Shooter: The Autobiography of the Top-Ranked Marine Sniper

by Gunnery Sgt. Jack

  Casey once described me as not being very subtle: “If Jack likes you, he curses and insults you. If he doesn’t like you, he does the same thing, only nose-to-nose and louder.” McCoy and I had a number of spirited discussions.

  While I could bully a lot of officers, he was a stone wall. He stands about six-six, weighs a muscular 240 pounds, keeps his light brown hair high and tight, and usually has a big cigar stuffed in his mouth. He tried to stare holes in me with his beady hazel eyes. McCoy is brilliant and kept cluttering up our arguments with quotes from Napoleon and Rommel. Nevertheless, the Boss supported my plan to put snipers on wheels, and I wasn’t going to let some S-3 regimental operations officer, even a tough dude like McCoy, stop me. I didn’t think anything could.

  On September 11, 2001, our eighth wedding anniversary was less than a month away. My wife was in the kitchen, and I was getting out of the shower to start another day in Marine paradise. We would take our kids to day care, then Kim would go to her teaching job and I would head off for another argument or two with McCoy.

  The telephone rang, and I picked it up in the bedroom.

  No hello. “Turn on the television set!” It was the battalion commander’s wife, who was running the home front while her husband had the troops in Okinawa. “We’re being attacked!”

  I snapped the power button on the remote, and New York swam into view on CNN. A tower of the World Trade Center was on fire, and as I watched, a big jetliner slammed into the second tower. I was stunned into disbelief and silence for a moment. “OK,” I said, and hung up the telephone, then jumped into my uniform and sped to the base, growing angrier by the minute. I didn’t know who had done this, but they were not going to get away with it.

  A savage typhoon had stalled over Okinawa, where it was now about nine o’clock at night at Camp Schwab, the northernmost base on the island. A few poor bastards were pulling outside guard duty in the storm, while most of the battalion’s senior officers were in Korea for a conference. One major and a bunch of lieutenants were left in charge at the camp, including Casey, the executive officer of Kilo Company. He finished checking his e-mail, went to his room, and turned on the radio. At first, he thought he was listening to some War of the Worlds kind of fake broadcast. He quickly called his four platoon leaders together for a briefing, and someone found a television set in time for them all to see that another plane had crashed into the Pentagon.

  Soon after that, Threat Condition Delta was ordered by President Bush. That meant Marines were to “man the lines,” but there was little that the men of the mighty Bull could do other than snarl at the television set and check in by radio with the near-empty battalion headquarters. The word came down to just sit tight until things got sorted out, because it was pretty unlikely that Camp Schwab was going to be attacked that night. The twenty-five-year-old lieutenant and his fellow officers settled down to watch over their flock as the bad news unfolded. They felt helpless. It was a strange feeling.

  Casey had come a long way to reach the Rock, on the far side of the world from his home in sunny Florida. He had grown up in the northwest section of Orlando, between the ocean at New Smyrna Beach and Disney World. As a kid, he visited the magical universe created by Walt Disney so many times he was almost on a first-name basis with Mickey Mouse.

  Great distances did not trouble him, for Casey was almost migratory by nature. His father was from Michigan, his mother from Tennessee. Casey had been born in Chattanooga on September 3, 1976. A few years later, the family, now including a younger brother, moved to Florida, and from the third grade until he left for college, he lived in a 1,500-square-foot three-bedroom home that his mom had decorated with Mexican tiles. The family pets started small, with a basset hound, but by the time Casey left home, their pet was a 180-pound Newfoundland named Bailey, who liked to rest his huge head on the dining room table.

  Casey once told me, “When I think of my childhood, it was complete normalcy.” His mother was a nurse, and his father became director of budgeting at a hospital and was fascinated by the early wave of home computers. He provided his boys some nifty games while he worked up a business in computer consulting for medical practices. That was Casey’s first step into engineering, and he never stopped.

  He enjoyed sports but was more of a bookish kid, and reading Hemingway and Kerouac was more appealing than learning to surf. With a swimming pool in almost every backyard in the neighborhood, he and his friends didn’t need to go to the ocean to while away a summer. What he was really good at, and enjoyed, was the math and science classes in school, where he could make intricate sets of numbers add up, the formulas made sense, and attention to detail paid off with correct answers. A physics teacher guessing the future occupations of some students looked at Casey and said, “Engineer.”

  He followed that very path, and narrowed his college choices to the University of Illinois and the University of California at Berkeley, although he had also been accepted at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Georgia Tech. His parents, both Republicans, quickly weeded the free-spirited Berkeley out of the possibilities, and Casey went to Illinois. He would graduate cum laude from the top structural engineering school in the country.

  That’s also where his life changed dramatically and what he calls “the duality of me” emerged. He was paying his way through college with a Naval ROTC scholarship when he realized there was more to life than calculus and physics. It’s hard for me to believe today, because Casey stands more than six feet tall and is a muscular 190 pounds, but he was small in high school. Reading all of those books had instilled a yearning for adventure, and in his sophomore year he decided to test himself physically and to become a Marine—not just any kind of Marine but an infantry officer, a grunt.

