“Shooter” and Just War
By: BJ Lawson
I read an excellent autobiography this weekend: Shooter: The Autobiography of the Top-Ranked Marine Sniper by USMC Gunnery Sgt. Jack Coughlin. Sgt. Coughlin is one of the most accomplished snipers in the Marine Corps, and while I have tremendous respect for all members of our armed forces, I’ve always had special admiration for the sniper’s training and discipline.
In a way, it’s oddly parallel with my original field of study, neurosurgery. Neurosurgery demands tremendous patience, sustained concentration over long periods of time, and uses exceedingly small movements to create life-changing results. Likewise, a sniper’s discipline to patiently await the target, maintain perfect concentration for hours on end, and integrate a lifetime of situational awareness and training into “one shot, one kill” culminates in just a few pounds of pressure on the trigger. The desired effect may be different, but like I said, oddly parallel.
Sgt. Coughlin takes you through conflicts from Somalia to Iraq, providing vivid eyewitness and participatory accounts. Most importantly, though, he provides a balanced portrayal of combat situations both as a dedicated soldier and a human being. The most challenging part of the book for me, though, was his description of civilian casualties after the Marines first established a position in Baghdad just across the Tigris River during Iraqi Freedom:
There is a dirty part of war that is seldom discussed. Little is written of it, and much less is said, for no one wants to talk about killing innocent people. By crossing that bridge, we stepped into one such troubled moment, a terrible situation that seemed preordained, with an outcome that was inevitable before it started. No matter how many times you try to turn back the clock, the ugly result remains unchanged. We did not intend to kill civilians, but we did, and we would just have to live with it. We did nothing wrong, but every Marine who was there would be scarred by what happened at the Diyala Canal.
The irregular fedayeen guerrillas had taught us, over and over, that just because an Iraqi was not in uniform was no sign that he didn’t want to kill you. Our entire batallion had driven past the smoking remains of an Abrams tank that had been blown apart by a suicide bomber. We had been in brutal combat all day yesterday and had lost Marines to an artillery barrage this morning. Faced with an incredibly tense situation in a zone of ultimate danger, it was almost impossible — even unwise — for the average grunt to hold fire on someone coming steadily closer. Threat or no threat? Guess wrong, and you and your buddies are dead.
My boys found a good high spot that gave us an unobstructed view up the main road, and all four snipers — me, Moreno, Carrington, and Harding — locked in on it. Since we could see clearly for a thousand yards, we established an invisible “trigger line” on a curve in the road about 850 yards from our position. Anyone approaching our positions would be watched but not considered a true threat until he reached that point. We quickly noticed that the curve in the road was at the top of a slight downward grade, so gravity and the physics of momentum would conspire to pull a vehicle towards us. It was another reason to be careful in choosing our targets.
More Marines were pouring over the bridge, which meant more rifles were pointing down the roads and machine guns were being set up. The buildup had potential for big trouble, because Iraqi radio stations were off the air, traffic cops had vanished, and there was no way to spread the word to civilians to stay the hell away from our bridge. Surely they knew of the ferocious fighting of the previous day and had heard the continuous shelling. But traffic continued to flow around the distant suburban area, with unwary civilian drivers passing faraway intersections as if going to work or the store. Others were just obviously trying to leave town.
I had a bunch of trained snipers with big scopes on their rifles, ideal for this kind of work, so I found the Kilo executive officer, and he agreed to let us use our advanced optics beyond a new trigger line. We would eyeball whoever was coming down the road and stop their vehicles by putting bullets into engines and tires. Anything that came closer would be free game for the grunts. That might get us out of what could easily become a shootout, with the possibility of civilians being caught in the middle. But communications in a war zone are always chancy, and not everybody had a radio, so the word did not reach all the Marines who were still crossing the bridge and enlarging the defensive perimeter.
Another car came over the crest of the road. Carrington and I watched until reached six hundred yards, still on the sniper side of the line, and then we shot the engine block. The vehicle didn’t slow down at all but seemed to accelerate. There were two Iraqis inside, both wearing dark clothing, and although we couldn’t be certain, we had no choice, because the car kept coming. I took the driver and Carrington zeroed in on the passenger, and once again we fired together and killed them both. The car chugged a few times, veered to the side of the road, and gave up, but once again a slashing outburst of Marine fire savaged the vehicle and the people inside. I watched through my scope as bullets punctured shiny holes in the painted doors, blew out tires, shattered the windows into webs of glass, and made the already-dead bodies jump.
