How did I escape? With difficulty. How did I plan this moment? With pleasure.
—Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo
Mogadishu Airport, 1995
Now all hell broke loose on the Mogadishu Airport runway.
Another jeep showed up with a DShK on a pintle mount on back, the dude manning the thing shooting directly at them—DNK, DNK, DNK, DNK, DNK! Those .51 cal DShK rounds made a hell of a racket, and they were landing damn close, too close. No time for careful aim.
Alex swung the Beast and rushed a shot at the guy.
The jeep took off.
“You hit the sidewall,” called his spotter, “right above the tire, between the gunner’s legs.” Good enough.
A moment later someone behind Alex shouted, “Everybody down!”
As they all ducked down an RPG shot straight over their heads, barely a meter above them. To Alex it sounded like a jet plane flying directly overhead. It exploded in the air behind them.
They were now also taking fairly effective small arms fire from several directions. The scene had degraded into full-out hostilities. Pepper spray and foam were most definitely not going to cut it.
Alex looked down to the southwest. All right, he thought, what’s the biggest threat? Quickly scanning the area, he spotted a Somali with an RPG, running low along the tarmac and heading for a building. Cover and concealment. If he reached the building he would be safe, and he could wreak havoc on them.
He tried to lead his target, but there just weren’t enough mils in the scope to lead this guy. He was running full speed, and he was fast.
Alex gave it his best from-the-hip estimate and sent off a round.
“Hit behind him,” shouted his spotter.
“Building is at seven hundred yards!” called out another teammate who had a range finder on the spot.
As quickly as he could, Alex dialed in the dope, reloaded—bolt, eject, slide, slam, ratchet—and got back on the gun. Through his eyepiece, he just managed to catch sight of the guy as he disappeared behind the corner of the building.
He took a breath, placed his crosshairs about 1 mil back from the corner of the building, about three feet off the ground … and waited.
Five seconds.
Ten seconds.
Fifteen … twenty … Alex stayed frozen as a statue, holding the Beast as steady as he could … twenty-five …
At about thirty seconds the man with the RPG stepped cautiously out from around the corner. His pelvis was directly in Alex’s crosshairs. He dropped carefully to one knee, raised his RPG tube, and aimed it directly toward Alex. Now Alex’s crosshairs were directly on his sternum.
BOOM!
The round cracked and sped away.
An instant later a bright spark flew up from the man’s chest: the incendiary round exploding as it made contact. The RPG gunner was gone.
And that was it.
Like a ferocious spring thunderstorm suddenly abating, the deadly spatter of small arms fire began to dry up and disappear.
A few minutes later some little kids ran out onto the runway, picked up the RPG tubes lying there, and started pointing them at the Americans. Alex didn’t know if they were just kids, screwing around, or if this was a conscious tactical ploy on someone’s part, an attempt to get the American intruders to shoot a kid, thus inflaming the locals and sparking off another Battle of Mogadishu.
Whatever it was, they didn’t fall for it.
The kids soon tired of their game and left.
Shahikot Valley, 2002
By day nine, the majority of the fighting in the Shahikot Valley was over, and entire units of American soldiers were being recalled from the valley. Operation Anaconda was winding down. Tim and Rob were up on the ridge, lying prone, side by side, glassing distant enemy positions, looking for whatever targets might still be there.
Suddenly Tim grabbed Rob’s head and smashed it down into the ground. “Stay down!” he shouted.
Rob just had time to wonder what the hell Tim was doing when he heard a loud THUD.
After a moment, they both lifted their heads and looked around. About thirty meters away a massive bomb was lodged in the ground, tail up.
“Jayyyysuss!” said a voice emerging from a nearby trench: B Company, U.S. 101st Airborne. An American soldier climbed out, walked over to the thing, and kicked it.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa!” Rob called out. “We don’t have to tempt fate here, do we?”
It was a five-hundred-pound American bomb, the kind a B-52 might drop. The kind a B-52 had dropped, just now. On them. For whatever reason Rob will never know, it just hadn’t gone off.