  He graduated in 1999, into a world that was generally at peace, and started his climb through the tough Marine training schools. Now, on this historic day, that was all over, and he found himself on Okinawa, with a typhoon howling outside, watching burning buildings on television and hearing President Bush tell the nation that its military forces were at the highest state of readiness. He had wanted adventure, and now, he had found it.

  Nine-eleven put an end to my dream for a Mobile Sniper Strike Team, at least for a while, and I didn’t care. Even had it been authorized that day, it still would have taken another year to get off the ground, and now there was a risk that it had become my own personal albatross. We were suddenly planning for war, and I worried that I was going to be left behind, shuffling papers, while a shooting scrape was going on.

  I went into a big staff meeting that day where contingency plans were being thrown down, changing hourly as more information arrived. Twenty-nine Palms was never far from alert status anyway, and things started clicking together rapidly. Afghanistan quickly rose to the top of the list of potential targets because it was the home nest of the Taliban, which supported the terrorist network that staged the attacks on America. Out came more maps, more studies, more plans.

  In a quieter moment, I cornered Colonel Hummer to make my pitch to get into the fight, but before I could say anything, he told me, “Calm down. You’re going to Afghanistan with us as my chief scout/sniper.” That was just what I wanted to hear.

  The Afghanistan campaign started in early October 2001, and Northern Alliance forces supported by U.S. advisers took the capital of Kabul in November. Kandahar, the last stronghold of those Taliban nutcases, fell in December.

  Meanwhile, far above our pay grades, another sort of war was being waged within the polished hallways of the Pentagon in Washington. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld had come into office in 2001 with a burning desire to restructure the U.S. military into a more mobile force, and the Army generals were balking at the rapid-deployment scheme. Afghanistan became a laboratory in which each side would try to prove it was right. While some Army Green Berets had helped direct air strikes in the north, and elements of the 10th Mountain Division came over from Uzbekistan to secure two northern airfields,
the first regular American combat unit to enter Afghanistan was the Marine Expeditionary Force that flew in from five aircraft carriers parked in the Arabian Sea to capture a southern base on November 25, 2001. They had been parked offshore with everything they needed for a long fight, from armored attack vehicles to water purification facilities. Rumsfeld and his top civilian assistants saw the swift, effective deployment of the Marines as proof of their argument for radical changes. The Army chain of command was not impressed.

  Ultimately, the Afghanistan campaign did not involve our regiment. Our job was to get ready for whatever came next, and we set about training like we had never trained before. President Bush, in his State of the Union speech in January 2002, labeled Iraq, Iran, and North Korea an “axis of evil” and accused them of supporting terrorism and having weapons of mass destruction.

  When the 3/4 battalion returned home from Okinawa in February, new and secret contingency plans were already showing that the next big strike probably was going to be in Iraq, just the kind of sandbox terrain the Bull knew so well. While the 3/4 had a good idea of where they would be going, I still wasn’t sure that I would be with them, because my regimental assignment left me in limbo while my buddies were preparing to fight.

  Then, in early May, I almost had a heart attack when the battalion got a new commanding officer, none other than my old nemesis Lieutenant Colonel Bryan McCoy. All of those arguments we had had over the mobile sniper teams rose to haunt me, and my spirits sank like a rock. McCoy did not help things by hooking me back into the fold to be the gunnery sergeant for the battalion’s Headquarters and Supply Company. I recoiled at the thought. Me, the combat veteran who wanted nothing more than to be out in front of the action with my sniper rifle, held back as the “Gunny” of the Hotdog and Soda Company, to shepherd those freaks and geeks into making sure all the real warriors had everything needed to fight a war, from rifle ammunition to toilet paper.

  The only person who felt as bad as I did was Casey, who arrived back in 29 Palms only to be snatched away from his rifle company and named the H&S executive officer and its interim commander. But he was immediately dispatched to still another school, and I was handling the company on my own.

  In reality, being a Marine company gunnery sergeant is a prestigious job and a good position for promotion, and I might have been more than willing to do it—if we had not been heading for war. Now I was frustrated and hated the idea, so I marched over to confront McCoy. His desk was the size of an aircraft carrier, but he was so large that it seemed a perfect fit. Early summer sunlight blasted through the windows as I sat down, wondering just how much damage I might have caused by arguing with him so much during the past months.

  “I want some other job, sir, not H&S,” I said. “Anything but H&S.”

  “Sorry, Staff Sergeant Coughlin. I need you right where you are,” he said, chomping the cigar.

  “I’m a sniper, sir!”

  “You’re my H&S Company gunnery sergeant!”

  I paused a moment, then played my ace. “Sir, I’ve got enough time in that I can still shift to another battalion.” I was ready to walk, to actually leave the battalion, something I never thought I would say. But if it would get me into the shooting war, I would do it.

  McCoy can be something of a Jekyll and Hyde character, and he let his more reasonable side take over rather than giving vent to the warfighter side. He had a job to do, he needed me, and anyway, he already was a step ahead and had plans much different than I had imagined.

