"Did you kill anybody?"
Anyone who's been in a combat zone, I imagine, gets asked this question far too frequently. How do we explain that it's not about that, or that operating in a guerilla war transcends the mere act of killing, which, under current rules of engagement, is simply something we do to keep attackers at bay? Killing someone hardly even factors in to the whole scheme of things, unless you're William Manchester capping a Japanese sniper in a small hut with a .45 pistol. That, apparently, freaked him out, otherwise it hardly seems like a big deal when it happens.
But Hollywood has been so patently unfair to infantrymen, with cut-and-dried images showing easy killings of enemy troops in the open--enemy fighters firing for sustained periods of time from the same position, which is rare indeed. Most fighters, especially guerillas, retain as much cover and concealment as possible and fire for a very, very brief time before getting gone. Just getting a shot off under these circumstances is a challenge, because Marines are taught to shoot at a specific target, not to fire indiscriminately.
Anyhow, to answer the infamous question: by my best count, I killed one, and I felt at the time like I was just trying to beat the enemy off of our backs. We were getting mortared and I saw a forward observer, an Arab watching us (standing in the open, bad idea) with binoculars and as I turned to tell Lopez to shoot him, Lopez began firing, then Rodriguez, then myself and Salinas. I got a good line of sight on him, watching Lopez's red tracers zipping in on him, acquired good sight picture in my M-16's iron sight ring, and we cut the guy down.
Yay.
I don't feel one way or the other about it, except I was excited then.
We had tanks with us that day (it was January 20, 2005 or somewhere about there) and they went to do a battle damage assessment on the position we fired on, and they found four dead "insurgents" in the palm groves along the Euphrates. As soon as we blasted the observer, the mortar fire stopped! Fancy that.
Other than that, some of the guys gunned some Arabs down and I held my own fire at different times, and there were times I held my fire and now wish I hadn't.
Killing does not seem to faze Marines, period. We laugh a little too loudly when we recount such incidents, but it just didn't feel wrong, especially when we all have friends who were killed over there. The attitude is, f*@# 'em. Period. The Arabs believe when Allah wills your life to be at its end, it ends. We're just puppets of Allah in this sense, in the Middle Eastern perspective.
None of this sounds terribly enlightened, but I'm afraid I must tell it the way I saw it. I hate the dramatization of things. If something bothers me, I say so; if it doesn't bother me, well, it just doesn't.
