Shooter: The Autobiography of the Top-Ranked Marine Sniper by Gunnery Sgt. Jack, Capt. Casey Kuhlman, Donald A. Davis Coughlin Page A

not very sexy, but screw it up and confusion reigns.
    Our designated dispersal area was several miles from Safwan Hill, a big pimple in the desert on the Iraqi side of the border with Kuwait. The Iraqis used this dominant geographical feature as their southernmost observation post, and as dawn broke on March 17, they had a superb view of the powerful American force that was growing before their eyes. I knew this place only too well, as did other Marines and Army grunts who had chewed Iraqi sand before. When the fight started, Safwan Hill was to be pulverized.
    We guided in the rest of the battalion that afternoon, and for hours,wave after wave of Marines arrived in convoys that trailed sky-high rooster tails of dust. The Iraqis up on the hill must have been putting down their binoculars and packing their bags to get the hell out of there. It was after dark before our final elements arrived, and before anyone slept, we were lined up with all of our guns facing north.
     
    “MISSILE LAUNCH … MISSILE LAUNCH … MISSILE LAUNCHT!”
    We thought it was the fucking end of the world.
Shit! Where’s my gas mask?
We had gotten up after a few hours of brief, exhausted sleep and were still stumbling about in the darkness when the banshee cries from an Army Patriot missile defense battery’s loudspeakers erupted about two hours before dawn on March 18. The missile boys had set up shop a few hundred yards from our position without our hearing a sound and had just scared the hell out of us.
    We jumped over and onto each other in a mad scramble for gas masks and jammed them down tight over faces still lathered with shaving cream, believing that Saddam was about to hit us. Then came a loud “
ALL CLEAR
…
ALL CLEAR!
” and we stripped off the masks and happily took deep breaths of clean air. Our new neighbors played that game all day long, until we eventually stopped reacting.
    Even so, we all believed Iraq would probably smack us at some point with chemical and biological weapons. Our leaders had built much of the reason for this preemptive war around those weapons stockpiles, and we had trained hard for surviving them. For us, it was not a question of
if
… just
when.
Therefore, while we grew casual about paying attention to the frequent Patriot warnings, I was still glad to be wearing my MOPP (Mission Oriented Protective Posture)suit, which would give us some protection during an assault by unconventional weapons.
    The suit consisted of a jacket and matching overall pants, worn over our T-shirts and shorts. The activated charcoal lining provided an extra layer of insulation that was welcome on chilly nights. We carried masks and heavy rubber gloves that we could put on in less than eight seconds. Bulky booties completed the ensemble but were so clumsy and hot that we seldom wore them for more than a few minutes. Oddly, the MOPPs were of a mottled green pattern, so after wearing desert camouflage for months in Kuwait, we would enter Iraq in jungle colors.
    If Saddam tried to chem us, it would be no more than an inconvenience, because our suits provided good protection for our lungs against any aerosol weapon. Being slimed during a biological/persistent-chemical attack was worse, because those agents might eat right through boots and skin. If a nuke fell, then nothing would help, but we knew our deaths would result in Baghdad becoming a radioactive hole in the ground.
    We weren’t frightened by any of it, but we always wore the suits, because they took too long to put on when a warning came. They also took a long time to take off.
    Answering calls of nature meant you had to take off your flak jacket with its ceramic tile plates, then your bulky MOPP jacket, then the suspenders that held up the pants and the various clips that held everything together.
    As extra protection against WMD attacks, we had our Poultry Chemical Contamination Detectors, five pigeons named Silent Bob, Jay, Crazy Pete, Little Bastard, and Botulism, that lived