He looked at Tim, both of them thinking back to the American sniper round that zipped right between them their second day in the valley, missing them both by inches. Friendly fire. Blue on blue.
The closest they’d come to dying had been at the hands of their own team.
Husaybah, 2004
By the time Jason’s team and the two platoons, Lima 2 and Kilo 1, reached the train station at the southern edge of the city, the rest of the battalion had just arrived from Al Qaim, and CAAT teams were loading up to move into the city to sniff out and stamp out pockets of the armed offensive.
Jason and his team started hitting the rooftops, moving through the city as overwatch for their platoon. It was a complex and exhausting sequence. They would come off a roof to kick down doors with the platoon, help out where they could at the street level, make sure no one was coming up on their backs, then hop back up onto the roof again to scout the area. And it was a moving element, combing through the city, so in a short time the platoon would move on to a new area of influence—at which point the snipers would have to scramble down off that rooftop, run and slingshot past the platoon, always keeping their own 360 degrees of immediate danger in consideration, and get to high ground so they could cover the unit as they entered their new location … a game of leapfrog as played in hell.
And it lasted for hours, nonstop, right through the hottest part of the day, when temperatures hit 110 degrees—running up and down stairs, jumping across rooftops and ledges, climbing into small windows, and always covering, always maintaining security, always watching. Jason had never before experienced such a grueling gauntlet. Hell Week in sniper school now seemed like a summer day’s fun at Coney Island.
Armed skirmishes continued throughout the day.
When nightfall came, they switched to NVGs (night vision goggles) and kept going.
The shift in visibility made identification much harder. With close to two thousand troops moving through the thickly settled square mile of the city, not everyone was on the same radio frequency. It was chaos at times.
These guys had been briefed in Al Qaim that they were coming in to pull this company out of a major offensive. Things tend to get exaggerated when you’re briefed on something like this. No doubt they’d heard, “Shit’s going down, blowing up everywhere, bodies everywhere!” They were hyped as hell rolling in there, and anyone on a rooftop was going to be in one dangerous position. Marines tend to shoot first and then ask questions, especially in a situation like this one.
At one point Jason, Mavica, and DelFiorentino suddenly found themselves hugging the concrete as automatic rounds tore at the lip of the roof they were on, saying, “Please, God, let them stop.” A CAAT team had seen silhouettes moving around up there on the rooftop and started lighting everything up with their .50 cals.
Getting these guys to stop was easier said than done. Reaching them meant getting on the radio with the snipers’ watch commander, who would get in communication with another guy, who would get in communication with the guys in the CAAT. Jason didn’t have a lot of confidence in that whole telephone game. Instead, they popped some chem lights and started yelling, “Hey, stop shooting at us!”
That seemed to work.
It wasn’t the last time that night they were shot at by friendlies. And they were shot at by quite a few unfriendlies, too. It was a long night.
They stayed out in the city, fighting block to block, until close to midnight, when things finally calmed down enough so they could come back to the rear to resupply. They’d shot a lot of rounds and needed to restock on ammunition, as well as get some water and chow.
By the time they arrived back at base, there were orders waiting for them to go back out again with another platoon. Command had broken the city down into distinct areas of responsibility for each company and unit. Battalion was going to stay, and all roughly two thousand marines were going to spend the next day doing a complete sweep of the city, building by building, door to door.
At this point, the snipers had been fighting for about fourteen hours straight. They were just getting started.
Helmand Province, 2009
After hours of crouching in that cramped, shallow hole in the ground, fighting for their lives, Nick Irving and Mike Pemberton were just about to jump to their feet and make a run for it when Derek, the recce operators’ team leader, said, “Hey, we’ve got some guys coming in!”
A machine gun team from Second Platoon who’d been hearing their calls over the comms had decided to break away from the firefight and come help get them out of there.
Nick looked over his left shoulder and saw them coming, five guys, two with M4 rifles and three with Mark 48 machine guns, screaming and laying down a blanket of gunfire even as they ran at full sprint.
That’s one seriously brave bunch of dudes, he thought.
