The Living and the Dead

On Veterans' Day, buy this Byliner Original by the veteran Brian Mockenhaupt:

The bullet smacked the dirt between Tom and Ian, inches from their feet, as they stepped out of the compound they'd just finished searching. A second later they heard the shot, fired from a string of houses along Route Animal, three hundred yards to the northwest.

"Let's go," Tom said.

As the patrol fanned out and jogged into the field, moving toward the buildings, more gunmen opened fire, from several spots along Route Animal and in Cocheran Village, farther north. Muzzle flashes twinkled from alleyways and darkened windows. The Marines at Dakota were terrified of buried bombs—the utter lack of control—but they loved firefights. Here they could influence the outcome. Many of them had joined the Corps with fantasies of moments like this—sprinting across open ground as bullets kick up dirt around them and snap overhead, then diving onto the ground and laying down cover fire as their comrades bound forward, leapfrogging toward the enemy. These were bread-and-butter infantry skills.

With Ian's four-man team in the lead, Tom pushed the patrol forward, an exhausting movement through muddy fields crisscrossed by irrigation canals. Ian spotted a gunman firing at them beside a pump house near a mosque along Route Animal. He had been trained at the Marine Corps's sniper school and carried an MK12 Special Purpose Rifle, a tricked-out version of the M-4 and M-16 rifles most Marines carry, fitted with a powerful scope. He could drop a man at a half-mile. He centered the crosshairs of his scope on the man's head and fired.