The first mortar impacted on the American base. The civilian contractors working there scuttled for cover. Inside the scout platoon’s barracks, the detonation roused Andy Hellman, the proud driver of the platoon’s unarmed Rat Rig. Quiet, sometimes to a fault, Andy stayed on life’s periphery, and moved through it as anonymously as possible. At parties, he was the guy in back watching everything, saying nothing. In battle, he always seemed to be a target, and he’d gotten the reputation as an RPG magnet. No matter, he strapped his gear on every day and went to work with a rock solid resolve that overcame all fear.
Curiously, he stepped out onto a second-floor veranda to see what was going on. Another scout, Sergeant George Gordon, soon joined him. As they observed the scene together, a second round exploded near the motor pool.
“Wow, that was pretty close,” Gordon observed wryly.
The attack had caught Lieutenant Ross Boyce out in the open. He and Lieutenant Chris Boeholt, the battalion mortar platoon leader, had been walking back from the chow hall when the first round had landed. Now they ran through the incoming to get back to their men.
The third mortar struck midway between the motor pool and the scouts’ barracks, sending up a thin column of smoke and dirt perhaps a hundred yards away. That was enough for Andy. “That’s too close! Let’s get back inside!”
The two Oregonians abandoned the veranda and went down the second-floor hallway, intending to get on the first floor. They could hear their medic, Mike Giordano, shouting something to some KBR employees who were outside and running for cover.
“That’s right, run you fucking pussies!” they heard him yell in his irascible growl.
Vintage Giordi. Hellman stifled a laugh. He thought the world of the platoon’s grouchy medic and his bah-humbug sense of humor.
The barracks convulsed. A flat, metallic burst of sound deafened Andy in the stairwell. Then a concussion wave slammed into Andy and nearly threw him off his feet. He stumbled down to the first floor.
Giordi lay sprawled on the ground a few feet from the open main door, covered in blood. Tendrils of smoke wafted through the room. Splinters of glass from shattered windows crunched underfoot as Hellman and Gordon rushed to their wounded medic.
Giordano had been hassling the contractors from the doorway of the barracks when a fourth 82mm mortar struck right in front of him. That he was even alive was a miracle.
“Check my eye!” Giordi growled.
“Your eye is fine,” Gordon reported.
“Is my liver okay?” the medic demanded.
“You’ve been hit in the neck, Giordi.”
Angry, seething with pain and fear, Giordano told Gordon how to treat his wound. More scouts and snipers emerged from their rooms to help out. Boyce and Boeholt arrived moments later. The sight of their medic roused everyone to fury. This mortaring shit had to stop.
A meat wagon arrived. The men lifted him into it, and he was sped first to the battalion’s aid station, then to the Baghdad Combat Support Hospital. He had suffered a serious shrapnel wound to his neck and was lucky to be alive. Later, he was evacuated to Germany, then to Walter Reed Hospital in Maryland, where he barraged the doctors with demands to let him rejoin his platoon. It took months, but he finally talked the docs into it. When he returned to the scouts, he received a warm and hearty welcome.
But that was all in the future. In the meantime, the mortar attack had wounded two Volunteers. Enough was enough. Boyce and his men sat down to brainstorm ways they could put an end to them.
Boyce was not a Guardsman, but a regular army officer who’d been a general’s aide at Fort Hood when Hendrickson promoted the scout platoon leader to a company command. The Volunteers were running very lean on officers at the time, and Boyce received an offer to take the platoon. The men greeted him with quiet skepticism at first, but he soon won them over with his willingness to learn, listen, and keep an open mind.
Together with Kevin Maries, Boyce developed a plan that was both bold and fit within the narrow parameters of the current Rules of Engagement. They knew that Hendrickson faced a tough tactical situation, thanks to the cagey nature of the Mahdi Militia. The insurgents had discovered where the unit boundary was between the Volunteers and 2-5 Cav, which was assigned to Sadr City. The Mahdi promptly exploited the boundary by launching their mortar attacks on the Patrol Base Volunteer from inside 2-5’s battle space. Had they just attacked from inside 2–162’s area of operations, Hendrickson would have simply sent his Quick Reaction Force to chase down the mortar teams and kill them in the streets. Instead, the Oregonians couldn’t get permission from 2-5 Cav to cross the unit boundary and hunt down the mortarmen with their motorized infantry platoons.