The five rangers came plowing in to where they lay, rolling on the ground. Nick recognized the lead gunner, a buddy of his named Ben Kopp. He couldn’t remember ever being so happy to see another human being. He’d have to remember to tell him that, later on when things calmed down and they were out of this mess.
The machine gun team bought them a little more time and some serious firepower. Without Kopp’s team roaring in for that epic save, Nick doubts they would have been alive more than another few minutes. But they were still sitting ducks, and they still had to get out of there. Time to make the dash, back to where the machine gun team had just come from. They were back at the Butch-and-Sundance, Bolivian-army option—but at least this time they had Ben Kopp and his machine gun team with them.
Derek quickly organized their sequence, who would go first, who next, right on down the line to Irving and Pemberton, who would be the last two in line. He pulled out his smoke grenade, popped and tossed it—and Nick watched in disbelief as the gusting wind caught at the billow of smoke and pulled it away in exactly the wrong direction.
So much for cover.
Not that it mattered: by the time the machine gun team and recce operators had all taken off and it was finally his and Pemberton’s turn to go, the smoke was long dissipated anyway. And they were still being pounded by overwhelming firepower.
They were pretty much back where they’d been just a few minutes ago. They looked at each other with looks that said, Okay, time to die.
“Hey, tell my wife I love her,” Pemberton said.
“Fuck that, man,” replied Nick. “You tell her yourself.”
They pounded fists a second time, then lunged to their feet and began running for their lives. As they started sprinting they heard the sounds of a very specific gunfire within the din of the ongoing firefight—sssnap! sssnap! sssnap! That wasn’t just the continuing barrage.
It was the freaking Chechen.
Fuck! thought Nick. Probably back at his window again, now that we’re were on the run.
When you’re being sighted by a sniper you don’t want to run in a straight line, because if you do, all you’re doing is helping him estimate your lead so he can drop a bullet out just ahead of you on your path so that by the time it reaches your distance, you’ve just run smack in to meet it. Instead, you have to move in as unpredictable a pattern as possible. Which goes completely against your instincts, because doing that also means you’re significantly slowing down your forward movement, prolonging the amount of time you’re exposed. Which is crazy—but you have to, because if you just make a beeline and run like hell, you’ll be dead for sure.
As they ran Nick repeated the mantra to himself, Zigzag! Zigzag!
The two ran as fast as they could, over rocky hardpan laced with muddy irrigation ditches, the worst kind of terrain for running; Nick says he doesn’t remember his feet ever touching the ground. It felt like they flew over the whole eight football fields’ worth of zigzag sprint, sssnaps! and splashes of dirt all around them.
They stopped running when they reached a small ditch, where they joined up with a small element of ten rangers from the platoon. The rest of the force was back inside a safe house they’d commandeered about two hundred yards farther to the southeast, most of them up on the roof, engaged in firefights. The Alamo, they’d dubbed the place. Nick lived in San Antonio. He’d seen the real Alamo up close and personal and knew its history. Not an encouraging image.
“You got any water?” Nick panted. “I need water, bad.” He’d had nothing to drink since running out of water on that endless march through the sand the night before.
Kopp pulled some water from his backpack. Nick drank half and gave the rest to Pemberton. Another one to thank you for later, Kopp.
They started moving. Nick saw a guy with an AK-47 pop his head around a corner about fifty yards away. He grabbed Pemberton and plopped Dirty Diana right down on his shoulder, using him as a human bipod. Pemberton understood and stayed still. Nick watched his inhale and exhale and timed his own breathing to his partner’s to make sure he could compensate correctly for the rising and falling of the gun barrel.
BOOM.
The AK guy went down.
“Hey, man,” said one of the machine gun team, “take formation.”
Nick ran up to the front of formation and started leading the twenty-odd guys—recce operators, Kopp’s machine gun team, and the ten rangers they’d met up with—out to the Alamo.
From this spot they had about one hundred yards left to get to the safe house. It’s only a hundred yards, he thought. We can make it. We’ve come this far. The days of no sleep, the hours of constant gun battle, were all catching up with him, and he made a critical miscalculation: he led them along a small ridgeline with a ravine in front and a line of trees behind it.
