For the reading
pleasure of Armchair "generals and CS etc
practitioners
Hard Lesson: 150 Marines Meet 1 Sniper
By DEXTER FILKINS
Published: November 11, 2004
ALLUJA, Iraq, Nov. 10 - American marines called in two
airstrikes on the pair of dingy three-story buildings squatting
along Highway 10 on Wednesday, dropping 500-pound bombs each time.
They fired 35 or so 155-millimeter artillery shells, 10 shots from
the muzzles of Abrams tanks and perhaps 30,000 rounds from their
automatic rifles. The building was a smoking ruin.
But the sniper kept shooting.
He - or they, because no one can count the flitting shadows in this
place - kept 150 marines pinned down for the better part of a day.
It was a lesson on the nature of the enemy in this hellish warren
of rubble-strewn streets. Not all of the insurgents are holy
warriors looking for martyrdom. At least a few are highly trained
killers who do their job with cold precision and know how to
survive.
"The idea is, he just sits up there and eats a sandwich," said Lt.
Andy Eckert, "and we go crazy trying to find him."
The contest is a deadly one, and two marines in Company B, First
Battalion, Eighth Regiment of the First Marine Expeditionary Force
have been killed by snipers in the past two days as the unit
advanced just half a mile southward to Highway 10 from a mosque
they had taken on Tuesday.
Despite the world-shaking blasts of weaponry as the Americans try
to root out the snipers, this is also a contest of wills in which
the tension rises to a level that seems unbearable, and then rises
again. Marine snipers sit, as motionless as blue herons, for 30
minutes and stare with crazed intensity into the oversized scopes
on their guns. If so much as a penumbra brushes across a
windowsill, they open up.
With the troops' senses tuned to a high pitch, mundane events
become extraordinary. During one bombing, a blue-and-yellow
parakeet flew up to a roof of a captured building and fluttered
about in tight circles before perching on a slumping power line, to
the amazement of the marines assembled there.
On another occasion, the snipers tensed when they heard movement in
the direction of a smoldering building. A cat sauntered out,
unconcerned with anything but making its rounds in the
neighborhood.
"Can I shoot it, sir?" a sniper asked an officer.
"Absolutely not," came the reply.
This day started at about 8 a.m., when the marines left the
building where they had been sleeping and headed south toward
Highway 10, which runs from east to west and roughly bisects the
town. At the corner of Highway 10 and Thurthar, the street they
were moving along, was a headquarters building for the Iraqi
National Guard that had been taken over by insurgents.
Almost immediately, they came under fire from a sniper in the
minaret of a mosque just south of them. Someone in a three-story
residential building farther down the street also opened up. The
marines made 50-yard dashes and dived for cover, but one of them
was cut down, killed on the spot. It was unclear what direction the
fatal bullet had come from.
"I don't know who it was," Lt. Steven Berch, leader of the fallen
marine's platoon, said of the attacker, "but he was very well
trained."
After two hours of bombardment, the sniper at that mosque ceased
firing. But just around the corner at the famous blue-domed
Khulafah Al Rashid mosque, another sniper was pinning down marines,
and airstrikes were called in on it, too. The issue of striking at
mosques is so sensitive in the Arab world that the American
military later issued a statement saying that the strike on the
Khulafah mosque was unavoidable and that precision munitions merely
knocked down a minaret.
By noon, the marines had worked their way down to the national
guard building, still taking fire from the sniper, or snipers, on
the other side of Main Street. Inside was a sign in Arabic that
said: "Long live the mujahedeen." Soon the marines had
spray-painted another sign over it: "Long live the muj
killers."
But for the next five hours, they could not kill whoever was
running from window to window and firing at them from the other
side of Main Street, despite the expenditure of enormous amounts of
ammunition.
"We're not able to see the muzzle flashes," said Capt. Read
Omohundro, the company commander. "As a result," he said, "we end
up expending a lot of ammunition trying to get the snipers."
At one point, they thought that they had a bead on someone running
back and forth between the two buildings. Then Capt. Christopher
Spears exclaimed: "He's on a bike!"
And somehow, through a volley of gunfire, whoever it was got
away.
At 5 p.m., the marines finally crossed Highway 10 and searched the
smoking remains of the two buildings. At 5:30 p.m., a sniper opened
up on them.