Lieutenant Boyce and Kevin Maries came up with a solution. Why not use the snipers to locate and kill the mortar teams with precision gunfire? The enemy had been lobbing rounds at their base from the same general area every day since the uprising began. If his scouts could find a tall building with a good view of western Sadr City, his snipers could take them out. That way, they wouldn’t have to cross the unit boundary and run afoul of 2-5 Cav’s commander or that battalion’s own operations. With the sniper teams, they could stay in 2–162’s own battle space and ambush the mortar teams from long range. If all went well, the Mahdi would never know what hit them.
Hendrickson, who had been impressed with the performance of the scout platoon all summer long, gave Boyce the green light. The twenty-six-year-old lieutenant went to work fleshing out the details with Maries and his squad leaders.
The main problem was manpower. With Gushwa hurt and the two outposts needing teams, Maries could only dedicate one team to the mission. Boyce would take enough men and firepower to protect the snipers and their Humvees, while the battalion would have a platoon of Humvee-mounted infantry ready to roll to their aid should they get in trouble. While no air support was available, 2–162’s parent brigade, Arkansas’s 39th Infantry, tasked a battery of heavy artillery to the scouts. Should they get into trouble, they’d have plenty of firepower at their disposal, plus ready backup only a few minutes away at Patrol Base Volunteer.
The plan was brilliant. Boyce had mobility, he had firepower, he had backup. Instead of using a single sniper team—more of an individualistic solution—the decision to use all the available men in the platoon would give them the firepower to tackle most threats should their hide site get compromised.
This was not a standard sniper employment; Boyce didn’t pull it out of any tactical manual or book. But then again, no book has ever won a firefight.
Long after sunset, the platoon mounted up and slid through Patrol Base Volunteer’s rear gate. They were going mortar hunting.
The platoon split up to search for a suitable overwatch position. Tyson Bumgardner led one patrol over to an abandoned amusement park by Martyr’s Monument. They couldn’t get a good vantage point from there, so Tyson and Buchholz climbed into a nearby Iraqi Police tower and observed Route Pluto for a few hours while the rest of the patrol pulled security for them on the street below.
The night was full of fireworks. Mahdi Militia teams kept launching rockets from Sadr City at the Green Zone, the administrative heart of the new government and Coalition forces. The Iraqi Police tower happened to be right under their flight path, and every few minutes one would buzz right overhead before exploding a few kilometers behind them in the blacked-out city.
From time to time, an AC-130 Spectre gunship would open fire from an orbit several thousand feet above Baghdad. Its massive firepower would lay waste to one of the rocket teams, but there always seemed to be more willing men ready to carry out the next launch.
As the night wore on, Tyson and Darren Buchholz decided to head back to the rest of the platoon. As they did, Bumgardner remembered an Iraqi Police checkpoint very close by at the Route Pluto entrance to Martyr’s Monument. Three men manned that position, armed with two AKs and a Dragunov sniper rifle. They’d been told to expect the platoon, and they knew of their pres
ence, but the patrol remained cautious as they passed close by it on their way back to Lieutenant Boyce.
When the scouts reunited, Randy Mitts told Boyce his patrol had found a great hide site in a neighborhood just north of Martyr’s Monument. He led the way, and the scouts stashed their Humvees at the base of a skeletalized eleven-story skyscraper. A wall ran around the perimeter of the building, which provided perfect concealment for the platoon’s rigs. Leaving behind a squad to protect the trucks, the rest of the scouts followed Lieutenant Boyce up into the skyscraper.
The war had not been kind to this building. Above the fourth floor, the fighting had torn away much of the outer wall, leaving the rooms within exposed to the outside. Scaffolding had been erected on the northeast side, a sign that the Iraqis were at least making some effort to reconstruct it. The higher they climbed, the more devastation they found on each floor. In some places, the interior walls had been removed by work crews who had also scattered construction supplies all over the place.