They were silhouetting themselves along a tree line.
Husaybah, 2004
The citywide sweep began at first light. Lieutenant Colonel Lopez was not going to let up even for a moment, and he was not pulling any punches. No more killing ’em with rainbows, no more soccer-ball diplomacy, and definitely no more looking for goat milk smugglers. They were locking this place down, tight. Show of force.
Before long, Jason’s group found a carefully planted 105mm shell. He radioed the EOD (explosive ordnance disposal) team, and they set up their position and waited. And waited.
No one had expected or planned for any kind of operation near this size or scope, and battalion had only one EOD team for the entire battalion. That’s one team, two guys and two little bomb-disposal robots, for a citywide door-to-door sweep involving more than 1,600 marines and a population of 100,000. And there were IEDs stashed throughout the city.
So they waited. And waited. As the sun rose, it became insanely hot, Iraqi hot.
The longer they waited there in position, the more time some insurgent was out there with his hand on the trigger, and this guy was no doubt calling up his reinforcements, saying, “Okay, they found the IED but they’re held up here, so get some guys over here right now, they’re sitting targets.”
Sure enough, soon men were creeping up on them and taking shots.
Close to three hours later, the EOD team finally showed up, looking exhausted and absolutely wasted. Delgado felt bad for these guys. They’d been hoofing around the city, blowing up four or five other calls in different locations before they got to this one. They’d lost one of their robots, so now they were just two guys and one robot.
They examined the situation, carefully blew up the IED, then gathered their robot and other equipment, mounted up, and headed off to their next appointment.
Just as they left, a barrage of machine gun fire opened up. Evidently the explosion had telegraphed their position. Time for another gunfight.
Still, this was nothing like the day before. It was clear to Jason that the insurgents had lost their prime advantage, which was their efficient and highly integrated web of communication. Now, rather than being a well-prepared and highly coordinated citywide force, the insurgents had been buttoned up into isolated pockets. The massive number of IEDs planted around the city were all bombs they had planned to detonate the day before at strategic moments as their offensive unfolded. There were also caches of additional weapons hidden in multiple locations throughout Husaybah, waiting for the mujahedeen to grab and use throughout the day. But the American response—far swifter and far more ferocious than the enemy had expected—had crushed them before they could do so. While they had resupply pockets stashed all around the city, they couldn’t get to them in force.
Jason and his snipers continued taking small arms fire throughout the day, as they methodically swept through, block by block, going door to door like an urban police force on a TV procedural. (“Sergeant Delgado, Third Battalion Fourth Marines, ma’am, open the door, we just want to talk to you.” Yeah, right.) Later that day they found a second IED and had to halt their part of the sweep to stay on station and babysit the bomb, while the EODs ground through their workload.
Jason estimates they must have gone through two hundred blocks of C-4 that day.
Helmand Province, 2009
As soon as Nick’s group hit that little tree-lined ravine—POP-POP-POP-POP-POP!—they were ambushed. These were no high-speed rounds breaking the sound barrier, these were machine gun rounds exploding at them from no more than thirty-five meters away. Danger close.
Nick did an immediate cartwheel into the ravine. They all dove in. The thing was full of funky water and filth, but it was better than being shot.
Dirty Diana was now completely submerged and full of water. Nick spotted one fighter over the lip of the ravine, really close, put the crosshairs on his face, and squeezed the trigger—and a stream of water flew out of the barrel. Fortunately, a bullet came out with it, and nailed the guy.
Then there were more guys, and more guys. Nick realized they were literally coming out of the ground—they had established underground positions. Was this real, or some nightmarish vision?
It was real, and it was like playing Whac-A-Mole. Fighters kept pouring out of the ground, and Nick kept shooting them. He couldn’t even see exactly where they were, he just saw flashes come out of the ground and shot them. The rangers were all floundering around in the water.
