temporary Iraqi government. But this one moment, that rule was forgotten.

As Hellman was carried to the Blackhawk, the scouts stood on the roof of their barracks, waving Old Glory furiously in the noontime Iraqi sun.

Back in the shrapnel-scarred scout barracks, where the windows had not yet been replaced, Buchholz ignored the growing pain in his head. He had been so severely concussed by the initial pull of his Barrett’s trigger that he was slurring his words and having a difficult time keeping his balance as he walked around. Yet before he went to see the medic, he wanted an answer. Where had Joe Blon been during the fight?

He found his spotter and demanded to know where he’d gone. Blon muttered, “I went to the roof to get a better view.”

That stank, and Blon knew it. A spotter’s place is next to his shooter.

“Did you get anyone?” Buchholz asked, his temper flaring.

“I dunno. I think so,” Blon replied.

Buck seized the man’s M24 and opened the bolt. It was clean and well oiled. Blon hadn’t fired a single round.

Darren looked Blon in the eyes and said, “You are dead to me.”

He turned and walked out of the room. Buchholz could hold his head up. He’d come through in the clutch. There would be no thoughts of redemption in his mind ever again.

Buck went down to the battalion aid station and got checked out. Concussion be damned. In a day or two, he’d be ready to roll again.

It had been a hell of a week. On the western edge of Sadr City, Boyce’s men had killed at least twenty-two Mahdi Militiamen and wounded more than thirty. The mortar attacks that had plagued Patrol Base Volunteer diminished after that. It was quite an accomplishment for such a small number of men, one that exemplified what a couple of sniper teams could achieve if properly employed. Thanks to Lieutenant Colonel Hendrickson, they had the opportunity to do what we snipers do best. They located, closed with, and destroyed the enemy with long-range, precision fire that minimized civilian casualties.

When things went wrong and the promised support did not arrive, the platoon didn’t panic. Far from it. They maintained the discipline needed to stay in the fight until there was no other choice but to break contact and get away. By the time they left, this handful of Americans had been fighting well over a hundred Mahdi insurgents. That they returned home with only one man wounded was a testament to their professionalism and coolness under fire.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX Baghdad 911

Following the August 10, 2004, ambush, the Mahdi Militia continued to launch attacks all over east and northeast Bahgdad. While the main part of the battalion continued to fight it out in the streets of the capital, two platoons joined the 1st Cavalry Division’s counterattack in Najaf. The city had been taken over by the Mahdi Militia, and through the first three weeks of August, a combined Iraqi National Guard — U.S. Marine and 1st Cavalry Division assault led to intense building-to-building fighting in that holy city. It would take most of the month to finally subdue the Mahdi Militia and wrest control of the Iman Ali Shrine away from al-Sadr’s most fanatical devotees.

As the violence escalated, Lieutenant Colonel Hendrickson let the scout platoon try ever more daring operations. The snipers had proven themselves to be reliant, proactive, and intelligent, and Hendrickson trusted them to use their talents in ways some battalion commanders would never have dreamed of allowing.

The sniper section began inserting into hide sites around northeast Baghdad in hopes of picking off bomb-laying militiamen. This led to one of those unexpected combat moments for Darren Buchholz when, after taking over a civilian’s house, they discovered the youngest daughter in the family was very, very pregnant. The Volunteers treated her deferentially and made sure she was well taken care of, but her presence worried them from the outset. The family was sequestered into one room on the first floor, then the men went about setting up overwatch positions inside the house.

Sniper Specialist Jim Schmorde booby-trapped the yard with claymore mines in case they were detected and the enemy assaulted their position. The doors were barricaded, the windows covered. They set up three-hundred-sixty-degree security and took shifts behind their optics.

They settled in for a long week overwatching Route Pluto, the main north-south highway in their section of the capital. Once emplaced in a hide site, the scouts would provide a quick reaction force, but otherwise no American unit would come close to it, lest they give the location away. Should they be attacked, the five snipers in the house would have to hold out for at least fifteen minutes before the scouts could ride to their rescue.

A few days into the mission, the pregnant girl began to show signs of distress. The family wanted to get her to the doctor. Buchholz, afraid that letting them leave would blow their hide site, refused. They tried to make her as comfortable as possible, but the situation deteriorated. The girl began to sob. The family begged Darren to let them leave. He refused.

