Shooter: The Autobiography of the Top-Ranked Marine Sniper Read Online Free Page A
Author: Gunnery Sgt. Jack, Capt. Casey Kuhlman, Donald A. Davis Coughlin
my career passed in a blurry whirligig of action as I moved from hot spot to hot spot, never knowing where I would land next, totally focused and energized by the magnitude of the events that unfolded around me in jungles, cities, and sandy wastes from Europe to the Philippines to Panama.
It was if I had stepped right out of college and into a war movie that never ended. Not only was I good at what I did, but I was also single, which meant that I could move out at a moment’s notice and had the extra advantage of being relatively expendable. I thought I was perfectly content, running around looking for trouble, and had no desire to get married and settle down.
But shortly after I returned from Somalia and took up new duties at 29 Palms, California, things changed one night at a club in nearby San Bernadino, when I met Kim, a pretty, intelligent blonde from Long Island, New York. She was twenty-four years old and had taken an English degree from the State University of New York at Stony Brook and then joined the Air Force. She had two stripes and I had three, so we both had the enlisted person’s unorthodox view of officers and the world. The more we talked, the more we wanted to talk, and she didn’t even blink when she learned on that first night that I was a sniper.
Suddenly, something important was shoving my job out of the way. Could I have a real life, just like everybody else? She was based at March Air Force Base outside of San Bernardino, and I was soon driving down there a couple of times a week, then every weekend.Within only six months, we decided to get married, and we eloped on October 3, 1993. Only afterward did we venture back to Massachusetts and Long Island to meet the families and throw reception parties for our hometown friends.
Back in California, we settled down in San Bernardino for a few months, but Kim quickly became pregnant, so she quit the Air Force and we moved into base housing at 29 Palms. Our first child, Cassandra, was born in July 1994, a talkative little Irish girl with light red hair, and she immediately stole my heart. Soon we bought our own place, a nice house with a swimming pool in 29 Palms, located in a rare neighborhood inhabited by few, if any, other Marine families.
It was as if I were on a voyage of discovery, and I jumped into this new personal life with both feet. My life revolved completely around my family, and even while I was working, I would look forward to going home, so there was never any boy’s night out for me. Instead of drinking beer in a bar, the big, bad sniper would lie down on the living room sofa with his baby daughter and watch television until she fell asleep, then tuck her into bed.
Kim got a job on the Marine base in finance, the same sort of thing she had done in the Air Force, and also studied for her teaching credentials. Not long afterward, she managed to convert a substitute job into a full-time teaching position at the high school that simultaneously helped her toward earning a master’s degree.
But the sniper was always in the house, too, although we both tried to keep him bottled up in a cupboard and out of sight. I believed that Kim understood how to separate Jack the husband and father from Jack the sniper. I would go away, sometimes for long periods, do what I had to do, and return home. We never, ever, discussed my work. It was not the sort of thing that husbands and wives talk about.
“Hi, honey. How was your day?”
“Oh, I killed some guys. How was your day?”
I was not being secretive by choice, but I was forbidden to discuss my work with anyone who was not directly involved in the job, even my best friends. To do so posed the risk that vital information might reach the ears of people who would think nothing of bringing vengeance down upon the ones I loved. I would not let that happen, so I kept my mouth shut. Such is life in the shadows.
If I awoke suddenly in the middle of the night with a start so violent that it shook the
It was if I had stepped right out of college and into a war movie that never ended. Not only was I good at what I did, but I was also single, which meant that I could move out at a moment’s notice and had the extra advantage of being relatively expendable. I thought I was perfectly content, running around looking for trouble, and had no desire to get married and settle down.
But shortly after I returned from Somalia and took up new duties at 29 Palms, California, things changed one night at a club in nearby San Bernadino, when I met Kim, a pretty, intelligent blonde from Long Island, New York. She was twenty-four years old and had taken an English degree from the State University of New York at Stony Brook and then joined the Air Force. She had two stripes and I had three, so we both had the enlisted person’s unorthodox view of officers and the world. The more we talked, the more we wanted to talk, and she didn’t even blink when she learned on that first night that I was a sniper.
Suddenly, something important was shoving my job out of the way. Could I have a real life, just like everybody else? She was based at March Air Force Base outside of San Bernardino, and I was soon driving down there a couple of times a week, then every weekend.Within only six months, we decided to get married, and we eloped on October 3, 1993. Only afterward did we venture back to Massachusetts and Long Island to meet the families and throw reception parties for our hometown friends.
Back in California, we settled down in San Bernardino for a few months, but Kim quickly became pregnant, so she quit the Air Force and we moved into base housing at 29 Palms. Our first child, Cassandra, was born in July 1994, a talkative little Irish girl with light red hair, and she immediately stole my heart. Soon we bought our own place, a nice house with a swimming pool in 29 Palms, located in a rare neighborhood inhabited by few, if any, other Marine families.
It was as if I were on a voyage of discovery, and I jumped into this new personal life with both feet. My life revolved completely around my family, and even while I was working, I would look forward to going home, so there was never any boy’s night out for me. Instead of drinking beer in a bar, the big, bad sniper would lie down on the living room sofa with his baby daughter and watch television until she fell asleep, then tuck her into bed.
Kim got a job on the Marine base in finance, the same sort of thing she had done in the Air Force, and also studied for her teaching credentials. Not long afterward, she managed to convert a substitute job into a full-time teaching position at the high school that simultaneously helped her toward earning a master’s degree.
But the sniper was always in the house, too, although we both tried to keep him bottled up in a cupboard and out of sight. I believed that Kim understood how to separate Jack the husband and father from Jack the sniper. I would go away, sometimes for long periods, do what I had to do, and return home. We never, ever, discussed my work. It was not the sort of thing that husbands and wives talk about.
“Hi, honey. How was your day?”
“Oh, I killed some guys. How was your day?”
I was not being secretive by choice, but I was forbidden to discuss my work with anyone who was not directly involved in the job, even my best friends. To do so posed the risk that vital information might reach the ears of people who would think nothing of bringing vengeance down upon the ones I loved. I would not let that happen, so I kept my mouth shut. Such is life in the shadows.
If I awoke suddenly in the middle of the night with a start so violent that it shook the
Readers choose
Grace Paley
Jack Steel
Violet Jackson
Mr Toby Downton, Mrs Helena Michaelson
P.D. Martin
Glen Cook
Roberto Bolaño
Veronica Heley
D C Grant
Gene Wolfe