Suddenly Nick heard an extremely loud sssssNAP! right next to his ear. For an instant he thought one of his team had fired with his rifle right next to Nick’s head, and he was about to scream at the guy to back off, but then realized there was no one there. It wasn’t someone shooting an inch from his head. It was a solo high-speed round snapping past an inch from his head. If he’d been standing an inch or two to the left, he wouldn’t have a face anymore.
That fucking Chechen.
He was still out there. He’d followed their escape path and was zeroed back in on Nick. He was now more than seven hundred yards away, and he was still popping head shots at that distance. This fucker was good.
And in the next moment Nick realized it wasn’t him the sniper was after, not anymore. Now it was the machine gunners.
He heard a loud THUD, like the sound you’d get if you swung a baseball bat hard into a punching bag, and then he heard a scream that curdled his blood.
“Fuck, I’m hit! I’m hit!”
You can tell when someone’s been nicked, and when someone’s been hit bad. This guy was hit bad.
Nick looked over to his left and saw Ben Kopp, about twenty feet away, a twenty-foot arc of blood spraying from his femur. He went down.
The medic on the recce team, a tall guy named Melvin, took off toward Kopp, half running and half swimming. Bullets snapping all around his head, completely ignored them. “Bravest guy I’ve ever seen,” recalls Nick. He took off his medical kit, threw it toward Kopp, and let it float there so he could move faster. He reached Kopp moments later, opened his bag, and went to work.
Nick waded over to the platoon leader, Kent, and said, “Sir, we’ve got to get the fuck out of here—you want us to move out and secure you to Alamo?” To make himself heard over the gunfire he had to get up close and yell right in Kent’s ear.
As he spoke, he felt a warm splash hit him.
His first thought: bullets hitting water, sending up a spray.
His second thought: no, that wasn’t it. A high-speed round had hit Kent in the upper chest. That was Kent’s blood splashing up onto Nick’s face.
The Chechen was systematically taking out their key personnel.
Nick froze: went into shock.
Pemberton took one look and saw what was happening, sloshed over, and stuck his finger in the bullet hole. Melvin came over and now started working on Kent, who was meanwhile screaming at Nick, “Dude, fucking kill these guys.”
Nick snapped to, turned back around, and started engaging targets.
The water around them was turning red from Ben Kopp’s blood. Melvin had gotten one tourniquet on him, but that wasn’t doing it; he wrapped on another. Kopp asked for morphine but Melvin couldn’t give him any; he’d already lost too much blood. He wrapped the gunner in a sort of carry bag and strapped him on.
They told Nick to take up the rear formation, make sure no one came up behind them, and started spraying up their back side. Pemberton took point. They had to get Kopp to the safe house, pronto.
They set off along the ravine, still getting shot at, made about eighty yards, until they reached a point where the Alamo was right in front of them, no more than twenty yards away—but it was all open, completely naked terrain. No cover at all.
Twenty yards.
Nick and Pemberton told the others to wait there with Kopp, who was by now fading in and out, while they cleared the way to the Alamo. They looked at each other. There was no cover, nothing but flat open ground between them and the safe house. Their clothes felt incredibly heavy now, soaked with water and filth and blood. They knew they were probably not going to make it all the way across.
Butch. Sundance. Bolivian army.
Time to go.
“Hey, man,” said Nick, “let’s get this over with.”
For a third time: the fist bump.
Once again: they ran.
The moment they got out in the open it felt to Nick like an earthquake struck. They had run straight into another major ambush! He hit the ground and screamed out, “Shit!”
Pemberton looked back at him. “Dude, are you hit? Are you all right?”
“Yeah, man,” shouted Nick. “I’m all right, get down! We’re getting hit!”
And Pemberton said, “No, you crazy bastard, those are our guys. That’s cover fire.”
Nick looked up. From the rooftop of the Alamo an entire line of machine guns from the platoon had all opened up at once, making the earth shake. Pemberton laughed as Nick picked himself up. Nick was laughing a little, too.
Husaybah, 2004
After the second IED had been dispatched, Jason Delgado slipped away from the main group and skirted off to a side street. He’d heard what sounded like harassing gunfire, from fairly close by, and wanted to shut it down.