A day dragged by. The girl showed real signs of distress. Buchholz began to worry that they might end up having to deliver a baby prematurely. One afternoon, the family’s doctor came to the house to check on the girl. The father pleaded with Darren to let him in as he knocked on the front door.

Here was a moment Darren never expected to encounter. He had to balance the military needs of the mission with the realities inside the house. They were there to help make the lives of everyday Iraqis better. Denying a pregnant woman medical care was not the way to achieve that. Yet every day Americans, Iraqi troops, and civilians were dying on Route Pluto. Stopping the bomb layers was sure to save countless lives.

Buchholz refused to let the doctor in. The pregnant girl broke down again. The family despaired. Her condition worsened until Buchholz could not in good conscience let her suffer any longer. He let the family take her to their doc. As they left, the Volunteers hastily packed their gear and called the rest of the scout platoon for extraction. The mission was a wash, and the snipers would never be able to use that hide again.

Other missions proved highly successful. One day the battalion received a tip identifying the hiding place of an enemy financier whose cell was responsible for the deaths of forty Iraqi National Guardsmen. Earlier in the deployment, such intel would come in and it would take the battalion considerable time to get approval up the chain of command to lay on a raid. Ninety percent of the time, the raids came up empty.

This time Lieutenant Boyce wanted to do things differently. His men were already locked and cocked, and he knew the financier could bug out to another safe house at any time. He approached Hendrickson and told him the urgency of the situation. Hendrickson gave him the green light to go hit the hideout.

First, he arranged to have a UAV deployed to scope the financier’s lair, which was a used car lot. Using the real-time feed, the scout platoon was briefed and they planned the raid on the fly based on the UAV’s imagery. It took another ten minutes to brief Hendrickson on how they planned to take the car lot down. He approved. The men loaded up and rolled out.

It took forty minutes from the time they received the intel to get the Humvees on the road. The platoon encircled the lot and sent in an entry team. Being short on bodies, several of the snipers filled positions in the stack that went through the door. Nate Gushwa, back in action despite continued issues with his August 6 wound, later recalled, “I spent almost as much time with the entry team as the number two man in the stack as I did in hide sites.” It was a testament to the section’s versatility that the snipers could step into an assault role so seamlessly.

The scouts kicked the door in, swarmed inside, and found the financier and a pile of money. Both were scooped up and hauled back to Patrol Base Volunteer in what became the model for future raids. Less than two hours after getting the tip, they’d been able to take down the target. It was so impressive that Major General Peter Chiarelli, commander of the 1st Cavalry Division, called Hendrickson to personally congratulate him on the operation.

At the end of August, Hendrickson ordered Delta Company, 2–162, to raid a large warehouse complex smack in the middle of the August 6, 2004, free-fire zone. The warehouses had been used as a staging base for the Mahdi Militia cells that had attacked the Volunteers and the Arkansans from the 39th Brigade. Take down the warehouses, remove any weapons or supplies inside, and the Oregonians figured they could put a dent in the enemy’s ability to operate in Zones 22 and 50.

Delta Company would provide both the entry teams and set up an inner perimeter around the warehouses. To keep civilians and any enemy reinforcements from interfering with the operation, an outer cordon would also be established at key intersections around the complex. Hendrickson still had a platoon of 2/7 Cav’s Bradleys, and he tasked them with setting up the outer cordon.

The snipers were to provide overwatch for the operation on the outer cordon. Buchholz, Nate Gushwa (who had recently returned to action despite constant pain in his neck, arms, and hands), and Keith Engle received the assignment.

Given that the battalion had been attacked almost every time they went into Zone 22 throughout the month, Hendrickson asked for, and received, Kiowa scout helicopter air support. The 1st Cavalry Division’s aviation brigade was spread thin, so the Kiowas could only remain on station for a short time. After that, the Volunteers would either have to get out of dodge or make do without an eye in the sky.

The battalion launched the raid on August 30. The enemy had been tipped off. When Delta Company surrounded the warehouses, which took up a full city block, the entry teams found very little war matériel.

