ARMY TIMES: PFC PUTS LIFE IN SHAMBLES BY TAKING WAR SPOILS: A MUST READ STORY

This story from the ARMY TIMES is a must read for anyone interested in what our troops go through in Iraq.

Pfc. puts life in shambles by taking war spoils

By Billy Cox - Special to the TimesPosted :

Monday Jul 7, 2008 12:37:38 EDT
http://www.armytimes.com/news/2008/07/military_coffey_070508w/

SARASOTA, Fla. — After nearly three weeks of desert combat and enough death to jangle his brain for a lifetime, Pfc. Earl Coffey arrived in Baghdad in April 2003 thinking he had discovered an oasis.

It was Palace Row, one of the most exclusive tracts of real estate in Iraq, and not even major bomb damage could dim the luster of a tyrant’s decadence. Coffey was among the first U.S. troops to secure Saddam Hussein’s inner sanctum, the postwar “Green Zone” now hosting diplomats and government authorities. Its allure was intoxicating.

Coffey recalled his awe at seeing gold-rimmed toilet seats, 30-foot wide chandeliers, and Swarovski crystal collections. Over the next few days, he sampled one revelation after another: the Dom Perignon champagne, the Monte Cristo Cuban cigars, even the lion’s roar of captive pet carnivores.

He watched as a Bradley Fighting Vehicle rammed and collapsed the wall of a windowless bunker just outside Saddam’s palace. The building concealed bundles of U.S. currency stacked floor-to-ceiling and wrapped in binding that read “Bank of America.”

To a man who had grown up in the bleak shadows of Kentucky’s coal mines, staring down all that money “was like hitting the lottery,” Coffey said.

His career was about to drown in a flood of American dollars.

The family business
Today, adrift and troubled in Sarasota, the 34-year-old is worlds away from what he once was — a trained sniper who took his first shot with a .22-caliber rifle his father gave him when he was 7 or 8 years old in rural Harlan County. At first, he practiced on tin can lids nailed to a fence post 80 yards away. When that got too easy, he began targeting the nails. And other things.
“I could shoot the fire off cigarettes from 40 to 50 yards,” he said. “I could shoot the head off a match.”

Coffey had other interests, like football. He played linebacker and tailback at tiny Everts High School. But looking back, he said his course was set the first time he picked up a gun. His father was a Vietnam veteran; his grandfather survived World War II.

“I wanted to go to the Army,” he said. “It was an honorable profession.”
So he volunteered at age 17. Duty sent the small-town boy around the world: Kuwait, Germany, Scotland, Curacao, Somalia, Saudi Arabia, the Azores.

Still a teenager, Coffey found himself in Mogadishu pr
oviding cover fire during the bloody “Black Hawk Down” street battles in 1993. “None of us thought we were coming out alive,” he said.

Using a .50-caliber sniper rifle, he and a spotter stalked targets from as far away as three-quarters of a mile. By then, Coffey had become a deadly expert, with enough experience to have his own theory on how quickly his targets would die.

“It’s all according to how full of rage or how full of energy they are,” he said.
A normal man dies instantly. In Mogadishu; he shot a man standing on a balcony 960 meters away.

“I hit him right above the eye,” Coffey said. “But he walked a good 15 feet before he finally went down.”

At age 19, this son of a coal miner and truck driver had come a long way from home and a childhood spent, for a while, without indoor plumbing.

“We had an outhouse,” Coffey said. “I remember packing water from natural springs way down at the end of the road. Our bath was a galvanized metal tub.”

Continue reading this story here: http://www.armytimes.com/news/2008/07/military_coffey_070508w/