Hard Lesson in Battle: 150 Marines Meet 1 Sniper
By DEXTER FILKINS
FALLUJA, Iraq, Nov. 10 - American marines called in
two airstrikes on the pair of dingy three-story
buildings squatting along Highway 10 on Wednesday,
dropping 500-pound bombs each time. They fired 35 or
so 155-millimeter artillery shells, 10 shots from the
muzzles of Abrams tanks and perhaps 30,000 rounds from
their automatic rifles. The building was a smoking
ruin.
But the sniper kept shooting.
He - or they, because no one can count the flitting
shadows in this place - kept 150 marines pinned down
for the better part of a day. It was a lesson on the
nature of the enemy in this hellish warren of
rubble-strewn streets. Not all of the insurgents are
holy warriors looking for martyrdom. At least a few
are highly trained killers who do their job with cold
precision and know how to survive.
"The idea is, he just sits up there and eats a
sandwich," said Lt. Andy Eckert, "and we go crazy
trying to find him."
The contest is a deadly one, and two marines in
Company B, First Battalion, Eighth Regiment of the
First Marine Expeditionary Force have been killed by
snipers in the past two days as the unit advanced just
half a mile southward to Highway 10 from a mosque they
had taken on Tuesday.
Despite the world-shaking blasts of weaponry as the
Americans try to root out the snipers, this is also a
contest of wills in which the tension rises to a level
that seems unbearable, and then rises again. Marine
snipers sit, as motionless as blue herons, for 30
minutes and stare with crazed intensity into the
oversized scopes on their guns. If so much as a
penumbra brushes across a windowsill, they open up.
With the troops' senses tuned to a high pitch, mundane
events become extraordinary. During one bombing, a
blue-and-yellow parakeet flew up to a roof of a
captured building and fluttered about in tight circles
before perching on a slumping power line, to the
amazement of the marines assembled there.
On another occasion, the snipers tensed when they
heard movement in the direction of a smoldering
building. A cat sauntered out, unconcerned with
anything but making its rounds in the neighborhood.
"Can I shoot it, sir?" a sniper asked an officer.
"Absolutely not," came the reply.
This day started at about 8 a.m., when the marines
left the building where they had been sleeping and
headed south toward Highway 10, which runs from east
to west and roughly bisects the town. At the corner of
Highway 10 and Thurthar, the street they were moving
along, was a headquarters building for the Iraqi
National Guard that had been taken over by insurgents.
Almost immediately, they came under fire from a sniper
in the minaret of a mosque just south of them. Someone
in a three-story residential building farther down the
street also opened up. The marines made 50-yard dashes
and dived for cover, but one of them was cut down,
killed on the spot. It was unclear what direction the
fatal bullet had come from.
"I don't know who it was," Lt. Steven Berch, leader of
the fallen marine's platoon, said of the attacker,
"but he was very well trained."
After two hours of bombardment, the sniper at that
mosque ceased firing. But just around the corner at
the famous blue-domed Khulafah Al Rashid mosque,
another sniper was pinning down marines, and
airstrikes were called in on it, too. The issue of
striking at mosques is so sensitive in the Arab world
that the American military later issued a statement
saying that the strike on the Khulafah mosque was
unavoidable and that precision munitions merely
knocked down a minaret.
By noon, the marines had worked their way down to the
national guard building, still taking fire from the
sniper, or snipers, on the other side of Main Street.
Inside was a sign in Arabic that said: "Long live the
mujahedeen." Soon the marines had spray-painted
another sign over it: "Long live the muj killers."
But for the next five hours, they could not kill
whoever was running from window to window and firing
at them from the other side of Main Street, despite
the expenditure of enormous amounts of ammunition.
"We're not able to see the muzzle flashes," said Capt.
Read Omohundro, the company commander. "As a result,"
he said, "we end up expending a lot of ammunition
trying to get the snipers."
At one point, they thought that they had a bead on
someone running back and forth between the two
buildings. Then Capt. Christopher Spears exclaimed:
"He's on a bike!"
And somehow, through a volley of gunfire, whoever it
was got away.
At 5 p.m., the marines finally crossed Highway 10 and
searched the smoking remains of the two buildings. At
5:30 p.m., a sniper opened up on them.
It's good that some Iraqis are fighting so effectively, instead of relying on random explosives. If I were an Iraqi, I would one of those snipers.
10:20:02 AM 