As the search continued, the enemy began moving around on the perimeter. Every time a militiaman appeared, a Kiowa would sweep overhead to investigate. The terrorist would go to ground and wait until the beat of the American helicopter’s rotors grew distant again. Then he’d pop up to maneuver through the urban jungle toward the American perimenter.

As the operation continued, the enemy grew bold. The Bradleys started to take small-arms fire. Mortars began to land. Delta Company’s commander urged his men to move faster, get the search over with so the whole force could pull out. But the warehouses were a maze of subdivided rooms and bays, filled with all sorts of random boxes, crates, and junk. Lieutenant Brandon Ditto, the platoon leader in charge of the entry team, could not rush this. His men worked methodically to check every nook and cranny.

In the meantime, the Kiowas were needed elsewhere. When they pulled off the target area, the Mahdi seized the moment. On the south side of the perimeter, two Bradleys covered an intersection next to a repair and truck depot used by the Iraqi Ministry of Transportation. On the other side of the MOT compound were blocks of multilevel apartment buildings with a school several hundred yards away.

Urban fighting in some ways is a lot like combat in natural terrain. The high ground becomes crucial in either environment. Hills and mountaintops have been scenes of key battles throughout history, and in Baghdad, tall buildings served the same function as hills. The Mahdi had learned this the hard way in Najaf and firefights in Sadr City. This time, while elements moved in the street, other militiamen flowed into the apartments and found shooting positions in windows and on rooftops. The MOT vehicle compound became the fight’s no-man’s-land, like a big mini-fortress just waiting for one side to occupy it. The problem was, getting to it was sure to draw fire no matter which side attempted it.

The level of incoming swelled. The Brads battled back with their 25mm auto cannon. Rocket-propelled grenades struck the street around the tracks. Much of the warehouses remained to be cleared, so this was only going to get worse.

The Brads needed the snipers on the high ground. The MOT compound included a tall building in the middle of its truck park. Buchholz took his team, supported by a dismounted squad of cav troopers, and dashed through the firefight to the Ministry of Transportation’s front gate. When they reached it, the Americans realized they had no way to breach it. The gate was heavy, thick metal and well reinforced. A small sliding peephole door sat in the middle of it. That gave Buchholz an idea. He pounded on the gate with one fist until, at length, the peephole door slid open and a pair of eyes appeared.

“U.S. Army! We need to come in,” Buchholz said.

Nate Gushwa, who was standing next to Darren, heard a voice say in broken English, “Go away!”

The peephole slapped shut. Darren and Nate exchanged a glance. In the middle of a firefight, they were having a Wizard of Oz moment.

Darren pounded on the door again. The peephole opened. The same eyes reappeared.

“What you want?” the voice asked.

“We are coming inside. Let us in,” Buck said.

“No.”

“Yes, we are.”

Bullets cracked and whined, an RPG exploded in the street by a Bradley. The situation bordered on the ridiculous.

The eyes tracked across the Americans. Between bursts of gunfire, the Iraqi said, “We cannot guarantee your safety.”

“Open the fucking gate right now.”

The gate swung open. The Iraqi stared at the Americans as they flowed through it and entered the truck park. There was no time to search the courtyard, so they decided to clear the building and use part of the dismounted Bradley squad to pull security for the snipers.

They stacked up on the door and entered the main building, weapons at the ready. On the first floor they found medical supplies and bloody bandages. The Mahdi had been using the Ministry of Transportation’s facility as a casualty evacuation point earlier in the fight.

Hyperalert now, the men headed upstairs ready for anything. Moving in pairs, they cleared the next floor, finding American currency and grenades. No bad guys.

They finished clearing the building and Buck took Keith up to the roof. Nate set himself up one floor down using a window that overlooked both a series of apartments and the school. He settled down behind his M24 and stuck his eye to his scope.

The Mahdi were everywhere, darting from alley to alley, firing at the Bradleys from windows and rooftops. There was no time for deliberate calculations; Nate had to use Kentucky windage to get his M24 on target.

About six hundred yards away, a militiaman broke cover carrying an AK-47. Nate happened to have the scope trained on that section of the street when he made his move. He tracked the enemy, but before he could take the shot, the man reached the school, pulled open a door, and plunged inside.

Nate saw him through a tinted plate-glass window as he moved into a room.