He popped his head around the corner. The side street sloped upward, leading up a small hill. Jason slipped out, low to the ground, and hid behind a small pile of trash on the corner. Using the trash as an ad hoc ghillie suit, he began slowly creeping up the street.
After he’d gone a fair distance he cautiously came around the edge of his mobile trash heap and peered down his scope.
There.
He found the source of the gunfire: a lone guy peeking out from a cement gate ledge in front of a house and shooting sporadically down the street at a unit of marines from the platoon Jason was attached to.
Jason sized up the situation. For two days now he’d been banging around in ditches, running up and down cement stairs, and jumping on and off of rooftops. He had no idea if his M40’s zero was still solid or not. This guy was a serious hazard; he hadn’t hit anyone yet, but if he kept hiding out there and shooting away, it was only a matter of time. Delgado did not want to lose this guy. He wanted to take him down with his first shot.
He needed to shoot something first, to make sure his boomstick was on point.
There was a lamp on a cement post right at that guy’s range, in fact, just a few feet away from the guy. He took a shot at the lamp. It exploded. Incredibly, the guy didn’t seem to notice; he was too busy ducking in and out to avoid the marines firing back downrange in his direction.
The lamp had told Jason his zero was right on. All he had to do was watch and wait.
A half minute later, the man peeked out around the corner of that ledge.
Jason let a round fly and, just like the lamp, the man’s head exploded.
Jason called his unit over, staying where he was while they came, watching to make sure nobody else crept up on them. By the time the marines made their way down to the man’s house and he had joined up with them, there was no body there to be found, nothing but a blood trail where the body had been dragged away.
Two women came out of the house making a lot of noise and tried to keep the marines from entering. They went in anyway, and found a huge cache of weapons—RPKs, RPGs, explosives, a shitload of AK-47s.
They arrested the two women and brought them back to the base. It was the first time they’d arrested any women.
In the course of their door-to-door searches that day they found a lot of dead bodies inside houses, wounded fighters whose time ran out before their women could stitch them up successfully. This was war, Jason figured, and they had their own corpsmen, too. They just weren’t as good as ours.
By the end of that second day, April 18, the marines had killed an estimated three-hundred-plus insurgents in the city. They also finally tore down the infamous former Baath Party headquarters building, where Jason and his snipers had their first experience of the insanity of Husaybah months earlier, and where Captain Gannon had been killed along with four of his marines just the day before.
They laid C4 all around its foundation and blew the whole damn thing to pieces, took it to the ground.
A few days later the two women Jason arrested were released.
He was never again investigated for any shots he took.
Helmand Province, 2009
The Alamo was a big house with a ten-foot wall around it, big blue metal gates for the front door and back door. A ranger with a combat camera snapped a few shots of Nick’s and Pemberton’s faces as they came bursting in through that big blue gate, both covered in blood, faces white with fatigue and shock.
The machine gunners on the roof covered the rest of the group as they made the twenty yards in safely.
They managed to get a medevac in to take out Kopp, Kent, and Walkens, the sniper who’d been hit in the foot.
The rangers had held off the incoming fire like the pros they were for the last hour or however long they’d been there, but there were a lot of unhappy Taliban out there, and they needed some snipers to come in and take out targets for them. Nick and Pemberton were only too happy to oblige. They clambered up a makeshift ladder out onto the roof and started engaging targets.
Fought for another hour or so.
They talked about staying through the night, when their night vision would give them the advantage. But they were just about out of ammo. Nick was down to five or six rounds. Time to get out of there.
It was right about then that they got some disconcerting news.
There were no helicopters coming. The area was too hot; too much gunfire.
Time for backup: call the marines. When the marine commander was told their location he said, “Holy shit, you guys are in that area? Sorry. We can’t go in there with anything less than a brigade.”
Are you fucking kidding me? thought Nick. A brigade: that’s a few thousand men! So they’d been fighting it out there for close to eight hours now, about forty of them, and this guy was saying he couldn’t go in without a brigade? Nick stood there, trying to get this to compute. It wasn’t working.