  “I’ve got an H&S company that doesn’t have a commanding officer right now,” the lieutenant colonel reasoned. “Your executive officer is gone for the Mountain Leaders Course, which leaves the company understrength and leaderless. That means you take over. We’re getting ready for a war, Staff Sergeant, and we both have a lot of work to do. Don’t let your vanity get in the way of what’s really important.”

  “But it means that I’ll be back in the rear with the gear when we go over, sir. I can’t do that.” I could almost feel the sniper rifle being taken from my hands.

  McCoy blew a big cloud of smoke. “Look, Jack. You work with me here, and get us to Kuwait, and I promise to let you go play when we go to war. I know and respect your abilities as a sniper, and when the bullets start flying, I promise that you are going to shoot people.”

  I took the deal.

  6

  The Wait

  The massive American military juggernaut was beginning to stir, and although our powerful 3/4 battalion was but one of the players, we trained as if we were the only unit involved. Our lives depended on it. The early plans called for a fast-moving war in Iraq, which meant our Headquarters and Supply people would move right along with the front line and sometimes would be in the midst of the shooting. So by early August 2002, when Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein warned that any attackers would “carry their coffins on their backs,” we were well along the road to turning our freaks and geeks into a team of fighters.

  Marines are taught from their earliest days that their rifle is their most treasured possession, for they stake their lives on it, and they become so intimate with the weapon that they can take it apart and put it back together blindfolded, and do so with precision. Then they progress up the chain of arms to become equally adept with a bewildering armory of other weapon systems—from the M249 SAW (a light machine gun) to the M203, M9, SMAW, M240G, AT4, Javelin and TOW missiles, and hand grenades. A Marine loves to pull a trigger.

  That had become our baseline assumption when Casey returned from the Mountain Leaders Course and joined First Sergeant Norm Arias and me in getting the Headquarters and Supply Company ready for combat. You should never go to war with anyone who cannot cover your back, and having someone you trust around during a firefight provides a sense of peace unknown in the normal course of life.

  Our men were supposed to be Marines, not secretaries, although they were secretaries. And truck drivers. And mechanics. And radio operators. We laid out training packages that demanded they could use their specialized skills when on those jobs but also could stay alive in a combat environment.

  A small tactical headquarters team, the “Tac,” would move at the front to direct the fight and would be closely followed by the “Main” headquarters, which was linked to the higher commands and other units, controlled the medical evacuation procedures, and did the battle planning. Then came the “combat trains” of supplies and backups needed to keep the whole thing rolling. The best way to stall a military attack is to destroy the leadership, communications, and logistics, which meant that our H&S Company, which had all three, was prime meat.

  We sent nine of the guys off to school to learn how to handle the heavy machine guns, and our drivers were drilled in how to get in and out of their trucks while under fire. If someone bitched about sweating while we were training out in the 29 Palms desert, Sergeant Arias jumped on them, barking, “Quit whining like little bitches! Get your warrior hat on and get ready to kick some ass. You’re going to be right up front, and you’ve got to protect yourselves.” When Normy speaks, people listen. He is a tough little Filipino with a stocky body sculpted by weight lifting, and his dark eyes can be filled with humor or malice, depending upon what he thinks of you. There is little nuance with Normy, and he can be as intimidating as hell. Iraq would prove that he was exactly right about the dangers, because the country’s long and empty roads became fertile killing grounds for guerrillas who ambushed American convoys with roadside bombs that tore apart both trucks and bodies. We wanted to be sure that our Marines knew how to fight back.

  The bureaucracy worked against us, since every hour we had our guys training was exactly equal to an hour taken away from their specialties. A delicate balancing act was necessary to weigh their vital support jobs against the need to polish the skills that would keep them alive long enough to do those jobs. By the time we were done, the 228 Marines of H&S were fully competent trigger pullers.

  In the final months of 2002, everyone
became familiar with the dreaded term “weapons of mass destruction,” and we stepped up the training needed to meet the threats posed by nuclear, chemical, and biological agents. There was no doubt in my own mind that Hussein, who had used poisons to quell a rebellion among his own people, would also use them against us.

  “Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction,” Vice President Dick Cheney told the Veterans of Foreign Wars in August. A few weeks later, President Bush challenged the United Nations to confront what he said was a “grave and gathering danger” by giving Hussein a final deadline to abandon his WMDs. If Hussein did not comply, the president warned, the United States was prepared to act, alone if necessary.

  Iraq responded by offering to allow UN weapons inspectors unconditional access to suspected weapons sites, but Washington dismissed the offer as merely another stalling “tactic that will fail.” The Bush administration sought quick congressional action on a resolution that authorized U.S. military action against Iraq.

  On November 8, the United Nations Security Council unanimously adopted Resolution 1441, which demanded that Iraq disarm. In early December, Iraq delivered to the UN a monstrous twelve-thousand-page document that stated the country had no WMDs nor any current programs to develop them. A week later, while the massive document was still being analyzed, Secretary of State Colin Powell told the press, “We said at the very beginning that we approached it with skepticism, and the information I have received so far is that skepticism is well-founded. There are problems with the declaration.”

  To me, all of the political crossfire meant only that war was by now a virtual certainty and that it was drawing closer. We received our deployment orders to Kuwait over the Christmas holidays.