In the fog of combat, mistakes happen. Young men are put into situations far beyond their capacity to control or deal with. In the opening two chapters of Fallen Pride, we flashback two years prior to Fallen Hunter, and visit a minor character from that book on the battlefields of Iraq.
1
Somewhere
in Iraq
Spring,
2004
Two men lay among a cluster of large boulders. They’d
been there over 24 hours, shivering through the still, cold night, and sweating
through the midday heat. Each man was covered with what’s commonly called a
ghillie suit, a heavy garment stitched with colored strips of free hanging cloth
meant to blend in with the surrounding elements. In this case, most of the
surrounding element was rock and boulders, so there was a lot of gray in their
covering. Indeed, they were nearly invisible from a distance. However, the
ghillie suits were designed more for use in jungle and woodlands and here on
this desolate gray landscape they were quite visible if someone got within 40
or 50 feet.
Fortunately, there were few people in this part of Iraq
and anyone that wandered within a hundred meters of where the two men lay
waiting, were visible to them. Behind, was an overhanging cliff about 30 feet
high that kept them shadowed throughout most of the day. No chance anyone would
stumble on them from the rear. They’d chosen this particular location for just
this reason. It offered ideal cover considering the options and was easily
defendable, should anyone from the small cluster of homes and shops below
happen to come up into the hills.
One man had a high powered spotting scope mounted on a
short tripod and covered with the same cloth their ghillie suits were made
from. As he looked through the scope, he spoke into a small microphone mounted
on a boom in front of his mouth, “Alpha Six, Raptor has acquired the target. Looks
like Nine of Diamonds, sending photo for confirmation.”
Moments later, the image was received by analysts at
Field Operating Base Grizzly in Camp Ashraf, Iraq. The FOB was where Alpha Company
of the 1st Battalion, 9th Marine Regiment was based, attached to the 6th
Marine Regiment. The image was scanned and facial recognition software only
took a few seconds to confirm that the person the two men were watching was a
high value target by the name of Ahmed Qazir al Ramani, the 9 of diamonds in
the most wanted deck.
Over the headset, the man on the scope heard a voice
reply, “Target is confirmed, Raptor. You’re clear to engage.”
“We have confirmation Jared,” the man on the scope said
to his partner. “You were right, it’s Nine of Diamonds
The second man lay motionless behind an M-40A3 rifle,
loaded with Lapua .308, moly coated, dovetail ammunition. He spoke without
moving his eye from the scope. “It’s a gift, Billy. Had it all my life. I see a
face and can remember it forever. Range me.”
Marine Sergeant William ‘Billy’ Cooper leaned into the
scope, taking readings. “Range is 905 meters. Declination, minus 10 degrees.
Air is still and heavy.” Billy was the spotter. Marine Scout/Sniper teams
worked in pairs, almost always alone and far from the units they were assigned
to, in this case Alpha, 1/9. The battalion was only recently reactivated,
having been stood down in 1994. In Vietnam the battalion earned the nickname Walking
Dead and still carry it today.
The second man, Corporal Jared Williams, was an
accomplished shooter long before enlisting in the Marine Corps after the
terrorist attacks on 9/11. Born in the mountains of Kentucky, he’d won a number
of shooting competitions starting at the age of 12 and all through his teenage
years. He made a slight adjustment to the elevation of the rifle and said,
“Target acquired.”
Billy relayed the message to the FOB and waited. He
didn’t have to wait long before the voice in his headset replied, “You’re clear
to take the shot, Raptor. I repeat, shot cleared.”
Billy took a slow breath. “You’re clear to fire when
ready, Jared. No change in conditions.”
Jared hadn’t moved a muscle in more than fifteen minutes.
Only now did he make the tiniest of moves, his right index finger, which had
been alongside the trigger guard, moved imperceptibly to the trigger. He could
see the target clearly through the U.S. Optics MST-100 scope. He was inside a
small stucco and stone house a little over half a mile away. He was sitting in
a chair, reading. Jared slowly took the slack out of the trigger while taking a
long slow breath and releasing it. It was an easy shot, conditions were ideal
and the target was unmoving. He had 12 prior confirmed kills, all of them more
difficult than this one. Eight on his previous tour in Iraq, and four in the
last three months since joining 1/9 and arriving back in country.
The pressure slowly increased on the trigger as the image
in the scope moved up and down a fraction of a millimeter at regular intervals,
caused by the beating of Jared’s own heart. He knew exactly the pressure
required to release the firing pin and send the round downrange and timed it so
that it occurred when the image rose with the beat of his heart and the cross
hairs fell on the bridge of the man’s nose. The report of the rifle echoed off
the granite cliff behind them.
At half a mile, it took slightly more than a second for
the round to traverse the distance from the barrel to the target. A second that
would change the young shooter’s life permanently. It all seemed to happen in
slow motion as he continued to watch through the scope to confirm the kill. In
the first half a second, a slight shadow passed over the man’s face as he was
reading. In the next half a second, his eyes came up slightly over his reading
glasses and a smile came to his face. In the next millisecond, which seemed to
take hours, someone stepped in front of the man in the chair. His 8 year old
daughter. In the next few milliseconds a hole appeared in the glass of the
window and cracks radiated out from it like a spider’s web. In the last
millisecond a pink mist emanated from the girls head, spreading over the man in
the chair and the girl fell forward into her father’s lap, dead.