The day had become a furnace — a hundred thirty-five degrees in the sun. The heat meant the M24’s bullet would travel farther with less resistance, affecting its drop. No wind meant Nate would not have to compensate for it. Still, at six hundred yards, hitting the enemy through a window presented serious shooting challenges that he had not yet been exposed to in training or in a real-world situation.

This kind of shot is something our Marine Corps shooters first get exposed to in advanced school, then in greater depth in urban sniper school. Glass affects the trajectory and behavior of a bullet significantly. Without understanding that dynamic, it is easy to miss when shooting through a window, even at close range. The type of glass, its thickness, and how it will react to a bullet strike also play a significant role in such a shot.

Nate was dealing with one of the most complex scenarios a sniper can encounter. Six hundred yards is a tough shot under any circumstances, but this young sniper was also firing from an elevated position. Had the target been in the open, Nate would have had to change his point of aim to counter the height difference. When shooting down at a target, the bullet will travel high, so the aim point has to be below center mass. Exactly where to aim is based on the elevation difference and distance to the target. This is the “dangle of the angle,” and it is an exceptionally difficult calculation to make on the fly. As a result, we use cheat sheets for such shots.

In Nate’s case, he had to fire through glass on top of figuring the dangle of the angle. The elevation distance ensured that the bullet would not strike the pane directly head-on. Instead, it would be coming in at an angle, creating a whole different set of variables as to where the bullet would actually go.

Normally, when shooting through glass without any elevation difference, the bullet will break high and to the right. At six hundred yards, if Nate had aimed at the man’s chest center mass, the bullet would have hit the pane, deflected upwards and caught the target in the shoulder. In a situation like that, the sniper will aim a little lower and to the left to compensate.

Now, with elevation changes, the ballistics invert. With the rifle above the target shooting down at him, the bullet fired will strike the pane of glass and deflect low and to the left, catching the target on the right side of his body. In this case, if Nate aimed center mass, his bullet would strike the Mahdi militiaman in the right side between his ribs and hip.

The type of glass plays a role in such a shot as well. Thick, double-paned, or shatterproof glass will affect a bullet differently than a single pane. Will the glass shatter, or will the bullet pierce it and leave only a hole surrounded by spiderweb cracks? In each case, the ballistics are different. We’re trained in advanced and urban sniper schools to recognize the type of glass and estimate its thickness, then compensate for what that material will do to our rounds. If we guess the type of material wrong, we’ll miss. Glass that shatters deflects the bullet in a myriad of little ways. Glass that doesn’t shatter slows the bullet down more as it penetrates, which increases the rate of drop.

Bottom line: this is one of the most difficult shots a sniper can make.

Nate had been shooting his entire life. Every sniper brings a set of intangibles to the table. Our schools hone those natural skills, develops those talents. Sometimes, as in my case, those skills and talents are discovered. Unlike Nate, I had never fired a weapon before I joined the Marine Corps. The Corps taught me everything I knew. Nate Gushwa was the exact opposite: he’d spent almost his entire life with a rifle in hand, honing his skills. Those days spent in the woods, or in his backyard refining his talents gave him the knack to shoot anything well. The Army and Guard trained him, brought him to new levels of skill and knowledge, which fine-tuned his native intuition.

In that moment, those instincts nurtured since childhood took hold of Gushwa. He remembered his grandfather’s most important lesson: take a few calming breaths before pulling the trigger.

Inside the room, the militiaman paused to peer outside. He wasn’t moving anymore. He probably assumed he was safe now that he had ducked inside the school.

The Oregon deadeye breathed out, in, out again. His body relaxed. He set the crosshairs just a hair high, then fired.

“Nate! Get up here!” Buchholz called from the roof.

Gushwa had time only to see through his scope the hole in the plate-glass window his bullet had made. It seemed to be on target, but he couldn’t see the Mahdi fighter any longer. Had he hit the man? Or had he missed and caused him to dive away from the window? Nate had no way to know, and no time to observe and find out.

He picked up his M24 and dashed upstairs. When he burst onto the roof, the scene unfolding there made him stop in his tracks. Engle was hunkered down behind the Barrett .50 cal, which he’d laid atop the waist-high parapet that defined the roof’s perimeter. Flanking him on either side was a fire team of Bradley dismounts, all of whom were hunkered down beneath the parapet, out of the line of fire.