Ross Boyce set them up on the seventh floor, and the scouts settled down to take shifts on their weapons, eat, and sleep. They planned to be up there for several days, if necessary. Even in the darkness, they could tell this place had a prime view of the western edge of Sadr City and the neighborhood where Keith Engle had seen the mortar launches. A perfect ambush site. Now all they needed was an enemy to show up.
The hours of darkness passed slowly. The men grew exhausted. Some dozed. Others scanned the city below. Tyson went downstairs to grab some food from the Humvees. As he chatted with some of the other scouts down there, he remembered that it was his sister’s birthday. For a moment, he wished he was at Volunteer so he could call her.
Around 0600, Lieutenant Boyce watched from the seventh floor as dawn broke over a city aflame. Eastern Baghdad had once again become a battleground. Rocket fire flared and distant muzzle flashes winked in the black streets below even as the sun crested the eastern horizon. The beauty of the red-orange dawn provided a stunning contrast with the skirmishes that seemed surreal to the Americans. At the same time, the sun blazing in their eyes made scanning Sadr City more difficult. Had it not been for the tactical situation, they would have found a hide that let them put the sun to their backs.
To Boyce’s left, Darren “Buck” Buchholz lay catnapping beside his Barrett .50 caliber rifle. The platoon had acquired the semiauto version of the weapon, and already they’d found it their most deadly precision weapon. The Barrett stretches almost five feet long and weighs twenty-eight and a half pounds, making it as cumbersome as one of the platoon’s M240 Bravo machine guns. The Barrett can hit targets over a mile away with a bullet traveling nearly twenty-eight hundred feet a second. The incredible velocity gives the round the ability to penetrate concrete and vehicular armor. Officially called the Special Applications Scoped Rifle, the Barrett is capable of knocking out vehicles and penetrating armor. A popular misconception holds that the weapon cannot be used against human targets under the Rules of Land Warfare—mainly due to the fact that it tends to cause people to explode when hit.
Buchholz was universally respected in the platoon for his dedication and refusal to quit. He spoke his mind and never held back his opinion to anyone regardless of rank. That blunt approach was refreshing, but not surprisingly it sometimes caused friction. If he was tough on those around him, nobody was harder on himself than “Buck,” as the other scouts called him.
Darren was a native of Dallas, Oregon, a small rural community nestled at the base of the Coast Range. He grew up prowling the woods with a .22 that his dad had taught him to shoot. Just as he left high school, he started hunting deer and elk with his grandfather’s pump-action .30-06. He later switched to a Steyr .30-06.
In December 1998, he joined the National Guard and was pulled into Bravo Company 2–162. He stayed with the unit for only nine months, before growing dissatisfied. He wanted to be more than a rifleman, and he wanted to find a way where he could make an impact within the battalion. Buchholz was a man imbued with a sense of service who always wanted to contribute. Not surprisingly, his attitude caught the attention of the scout platoon, and he received an invite to join. Maries pulled him into the sniper section not long after, and he graduated from the Little Rock schoolhouse in 2001.
Until sniper school, Darren’s sense of perfectionism stemmed from a lack of self-confidence. He constantly criticized himself and never measured up in his own eyes. That came to a head in sniper school. Between the stress and the pressure, the PT and the technical work that demanded the utmost attention, Buchholz discovered the key to success for himself. No matter how tired, he had a knack for staying focused. At times, while others grew frazzled from exhaustion and the chaotic environments they were thrown into, Buck could stay calm and learned to trust his training. It all clicked one day in the field, and he knew he’d make it through, though half his classmates did not.
When he missed the August 6 firefight, he beat himself up for days. He raged at himself for not just sucking it up and rolling with his brothers. Never mind the fact that he couldn’t walk. He’d started to spiral, and some of his old self-doubts returned. When this mission came up, he absolutely refused to be left behind. For him, it wasn’t just an opportunity to avenge Giordi’s loss, it was his chance at redemption.
