Billy Summers

‘You must see your target but your target must not see you.’ Up told us that over and over. ‘And no matter what you’ve seen in the movies, snipers do not work alone.’

Even though it wasn’t Sniper School, Uppington put us in teams of two, spotter and shooter. I teamed with Taco and George teamed with Donk. I mention them because we ended up together in Fallujah, both Vigilant Resolve in April of ’04 and Phantom Fury that November. Me and Taco

Billy stops, shaking his head, reminding himself the dumb self is in the past. He deletes and starts again.

Taco and I switched back and forth during Firing Week, me shooting and him spotting, then him shooting and me spotting. George and Donk started that way, too, but Up told them to quit it. ‘You shoot, Dinner Winner. Cash, you just spot.’

‘Sir I would also like to shoot sir!’ Donk shouted. You had to shout when you addressed Up Yours. It was the Marine way.

‘And I would like to tear your tits off and shove them up your sorry ass,’ Up replied. So from then on, George was the shooter and Donk was the spotter in that pair. It stayed the same in Sniper School and in Iraq.

When Firing Week was almost over, Sergeant Uppington called me and Taco into his office, which wasn’t much more than a closet. He said, ‘You two are sorry fucking specimens, but you can shoot. Maybe you can learn to surf.’

That was how Taco and I found out we were being transferred to Camp Pendleton, and that’s where we finished our basic, which by then was mostly shooting because we were in training to be snipers. We flew to California on United Airlines. It was my first time in an airplane.

Billy stops. Does he want to write about Pendleton? He doesn’t. There was no surfing, at least not for him; how could there be when he never learned to swim? He did get himself a shirt that said CHARLIE DON’T SURF and wore it almost to tatters. He was wearing it the day he picked up the baby shoe and tied it to the belt loop on his right hip.

Does he want to write about Operation Iraqi Freedom? Nope. By the time he got to Baghdad, the war was over. President Bush said so, from the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln. He said the mission was accomplished, and that made Billy and the jarheads in his regiment ‘peacekeepers.’ In Baghdad he had felt welcomed, even loved. Women and children threw flowers. Men yelled nahn nihubu amerikaan, we love America.

That shit didn’t last long, Billy thinks, so never mind Baghdad, let’s go right to the suck. He starts writing again.

By the fall of 2003 I was stationed in Ramadi, still peacekeeping up a storm, although sometimes by then there was shooting and the mullahs had started adding ‘death to America’ to their sermons, which were broadcast from the mosques and sometimes from storefronts. I was 3rd Battalion, also known as Darkhorse. My company was Echo. We shot a lot of target practice in those days. George and Donk were someplace else, but Taco and I were still a team.

One day a lieutenant colonel I didn’t know stopped by to watch us shoot. I was using the M40, banging on a pyramid of beer cans at eight hundred yards, knocking them down one by one from top to bottom. You had to hit them low and kind of flip them, or the whole bunch would fall over.

This lieutenant colonel, Jamieson was his name, told me and Taco to come with him. He drove us in an unarmored Jeep to a hill overlooking the al-Dawla mosque. It was a very beautiful mosque. The sermon blaring from the loudspeakers wasn’t so pretty. It was the usual bullshit about how the Americans were going to let the Jews colonize Iraq, Islam would be outlawed, the Jews would run the government and America would get the oil. We didn’t understand the lingo, but death to America was always in English, and we’d seen translated leaflets, supposedly written by the leading clerics. The budding insurgency handed them out by the bale. Will you die for your country? they asked. Will you die a glorious death for Islam?

‘How far is that shot?’ Jamieson asked, pointing at the mosque’s dome.

Taco said a thousand yards. I said maybe nine hundred, then added, being careful to address Jamieson respectfully, that we were forbidden to target religious sites. If, that was, the l-c had such a thing in mind.

‘Perish the thought,’ Jamieson said. ‘I would never ask a soldier under my command to target one of their holy dungheaps. But the stuff coming out of those speakers is political, not religious. So which one of you wants to try knocking one of them off? Without putting a hole in the dome, that is? Which would be wrong and we’d probably go to muji hell for it.’