Bullets cracked overhead, ricocheted off the building and whined in random directions. Buchholz stood totally erect, his M4 to his shoulder, walking back and forth, his upper body exposed to the Mahdi. The enemy was pouring it on trying to bring the big Oregonian down. He’d pause every few steps, take a shot, then move again to find another target. He was growling and cursing, blasting away at the enemy without any regard to his safety. He seemed oblivious to the bullets whipping past him.

Buchholz had an ACOG four-power scope on his M4. Each time he paused to fire his carbine, he’d face the enemy. Anyone who has ever shot a rifle from the standing position knows how difficult it is to do it accurately. If prone is the easiest, standing is the most challenging, and the way the Army trains its soldiers to shoot this way is very different from most civilian marksmanship classes. Instead of standing with your shoulder pointed downrange, shooting from a profile stance, our warriors learn to put their chests toward their target and lean slightly forward. This method was developed to maximize the safety of our men. Shooting in profile exposes the soldier’s ribs and side to enemy bullets. Our body armor does not cover these areas, just the back, chest, and stomach. Some have adaptors that protect the neck, shoulders, and groin, but most infantrymen and snipers don’t wear those accessories as they are cumbersome and heavy. But firing with our front to the enemy gives us the full protection of our body armor.

Most of us had to learn this method of shooting while in the service, and it takes some men a lot of time to break their old civilian habits.

Nate took a knee and watched his friend pop off another round. “He looked like Conan the Barbarian playing whack-a-mole with an M4,” Gushwa later recalled. “For God’s sake, Buck, get behind cover!” he’d told him.

Darren ignored him and kept shooting. Just then a captain who had been in the Bradley with them appeared on the roof. He had come along on the mission as an observer and was not part of the 2–7’s platoon attached to the Oregonians. “Hey, I need to take some photos for my research project,” he shouted over the gunfire. Buchholz impatiently waved him forward. The man crouched, camera in hand, and moved up beside Buchholz. He peered over the parapet, snapped a few photos, and went white as a South Dakota winter.

Buck smoke-checked another Mahdi. Suddenly, an RPG swooshed right between him and the captain. The heat of the weapon and the total shock of the near miss caused the captain to flop flat on his back. Staring skyward, he lay there as Buchholz pulled his eye out of his scope to regard him.

“Ya got enough photos yet, sir?” Buchholz deadpanned.

The captain stammered, “Uh, yeah. I’m good.”

He crawled off the roof and disappeared downstairs.

A few of the 2–7 dismounts began popping up over the parapet to add their firepower to the fight. Nate moved to the parapet, too. Darren tried to contact Lieutenant Colonel Hendrickson on the section’s secure radio to give him a status report, but the device malfunctioned. With the amount of incoming growing, Buck didn’t have time for fussy technology. He stowed the radio and knelt beside Gushwa and Engle. In the apartments and street, there were more targets than bullets. Just like August 10.

Several RPG teams maneuvered on the Bradley. Hendrickson was standing near the track when they launched their rockets. The sudden barrage scored several near misses and convinced the 2–7 crew to back their Bradley out of the immediate line of fire. The 25mm spewed flame. Down the street, the cannon shells killed an RPG man, then set fire to the car he’d been using for cover. A moment later, the Brad had repositioned to a less vulnerable spot out of the intersection.

When the track disappeared from the Mahdi Militia’s immediate field of view, they shifted their fire to the snipers and the dismounts on the roof of the MOT building. The parapet was swept with a storm of bullets and incoming RPGs.

The dismounts left to return to their Bradley. Buchholz, Engle, and Gushwa refused to leave. Darren spotted an RPG launch in the street, called it out to Nate, who settled his scope on the militiaman’s position. He was using a loophole in a concrete wall as a firing slit for his launcher. Gushwa got the range: one hundred twenty-five yards. The loophole was only a few feet high and perhaps eighteen inches wide. The RPG man reloaded, then stuck his weapon through the loophole. Nate drilled him before he could shoot again.

Below them, the car the Bradley had hit now blazed from bumper to bumper. Black smoke filled the street and boiled hundreds of feet upwards.