While Darren slept, his new spotter, Joe Blon, kept watch on his scope. With Gushwa wounded and out of action, they’d be partnered up for a while. Blon was an unknown to Buck, and this would be their first mission together.
Downstairs, Tyson finished up his meal and rushed back to join Buck and the others. Along with Tyson’s M240, the scouts had deployed two other machine guns, manned by Staff Sergeant Paul and PFC Albert. The gun Paul lay behind was the same one Nate Gushwa had used during the August 6 firefight. Both Tyson and PFC Albert’s guns had only iron sites.
The snipers had set up their overwatch position in a half-built room on the northeast side of the building behind some of the scaffolding clinging to the exterior that they’d seen the night before. Iraqi construction crews had Sheetrocked one interior wall, and that became the dividing line between Tyson’s M240 and the rest of the platoon. Buchholz had positioned himself next to the interior wall, with SSG Paul’s machine gun and PFC Albert’s deployed to his left. The rest of the men carried M4 carbines. Each scout on watch covered a specific sector of Sadr City. Through their optics, they’d seen considerable movement, but so far the targets they were stalking had eluded them.
The sun rose higher. Some of the men took a break from their observations to tear open MREs, and they scooted back deeper into the building to wolf down their breakfasts while others took their place on watch. The floor Boyce selected lacked outer walls on every side, which gave them a sweeping view of the city. With first light, it became clear to the scouts that the place hadn’t been worked on in months, thanks to the escalating violence in the area. The floor was littered with debris, stacks of drywall, and other supplies. Most of the interior walls had yet to be framed. The men leaned against bare steel I-beams as they ate.
The morning dragged on. By 1100, the sound of gunfire echoed through the city as more battles broke out between patrolling American units and marauding bands of Mahdi fighters. Yet so far the neighborhood they were watching remained quiet. A few civilians went about their morning routines. It amazed the Volunteers how these Iraqis seemed to take the violence in stride. They made do under conditions most Americans would find impossible. Commuting to work under the constant threat of roadside bombs or getting caught in a crossfire between Mahdi RPG gunners and M1 tanks in traffic conditions worthy of Los Angeles had already claimed a lot of civilian lives.
Buchholz woke up and stretched. He sat up and leaned against the Sheetrocked wall far enough into the room to remain out of sight from the street below. Blon, his spotter, was on an M24, glassing the peaceful-looking neighborhood. He would take his place and give him a break in just a few more minutes.
Not far away, Sergeant Paul,
who had been Gushwa’s truck commander on August 6, stared intently through his binoculars.
He said, “Hey, Buck? I think we’ve got something.”
The neighborhood was not as innocent as it first appeared.
Darren returned to his Barrett to have a look. Eight hundred yards away, a group of teenaged boys streamed from a house into the quiet street. A few of the boys carried tires, which they piled in an intersection and set afire. The scouts had seen this sort of thing before and knew these pyres functioned either as a rally point for other insurgent cells, or as a way to melt the street’s asphalt so a bomb could be emplaced in the roadbed. Whatever the boys’ intent, it telegraphed to the Americans that something bad was going to happen soon.
Boyce crawled over to watch the tire fire through his binoculars. Meanwhile, the other scouts assembled on the firing line. Tyson Bumgardner slipped behind his M240 Bravo machine gun. Its butt to his shoulder, he lay prone and watched the scene in the street over his weapon’s iron sites.
A rash of gunfire swelled in the distance. A rocket-propelled grenade exploded. Somebody went cyclic on a machine gun. Brunch in Sadr City; the place was a zoo.
The Oregon snipers maintained their sharp watch on the streets. Suddenly, the men heard the hollow thunk of a mortar being fired. The round exploded near Patrol Base Volunteer. Nobody saw the tube.
The kids tossed a few more tires into their bonfire just as a white sedan sped around a corner and came into view. Buchholz and Paul tracked it to a ramshackle dwelling, where it stopped and the doors flew open. Four black-clad men jumped out and ran behind the house into the backyard. Buck kept his Barrett’s scope on them.
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