Page 6 of Hard Corps (Selected Sinners MC 7)

CHAPTER THREE

Early Spring 2004, Fallujah, Iraq

The First Battle of Fallujah.

I grew up the only son of high school sweethearts who fell in love, married, and remained true to each other until my mother passed away. My father never remarried after her death, claiming his only love to be my mother, and further explaining that allowing another woman into his life, at any level, would be disrespectful to his deceased wife and only love.

I respected him for his position on love, relationships, and as a father. As a child, my friends often claimed their hero to be a television character, someone in a movie, or even a superhero from a comic book.

Me?

My father was my only hero.

He took me deer hunting for the first time when I was twelve. Although I was young, I had spent my short life around weapons, learning to respect them, understand their inner workings, and how to properly handle them safely. My father described me as a natural, claiming one day I would be in the Olympics as a marksman, but I knew otherwise.

I wanted to be like my uncle, who was a former Marine and a Vietnam war veteran. My father’s brother, and a man who didn’t demand respect – but received it from those who understood him. He was less apt to speak than any other of my relatives, but when he did, his advice was always well thought out and easy to apply to life.

As we sat in the tree stand waiting for a deer to cross the trail a hundred yards ahead, my father questioned whether or not I was ready, and, ultimately, if I was ready, would I be able to make a shot at such a distance?

I later learned after they were shot, most deer ran through the woods for a hundred yards or more before finally bleeding so much that they expired from blood loss. A perfectly placed shot – straight up from the back side of the front leg, half way between the bottom of the chest and the back – was the only thing that would drop a deer in its tracks.

Filled with confidence, and hoping to make my father proud, I waited for a deer to cross the path in front of us. As the morning sun began to rise above the base of the trees, a buck stepped into the clearing, raised his head, and sniffed the air as if something was wrong.

As his shoulder twitched from either fear or an inner knowledge of impending threat, I squeezed the trigger.

The deer fell where it stood.

Two days later, as we sat and ate a meal of venison steaks, potatoes, and an apple pie my mother had prepared, I began to understand the permanency of death. My father, while describing the impossible shot I had made to my mother, was filled with pride.

As I listened to him speak, I didn’t necessarily feel proud, but I was far from ashamed. I felt powerful, large, and almost invincible. The taking of a life wasn’t something every man was able to do, but I understood death as the completion of the cycle of life, and something completely necessary for all living things to endure at some point.

Making the choice to end the cycle of life wasn’t something I took lightly as a child, or as an adult. As I grew older, I eventually stopped hunting. My belief at the time was that it wasn’t necessary. For me at least, hunting was a sport; and killing – for sport – was something I decided was wrong.

***

“We need to get off this roof before he shoots all of us,” the young Marine complained.

In searching the building for insurgents, we had encountered a Marine Scout Sniper and his spotter. The sniper had been shot, was close to death, and the spotter appeared to be in slight shock. There was no doubt he had received considerable training to be a spotter for a Scout Sniper and to be a combat ready Marine, but nothing could ever replace the experience from actually being in combat, which was something he obviously hadn’t had the luxury of experiencing.

“First tour?” I asked as I crawled toward the abandoned sniper rifle.

“Yes, Sir. We got here two days ago for this operation,” he responded nervously. “We really need to get down from here. We’re sitting ducks.”

“Well, that’s not going to fucking happen. Your sniper has a hole in his shoulder the size of a baseball, and I intend to kill the motherfucker who shot him before he shoots someone else. Now, take a breath, remember your training, and give me an accurate fucking distance to my target,” I barked as I leaned my M4 against the parapet of the roof.

I flattened myself into a prone position and placed my cheek against the buttstock of the sniper’s rifle. After pulling off my helmet, wiping the sweat from my brow, and closing my left eye, I peered through the scope toward the target. The man on the rooftop who had been taking pot shots at an approaching convoy was taking a new position at the corner of the roof and lowering his rifle to what appeared to be a sandbag rest.

I’m guessing eight hundred plus.

The mid-day sun provided aggravating temperatures, but also made finding my target rather easy. With half of a mile between us, the bullet from the .308 caliber rifle would reach him in roughly one second. In that same second, he could take a shot, change his position, or take cover behind the upper roof line.

If his intention was to shoot Marines, I knew I didn’t have a second to waste.

I compared the four story building across the street to the building half a mile away and decided the distance based on the reduced appearance in size. After I studied the blowing dust for a moment, I reached up, and began to adjust the scope for an 800 yard shot. The wind was from my right to my left at what I guessed to be 6 miles an hour, which would carry the bullet from the right to the left slightly in the 2,600 feet it had to travel to get to the target.

As Cunningham and Grayson sat in wait and Whitmire tended to the wounded sniper, the spotter peered nervously through his spotting scope toward the target. I inhaled a deep breath and paused.

“Eight hundred and twenty meters. Wind from your immediate right to your left. Push right point two,” the spotter said.