Three men stole out of an alley and jumped into a blue minivan — one carried an RPG, another hefted an AK. Buchholz called it out. The three snipers concentrated on it. Keith got off one shot with the Barrett .50 cal. His HEAPI round struck the back of the van. Seconds later, Buck shot the driver. The other two bailed out and ran inside a nearby building.

Over the din of the firefight, the snipers heard a wailing siren. It seemed to be growing nearer. Looking around, Nate spotted an Iraqi fire truck speeding toward them.

The Baghdad fire department had arrived. Apparently, somebody had dialed 911.

The firemen drove straight through the middle of the battle, totally oblivious to the bullets and rockets flying around them. They stopped near the burning car the Bradley had hit, pulled out their hoses, and set to work extinguishing the blaze.

On the roof, Gushwa’s jaw dropped. Buck turned to him and said, “Is that really happening?”

The Mahdi incoming never slackened. As the firemen doused the car with long streams of water, the fight continued. Keith spotted an AK-47 appear in a window in one of the apartments. Buchholz saw it, too, and knocked the man down with a single snap-shot. Moments later, Nate watched a Mahdi militiaman run into the street five hundred yards away. He called it out, and Buchholz pinned the man with his ACOG’s reticle. He triggered a shot, but was low. The bullet struck the man in the leg. He staggered under the impact, but didn’t lose his footing. The Oregonians watched as he limped the last few yards to cover.

The car, now good and soaked by the firemen, sizzled and steamed in the street. The Mahdi grew cautious. Fewer exposed themselves in the street, choosing instead to pop around corners to let off a few rounds before ducking out of harm’s way. By now, it was mid-afternoon and the day’s hundred-thirty-five-degree heat was punishing the snipers, who had no overhead protection from the sun. Nate, bathed in sweat, began to get dizzy. He slid under the parapet and peeled off his body armor as he sucked water from his Camelbak.

“We need to call for ammo resupply,” Buck said to Nate.

“Roger,” Nate did a quick count. He had borrowed Kevin Maries’s M24 for this mission and had brought forty rounds with him. He was down to just a handful of 7.62, with no M4.

Buck and Keith were in the same boat. They wouldn’t be able to stay on the rooftop much longer if they didn’t get resupplied.

Nate keyed his radio handset and called the BC. He explained their situation and asked for ammo.

Hendrickson replied, “Try to shoot less. We’re getting ready to unass.”

Buck and Keith heard this and turned to Nate. “Really? Shoot less? You gotta be shitting me.”

Fortunately, back at the warehouses, Lieutenant Ditto’s men finished the search at last. They’d found very little inside the structures, though it was clear from leftover trash that the Mahdi had been using them as staging bases. Ditto and his men mounted up. Lieutenant Colonel Hendrickson gave the word to pull out.

The snipers broke contact, dashed downstairs and through the Wizard of Oz door to a waiting Bradley. Back at Patrol Base Volunteer, LTC Hendrickson angrily demanded to know why his snipers hadn’t been giving him contact reports and status updates. When Buck described the hornet’s nest they’d found themselves in on the MOT’s roof, all was forgiven.

Not long after the warehouse raid, Buchholz and Gushwa took part in another sweep through the same area. This time, the battalion went to go clear the school on the other side of the Ministry of Transportation’s motor pool facility. During the search, the Volunteers found a room bathed in blood. At first there was talk that they’d found a Mahdi torture chamber. Then Nate and Buck went to take a look. They walked in to find dried blood all over the floor and wall. The heavy, double-paned, shatterproof window in the room held a single 7.62mm bullet hole. As Nate peered at it, he saw the MOT building in the background. This was the room he’d seen the Madhi militiaman run into during the warehouse scrap. That was his bullet hole. Until that moment, he hadn’t known if he’d made the shot. Now, as he stood there with Buchholz, it was clear that he had, and the amount of blood suggested the target probably had not made it.

Only a handful of snipers could have made that shot.

Over the next four weeks, the battalion lost three more men killed in action. Two died in a roadside bomb attack north of Baghdad, while the third, Specialist David Johnson, died in northeast Baghdad in another blast while on a resupply run.