“Sorry,” the message came back again. “We just can’t go in there. We can drive over to a rendezvous point nearby, but you’ll have to run out to us.”
The rendezvous point they gave was about one mile south of the Alamo.
“So let me get this straight,” Nick said out loud to nobody in particular. “Now, after all this, we have to leave our safe house and run a mile, through a hail of enemy gunfire, to go meet our rescuers with their trucks? Is that the deal?
That was, in fact, the deal.
Nick didn’t see how he could run a mile. He was so completely used up, he didn’t see how he could run a meter. And that mile was all through open terrain.
“Fuck it,” said one of the other guys. “We’ve gotta do it. Irv, you’ve got point. Pemberton, you cover our six.”
So Nick would be the first guy out of the safe house, the first guy to break into that sprint through a full mile of pure open terrain. Sure, why not?
They opened up that big blue metal door and Nick took off like a jackrabbit.
In an instant he started hearing it—sssnap! sssnap! sssnap!—all around him. A stray thought shot through his mind: I guess I’m about to find out how fast I can run a mile.
When you’re running past people in the middle of a firefight, you have to make split-second decisions as to whether they’re combatants or just ordinary citizens who happen to live there. They were running through a scatter of rural villages. There were people out there in the middle of the fields, with shovels and hoes, planting their carrots or poppies or whatever the hell they were doing, and Nick and his friends were staggering along, running for their lives while being shot at from behind, and they had to take the time and care to PID (positive-identify) these people.
Nick saw a guy pop up about fifty yards beyond the house, slipping out of a doorway with a rifle.
Guy with rifle. Roger that.
He broke formation, stepping out to the left, dropped down to one knee, and shot the guy while everyone ran past him.
Got back on his feet, took off, caught back up.
Saw another guy—guy with rifle—broke out, dropped to a knee, shot him. Caught up again.
And repeated that sequence a few more times throughout the run.
Finally they reached the waiting marines and their five Humvees. Five vehicles for forty guys. Okay. They piled in, Nick lying across four guys’ legs with a few more guys sitting on his head and legs and the Humvee’s marine machine gunner standing on his chest. Some of the rangers clung to the outsides of the Humvees.
They drove.
As they bounced along, Nick realized he wanted one thing: a dying man’s last cigarette. Only he wasn’t dying, he figured, he’d already died many times over that day. But he could still have the cigarette, right?
One of the marines lit a Marlboro Light and gave it to him. He smoked practically the whole thing in a single drag. When he tried to put it out, it fell inside his shirt and caught on fire. I’m on fire. Sure, why not? One of the rangers he was lying on top of reached up, poured out the contents of his CamelBak all over Nick’s back, and put him out.
* * *
Later on that afternoon, Alex Morrison noticed a Somali civilian walking out across the runway with four others trailing along behind him. The man was not armed, so the SEALs and marines left him alone, but they watched him carefully. When he hit the concertina wire the marines had set out as their defensive position, he followed it to where it dropped down a ten-foot cliff face behind them. He followed it down the cliff—and then started climbing over the concertina wire.
Crazy bastard. What the hell was he trying to do?
Some marines went over there with some pepper spray and a card with Somali phrases printed on it. They started calling out to the guy in Somali, trying to get him to back the fuck up.
He started yelling back at them, but then a wave hit him, pulling him down off the beachhead and into the water. Everyone assumed he could swim, but this turned out not to be the case. The man flailed around in the water for a short time, and then the water got really choppy and started carrying him farther out. There was nothing the marines or the SEALs could do but watch. They had been given strict orders not to go in the water, which was amply populated with sharks.
Whatever the man might have been hoping to accomplish, it didn’t happen. After another few minutes, he drowned, about fifty yards offshore.
As he floated there on the surface, Alex noticed seabirds landing on him. They weren’t eating him. They just looked happy to have something to sit on that wasn’t being blown up or shot at.
Late that night Alex and the others boarded an LCAC, climbed into their metal shipping container, took their benches in the dark, and felt themselves slip back out to sea.