2
Key
West
Present
Day
Jared Williams bolted upright, drenched in a cold sweat
and shaking. The image of the dead girl in her father’s lap and the man looking
right at him through the hole in the glass, was still fresh in his mind. As it
always did, it took a few seconds to take stock and realize he’d had the
nightmare again. He was in his bed, in his small apartment above a garage. The
garage sat on a small corner lot in Old Town Key West with a two story Conch
house next to it. It was owned by a wealthy Canadian, who was only in residence
for a few months in the winter. Jared took care of the property and grounds in
exchange for free rent.
He had the same recurring nightmare hundreds of times
since that day two years earlier. His gift of remembering faces was now a
curse. After the incident, he and Billy made their way around the cliffs and up
into the mountains for helicopter extraction two days later. While being
debriefed by an unidentified agent with Central Intelligence, the man
insinuated that Jared had killed the girl intentionally. Jared came unglued and
lunged across the table in a fit of rage and nearly beat the man to death
before Billy could pull him off. The following month was spent in the brig,
before being flown back to Camp Lejeune, North Carolina for a quiet court
martial, where he was sentenced to time already served, forfeiture of all pay
and allowances, reduced in rank to Private, and dishonorably discharged. The pride
of the Marine Corps couldn’t handle any more bad press about its Marines
killing innocent civilians.
His next two months were spent in a drug and alcohol
induced stupor when he returned to his home in Kentucky. His brother had
followed him into the Marine Corps and was stationed in California. His mom and
dad, now empty nesters, pulled up stakes and headed south to get away from the
cold mountain winters. But, Kentucky was his home and where his friends were,
so that’s where he went. It didn’t take long for him to find that his old
friends from high school were no longer the same as him. Many had left the
hills and taken jobs in the surrounding cities, or headed off to college. Those
that remained in the small town of Sassafras, near the Virginia border seemed
different from him somehow. A few years older, but they seemed to be perpetually
stuck in high school. Unable to find a job, he was soon almost out of money. He
sold his 1985 Ford pickup to a friend, bought a Greyhound ticket to Key West,
and called his dad to ask if he had room to put him up for a week or two, until
he could find work.
Arriving in Key West was like entering a different
dimension. The verdant green hills and mountains of Kentucky were replaced with
the flat blue of the tropical ocean. The regimented military lifestyle replaced
with the wild abandon of this centuries old pirate town.
His dad had taken a job on a shrimp trawler as a mechanic
a year earlier. His reputation quickly grew in the small island community as a
man with a knack for understanding and being able to fix all sorts of
mechanical problems. In a place with almost as many boats as people, he’d found
plenty of work on his days off, repairing boats, cars, trucks, and even did some
mechanical work on private planes. He’d saved up, got his private pilot’s
license and bought an old float plane, with the idea of taking tourists and
fishermen around the island chain to places you couldn’t get to by car and get
them there faster than by boat. His folks didn’t really have room in their
small mobile home on Stock Island, but let him stay on the couch anyway. His
dad made it clear that it was temporary and gave him a month. David Williams
didn’t raise his boys to be slackers and they weren’t. Less than a week after
arriving, his dad had made the arrangement for the garage apartment with a fly
fisherman from Canada he’d met earlier that winter and taken up in his plane
several times. A few days later, a friend of his mom told her about a job
opening at a restaurant and bar just off of the main drag, Duval Street.
Arriving at the Blue Heaven and meeting the manager, he learned that the
opening was for a bouncer/bar back. Being just over six feet tall, 200 pounds,
and muscular gave him an edge and the fact that he had served in the Marines
got him the job. He didn’t mention that he’d been dishonorably discharged and
the manager never asked.
He’d worked hard for two years, making friends around the
island and at the restaurant, a popular place with locals and tourists alike.
The job suited him. He quickly found that his training on the battlefield gave
him the ability to read people better than most and usually could stop an
altercation before it even started, simply by imposing himself on the
occasional drunk rowdy. This was something his boss liked. He looked after the
waitresses and bartenders like they were his little sisters and soon they
looked up to him as their big brother, even the ones that were a little older
than him. During his time off, he worked out a lot. The Canadian had a complete
weight set in the garage and the work around the property could be hard at
times, especially after a storm. Broken branches that fell from the many oak
and elm trees, he would cut up using an old buck saw he’d picked up at a yard
sale. He soon added fifteen pounds of hard muscle to his already powerful
physique.
The nightmares didn’t go away, though. One of the
regulars at the bar was an old guy named Jackson Wainwright that everyone just
called Pop. He seemed like a harmless guy most of the time. On the smallish
side, maybe 5’-8” and a wiry 165 pounds, with long gray hair and beard, he was
usually barefoot or wore flip-flops, baggy shorts and a worn out tee-shirt. One
night, a year after Jared arrived in Key West, Pop went completely nuts and
started a fight with two Vietnamese tourists. Jared had to break it up and kick
him out. That’s when he learned that Pop was a Vietnam Veteran. Once he got the
old man outside, struggling all the way, he collapsed at the curb, sobbing
incoherently. Not knowing what to do, Jared sat on the curb next to the old man
and within a few minutes each realized they were kindred spirits. He sought out
Pop many times after that night, when the tension and nightmares came and it
seemed to help them both, just to sit and talk about their experiences and
fears. Still, the nightmares didn’t go away.
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