Yet just as quickly as the Second Shia Uprising began that summer, it came to an end that fall. October was dead calm in Zones 22 and 50. November saw a major series of attacks launched by Sunni insurgents reinforced by a cadre of al-Qaida, but the Shia militias never again posed a serious threat to 2–162. A few scattered firefights with the Mahdi Militia remained to be fought in December and January, but the days of massed attacks ended with the warehouse raid.

Lieutenant Colonel Hendrickson took his battalion home in March 2005. During the year the Volunteers had been in combat, they had suffered nine killed and over eighty wounded in action. Over ten percent of his citizen-soldiers had become casualties while struggling to bring stability in Iraq. It was the most difficult and battle-torn deployment the Oregon National Guard had experienced since fighting across the Pacific with General Douglas MacArthur in World War II.

The snipers came home with dozens of confirmed kills, but that is not what they remember. They take pride in the lives they saved at the Ministry of Interior in June 2004. They take pride in stopping the mortar attacks and the friendly casualties they incurred. Who knows how many lives they saved with their August 10 ambush.

Most importantly, Staff Sergeant Maries brought everyone home. Despite rocket attacks, firefights, roadside bombs, and urban ambushes, Nate Gushwa was the only one from the sniper section to be wounded in action, though there were several men from the scout platoon who were hit, including Andy Hellman, Randy Mitts, and Giordi.

Of his section’s performance in Baghdad, Kevin later said, “Nate and Buck — they were the best sniper team I had. I could always count on them to get the job done, and they need credit for that.”

Ten years later, Tyson Bumgardner looked back on the deployment and summed things up: “Most of us had families with a military hero in them. We all read the literature voraciously, we knew our unit’s unique history. We wanted the fight more than most. I think our scout/snipers were able to survive so many close fights with relatively few casualties because of our solid leadership … our aggression, discipline, and training. We thought of ourselves specially picked — and Oregon men are expected to never quit any fight. Ever.”

Six months after returning to Oregon, Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast. The governor of Louisiana appealed to Oregon for help. The 41st Brigade mobilized, and within a week deployed to New Orleans to put an end to the violence and looting there. Hendrickson took three hundred fifty men, veterans of the Baghdad firefights, into the Big Easy with him.

In a neighborhood that once had been home to eighty thousand Americans, the Volunteers found precisely seven holdouts. Here at home, they patrolled the trash-strewn streets and felt nothing but revulsion for the sights they witnessed. Block after block had been devastated by looters and vandals. Gang wars had broken out. The cops had gone rogue and the Volunteers caught them looting businesses and private homes. They encountered bullet-riddled corpses in mini-markets and gas stations, suicides closeted in waterlogged houses. One patrol encountered a corpse whose groin was being eaten by a stray dog. On another, the men escorted a distraught young man searching for his grandmother. Upon entering her home, they found her corpse draped across an upright piano. When the levees broke and the floodwaters hit her neighborhood, she’d been knocked off her feet by the first wave and slammed into a wall. She fell, dead, atop her beloved piano, her corpse rotting in the stifling humidity of late-summer Louisiana.

Running water did not exist in the city. Neither did power. The men slept on concrete walkways and on the steps of the chapel at the New Orleans Baptist Seminary. They took whores’ baths, ate MREs, and endured swarms of chiggers, mosquitoes, and other insects every night as they bunked down. None of the men grew used to the stench of the dead city. It permeated their filthy uniforms, lingered in their nostrils, and even the gentle breeze and occasional summer showers offered no respite from the charnel house smell.

Baghdad had not been as bad as this. Said Keith Engle later, “That an American city smelled worse than Baghdad was … unbelievable.”

Morale in the battalion was tested to the limits. The men had just picked up their civilian lives when they were thrust into this new nightmare. Some of the wives refused to believe they were even in the city, and at least two moved out while the Volunteers were gone. Many of the men, including Tyson Bumgardner, were scheduled to start college in the fall. The New Orleans deployment wrought havoc with those plans.

The cost of this deployment to his men was not lost on Lieutenant Colonel Hendrickson. Within a week, he began to send the student-soldiers within his battalion home so they could make the start of the term at the University of Oregon and Oregon State. Others with family hardships soon joined them. The battalion’s footprint shrank until a kernel of one hundred fifty devoted men remained.