“Goddammit!” I yelled. “Stop shooting! Stop! Let us do this!” We had already done the job, and the thunder of infantry fire that sliced up the vehicle was totally unnecessary. I yelled for the grunts to cease fire, but even that took time, until the shooting finally eased with a ripple effect, like a wave in a stadium crowd. One guy would stop firing only when the guy next to him stopped. This was terrible.
I heard the Kilo XO shouting down the line, “Let the snipers deal with the civilian vehicles!”
But all of the Marines had to be suspicious about the cars and trucks coming toward them, some even accelerating after the snipers shot them. These kids had been carefully trained for months to add their power to the violent supremacy of an attack, and that’s just what they were doing. No one was going to let a truck that might be packed with explosives and driven by a suicidal madman get through and blow up in the middle of our lines.
Ten minutes later, it all changed in the blink of an eye, and in the swirling fog of war, the inevitable tragedy emerged in the form of a blue Kia minivan that came over the hump of the hill. Carrington, Moreno, and I all fired into the engine block, but once again the motor kep running and the built-up momentum pulled it along… I could see the people moving inside… Who knew what was packed in the big cargo space? I prayed for the damned thing to just stop, it eventually reached the trigger line and entered the kill box.
The Marines legitimately opened up on it, and a typhoon of bullets pummeled the van. I couldn’t remove my eyes from the scope and watched these innocent people die as rifle fire flashed and flared around me. A middle-aged man and woman in the back of the van somehow lived through the hell of gunfire and spent the night hiding among the dead members of their family before crawling out the next morning with their hands raised.
Suddenly, I was present, but I wasn’t really there at all. I snapped from the emotional overload, something I had never before experienced and did not believe was possible. My body began to react automatically to its years of training, but my mind totally disengaged from the awful scenes unfolding in front of me as people kept coming. Innocents were dying, and I was stuck right in the front row with a huge spyglass, but also participating in it, up close and personal. I was still a sniper, but I just wasn’t home.
I don’t remember all of the cars and trucks that were dealt with that day. A mother and father driving a big Mercedes were shot to death, but their little girl, clutching a teddy bear in the back seat, survived… There was no way for us to go into that uncleared area to help without exposing ourselves to getting killed, for Iraqi soldiers up the road were still shooting at us….
I could not count, and did not want to know, how many people I had killed in the past two days. My logbook would have to wait, and it would never be complete… Oh my God, what have we done? (pp 225-232)
War is Hell. We must be diligent as a nation to ensure that force is used according to the Augustinian principles of just war, as articulated here by Rep. Paul:
I have also acted to protect the lives of Americans by my adherence to the doctrine of “just war.” This doctrine, as articulated by Augustine, suggested that war must only be waged as a last resort— for a discernible moral and public good, with the right intentions, vetted through established legal authorities (a constitutionally required declaration of the Congress), and with a likely probability of success.
It has been and remains my firm belief that the current United Nations-mandated, no-win police action in Iraq fails to meet the high moral threshold required to wage just war. That is why I have offered moral and practical opposition to the invasion, occupation and social engineering police exercise now underway in Iraq. It is my belief, borne out by five years of abject failure and tens of thousands of lost lives, that the Iraq operation has been a dangerous diversion from the rightful and appropriate focus of our efforts to bring to justice to the jihadists that have attacked us and seek still to undermine our nation, our values, and our way of life.
I opposed giving the president power to wage unlimited and unchecked aggression, However, I did vote to support the use of force in Afghanistan. I also authored H.R. 3076, the September 11 Marque and Reprisal Act of 2001. A letter of marque and reprisal is a constitutional tool specifically designed to give the president the authority to respond with appropriate force to those non-state actors who wage aggression against the United States while limiting his authority to only those responsible for the atrocities of that day. Such a limited authorization is consistent with the doctrine of just war and the practical aim of keeping Americans safe while minimizing the costs in blood and treasure of waging such an operation.
On September 17, 2001, I stated on the house floor that “…striking out at six or eight or even ten different countries could well expand this war of which we wanted no part. Without defining the enemy there is no way to know our precise goal or to know when the war is over. Inadvertently more casual acceptance of civilian deaths as part of this war I’m certain will prolong the agony and increase the chances of even more American casualties. We must guard against this if at all possible.” I’m sorry to say that history has proven this to be true.