* * *
Rob Furlong was struck by how different things felt when they got back to Bagram. When they’d first been there getting their orders some ten days earlier, they’d been just one more entity in the Coalition, a handful of unknown Canadians, anonymous in the crowd. Now they were practically celebrities. They found they could walk around into any tent lines, talk to any of these guys, and everyone knew who they were.
Rob was no military buff. Unlike Nick Irving, who idolized Carlos Hathcock and knew the details of his career the way a pro baseball fan knows his favorite player’s stats, Furlong was only dimly aware of the name, and certainly hadn’t memorized the stats. He didn’t know that Hathcock had held the world record for longest confirmed kill shot, at 2,250 meters, for decades. The idea that he’d just broken some sort of world record never occurred to him.
Ironically, the record Rob broke that day was not that set by Hathcock during Vietnam. The legendary marine’s record had already been smashed just two days earlier—by Arron Perry, Rob’s counterpart on 63 Alpha, the other Canadian team, when Perry took out a Taliban machine gunner manning a gun from the back of a truck at 2,310 meters.
“We’ll make you proud,” Ragsdale had told Colonel Stogran.
No idle threat.
Between the five of them, the Canadians had had a huge impact on the course of the operation and had earned enormous respect from their Coalition peers, and with it a powerful sense of brotherhood, a bond that carried on throughout their tour. Their performance in Anaconda also earned them all Bronze Stars, the medal for bravery that the U.S. military typically awards to outstanding warfighters from foreign units who serve alongside American troops.
“Their professionalism was amazing,” Lieutenant Overbaugh reported, calling the Canadians “a very large asset to the mission.”
Based in part on their experience in Anaconda, the Canadian sniper program incorporated detailed instruction in how to call in direct fire and close air support into their sniper training.
Less than twenty-four hours after arriving at Bagram, they were airborne again, on their way to another mission.
* * *
I asked Jason Delgado, after the whole battle was over, when all the smoke had cleared, what did the city of Husaybah look like? Like London after the Blitz?
“Believe it or not,” he said, “it looked exactly the same as before we started. Exactly the same.”
That’s the thing about Iraqi architecture: it’s solid concrete. Concrete stairways coming out of concrete walls. Concrete floors, concrete roof.
“You can send rockets into these fucking houses,” he said, “and they’ll stay on their foundations.”
Seemed like a hell of a metaphor.
After their two-day sweep of the city, things were relatively quiet for the next week and a half or so. Then it started raining 155mm mortar shells again. Soon IEDs were blowing up throughout the city and the pace of attacks accelerated. Jason saw a good deal more carnage over the following months. By his count, they lost thirty-two marines during his time there.
When their deployment came to an end a few months later, Jason and his teammates turned down their ride, choosing to avoid the main roads and instead slog their way through the desert the long way around to get to Al Qaim, where helos would ferry them to Al Asad to meet their flights home. Even so, they didn’t expect to make it out.
They’d seen too many of their guys hit by rockets and blown up by IEDs, says Jason. Why should they be any different?
* * *
Nick Irving says he still doesn’t know how they managed to survive the gauntlet of that last one-mile run to the marines’ Humvees. When they got back to that remote marine base and all started inspecting themselves for damage, every last one of them found multiple bullet holes in their clothes, yet somehow, with the exception of Ben Kopp and Kent, the platoon leader, none of them had actually been hit.
Later that afternoon Nick sat waiting for a transport bird to pick them up and take them back to rejoin their own platoon. There was still so much adrenaline coursing through his system that he was too buzzed to sleep. Finally, he started to drift off.
SSSSSNAPPP!
Nick sat bolt upright as a supersonic round whipped past, within inches of taking his head clean off at the shoulders. He grabbed Dirty Diana and leapt to his feet in a single clean movement and looked around at the other guys—
Who all sat stock-still, staring at him like he’d just shouted “Cocksucker!” in church. No sounds but the rasp of his own panting breath.
He slowly sat back down and tried to let himself drift off again.
Irving was finally out of the battle. It would be a long time for the battle to be out of him.