Through it all, the sniper section shined. During an early patrol, Specialist Jim Schmorde took one of the battalion’s few thermal sights with him. While moving along a raised railroad embankment at night, he spotted a heat signature in a neighborhood that had been particularly hard hit by the floodwaters. After studying it, he was convinced he’d found somebody. Was it a looter? One of the gangbangers known to be in the area who were shooting at passing rescue crews?

The next morning, the scout platoon went to find out. Using boats scrounged from the area, they motored across opaque black water filmed with rainbow slicks of oil. Schmorde led the search effort to the block where he’d seen the signature. The water there was still at least six feet deep. In places, the flood line reached the eaves of the one-story buildings.

They maneuvered from house to house, unsure of what they would encounter, but ready for anything. At last, as they knocked on one waterlogged front door, they heard a muffled and weak cry for help. Using crowbars, they broke into the house and found a dying eighty-nine-year-old woman. She’d been trapped inside her house for almost two weeks. When the floodwaters receded, they left her doors so swollen that she did not have the strength to open them. Same with her windows. Her rescuers eased her and her wheelchair into one of their boats and returned to the high ground where Patrol Base Volunteer, New Orleans, had been established. There, an ambulance sped her away to Belle Chase Hospital, leaving her wheelchair abandoned in the middle of Chef Menteur Boulevard.

She survived only because Jim Schmorde had brought a thermal sight on patrol with him. As in Baghdad, here at home the Oregon snipers saved lives.

At the end of September 2005, the last of the Volunteers returned home. Staff Sergeant Maries left the battalion soon after and joined an aviation unit. Buchholz left the Guard, but his desire to make a difference burned inside him. Six months after leaving the Guard, he found himself in a meaningless, dead-end job drawing a paycheck. It was a hollow existence for the man who always wanted to do more for his country and community. After a client yelled at him for an inconsequential error, he walked out and never looked back. He became a police officer in Independence, a small town just outside of his native Dallas. He was accepted onto the county SWAT team and served with distinction before moving on to the Salem Police Department. He continues to patrol the state capital today.

Nate Gushwa was medically retired from the Guard as a result of his wounds. He settled back in his hometown on the coast and rejoined the construction company he’d worked for prior to 9/11. He went to school and is a draftsman today.

He lives with the lingering effects of his wounds every day. The wire that clotheslined him on Route Hamms did permanent nerve damage to his neck. Sneezing for him is an agony. The sudden spasms it causes sends shock waves of nerve pain through his neck, arms, and hands. At times, his fingers tremble uncontrollably.

His refusal to leave the sniper section after he was wounded made things worse for him. Wearing his Kevlar helmet and body armor ensured that his tendons never healed properly. Scar tissue built up over the nerve bundles in the back of his neck. Over the years, the scar tissue has continued to build up and can be seen on X-rays. There’s no surgical option for Nate, so he lives with these constant reminders of his time in Baghdad.

Keith Engle returned home and went to sniper school. He took the section back to Iraq when 2–162 deployed for a second time in 2009. It was a very different place by then. The streets weren’t filled with Mahdi Militia, the civil war between the Sunni and Shia that had begun at the end of their 2004–2005 deployment had mostly subsided. The battalion ran convoy operations, guarded bases, and chafed at the inactivity, boredom, and separation from their families. Engle lives with his family on the southern Oregon coast and remains in the National Guard today.

The 2–162 snipers still get together whenever they can. They hunt with their sons. On those trips, Nate and Darren use customized Remington 700 rifles built by Daryl Holland specially for them. At night, over drinks, they’ll sometimes speak of their firefights and gut-check moments in Baghdad. In their most serious moments, they grow bitter and angry over what happened at the MOI. For all they accomplished that year in Iraq, the pall cast by June 29, 2004, and the discovery of the torture compound has left them with unanswered questions. Who gave the order for the scouts to withdraw? Who was responsible for the unit inflicting the torture?

But most of all: what happened to the men who were not released? Those thirty-three men the scouts could not save. No matter where the snipers will go in their lives, those tortured, battered men are never far from their thoughts.

If only they could have done more.

It is the lament of soldiers and snipers whose sense of duty, honor, and service are embedded in their DNA.