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Monday, Nov 9, 2009
A sniper with the 256th Brigade Combat Team.
The sniper was working the night shift at the command post. He was a tall, good-looking man who didn't have trouble getting girls back home. He showed me photographs on his computer, describing them in a deep Southern baritone. It was late and there weren't a lot of people around at that time of the night. Radios chirped and hissed in the next room with traffic from the patrols outside the wire as they made their way through the neighborhoods of western Baghdad. Satellite maps of the capital marked "SECRET" covered the walls of the trailer. It was a quiet night, and there were no roadside bombs or rocket attacks as the patrols called in their positions.
The soldier showed a picture of himself kneeling on the ground, surrounded by Iraqi men who were giving the camera the thumbs up. One of the young cousins was throwing a gang sign, his fingers spread out in a sideways "V." The men were smiling. One of the older brothers had his hand on the sniper's shoulder. In the foreground, laid out in front of the American, was his trophy, a dead fox.
The sniper explained to me that he had befriended the Shiite family in the photograph while his unit spent some days near the town of Taji. He was ordered to watch a road and posted on their roof. "They were so respectful and wanted to learn things about us, and learn about our culture. It was like we were very important people, stopping in at their house," he said with some amazement. It was one of his happiest memories of Iraq.
"On our last day at that position, while we were waiting to be extracted after midnight, we were sitting with the father, sons and cousins. Then the old man looked out and saw a fox near his chickens. I looked through my night vision system and saw the fox on a roof on the far side of a courtyard. The father said, 'Would you mind shooting the animal that is killing our chickens?' I said, 'Not a problem.' So I fired and it disappeared, but they didn't believe I hit it. I told the kid to go out and see for himself and he went out there and came back with the fox, smiling. The old man was so happy."
The sniper said he wanted to go back to see how the family was doing, but the unit changed locations and he couldn't keep his promise to return. He brought up more photographs of his sniper positions, and told me he could hit a quarter at 300 meters. It is a distance of nearly a thousand feet. The sniper also told me his first name was Joe.
Back home, Joe hunts white-tailed deer with a bow and arrows he carves out of cedar shafts. "You have to know how to stand," he said. "You only have 20 yards." Like most of the men in his unit who are from the deep South, he can talk about the woods for hours, and his descriptions of his favorite places are unusually vivid, but the world beyond the forests and bayous, the chain of command and military politics, makes him uncomfortable. In the war zone, Joe remains close to the noncommissioned officers he trusts and avoids officers as much as he can. Joe is the son of a fighter pilot who died a year after he returned from Vietnam. There have been soldiers in his family for generations. When he started talking, I could see that he was struggling to make sense of his experiences in Iraq.
Joe went through the pictures on his laptop one by one, talking about near misses where his hiding place was nearly discovered, and the hot days where he had to lie perfectly still while Iraqis walked a few feet away from his position.
We looked at photographs of Joe crouching in fields, surrounded by tall grass where he can barely be distinguished in his camouflage suit. In many of the shots, he's flipping off the camera. "That's just something we do," he told me. "I don't think you can use any of those pictures," he said and laughed.
Then he brought up a photograph of a white Daewoo Espero sedan on a Baghdad street. The sedan had a single bullet hole in the driver's side of the windshield. Behind the wheel there was a lifeless man, slumped in the seat with a shattered skull and a torrent of blood staining his shirt. The image carried a sudden shock of recognition and despair. The dead man behind the wheel of the car was my friend and colleague, Yasser Salihee.
The sniper lowered his voice when he talked about the pictures of the car and the man inside it. His self-assured manner disappeared and he became nervous. "Here is one of ours. I really hope he was a bad guy. Do you know anything about him?" Then he said, "See, I don't know if I should be talking about this."
"Did you fire the shot that killed him?" I asked.
"I don't know."
Joe said that it was true that he fired the shot through the Espero's windshield, but he wasn't positive if it was the lethal shot. There was no doubt that it was, but Joe seemed to be genuinely uncertain about it. It was clear that he did not want it to be true.
