American Sniper: The Autobiography of the Most Lethal Sniper in U.S. Military History (10 page)

T
hat action turned out to be our last significant encounter during that deployment. The CO pulled us back to base.

It was a waste. The Marines were going into Nasiriya every night, trying to clear the place out as the insurgency stoked up. They could have given us our own section that we could patrol. We could have rolled in and taken out the bad guys—but the CO vetoed it.

We heard it at the forward bases and camps where we were sitting around waiting for something real to do. The GROM—the Polish special forces—were going out and doing jobs. They told us we were lions led by dogs.

The Marines were blunter. They’d come back every night and bust on us:

“How many did y’all get tonight? Oh, that’s right—y’all didn’t go out.”

Ballbusters. But I couldn’t blame them. I thought our head shed was a bunch of pussies.

We had started training to take down Mukarayin Dam northeast of Baghdad. The dam was important not only because it provided hydroelectric power, but because if it were allowed to flood it could have slowed military forces attacking Iraqis in the area. But the mission was continually postponed, and finally given to SEAL Team 5 when they rotated into the Gulf toward the end of our stay. (The mission, which followed our basic plan, was a success.)

There were many things we could have done. How much of an impact on the war they would have had, I have no idea. We certainly could have saved a few lives here and there, maybe shortened some conflicts by a day or more. Instead, we were told to get ready to go home. Our deployment was over.

I sat back at base for a couple of weeks with nothing to do. I felt like a little fucking coward, playing video games and waiting to ship out.

I was pretty pissed. In fact, I was so mad I wanted to leave the Navy, and give up being a SEAL.

5

Sniper

Taya:

The first time Chris came home, he was really disgusted with everything. With America, especially.

In the car on the way back to our house, we listened to the radio. People weren’t talking about the war; life went on as if nothing was happening in Iraq.

“People are talking about bullshit,” he said. “We’re fighting for the country, and no one gives a shit.”

He’d been really disappointed when the war began. He was back in Kuwait and had seen something on television that was negative about the troops. He called and said, “You know what? If that’s what they think, fuck them. I’m out here ready to give my life and they’re doing bullshit.”

I had to tell him there were a lot of people who cared, not just for the troops in general, but for him. He had me, he had friends in San Diego and Texas, and family.

But the adjustment to being home was hard. He’d wake up punching. He’d always been jumpy, but now, when I got up in the middle of the night, I’d stop and say his name before I got back into bed. I had to wake him up before coming back to bed to ensure I wasn’t hit with his basic reflex.

One time I woke up to him grabbing my arm with both of his hands. One hand was on the forearm and one just slightly above my elbow. He was sound asleep and appeared to be ready to snap my arm in half. I stayed as still as possible and kept repeating his name, getting louder each time so as not to startle him, but also to stop the impending damage to my arm. Finally, he woke and let go.

Slowly, we settled into some new habits, and adjusted.

S
CARES

I
didn’t quit the SEALs.

I might have, if my contract hadn’t still had a lot of time to run. Maybe I would have gone to the Marines. But it wasn’t an option.

I had some reason for hope. When you come home and the Team returns from a deployment, there’s a reshuffling at the top and you get new leadership. There was always a chance our new head shed would be better.

I talked to Taya and told her how pissed off I was. Of course, she had a different perspective: she was just happy that I was alive and home in one piece. Meanwhile, the brass got huge promotions and congratulations for their part in the war. They got the glory.

Bullshit glory.

Bullshit glory for a war they didn’t fight and the cowardly stance they took. Their cowardice ended lives we could have saved if they would have let us do our jobs. But that’s politics for you: a bunch of game-players sitting around congratulating each other in safety while real lives are getting screwed up.

E
very time I returned home from deployment, starting then, I wouldn’t leave the house for about a week. I’d just stay there. Generally, we’d get about a month off after unloading and sorting our gear and stuff. That first week I’d always stay home with Taya and keep to myself. Only after that would I start seeing family and friends.

I didn’t have flashbacks of battle or anything dramatic like that; I just needed to be alone.

I do remember once, after the first deployment, when I had something
like
a flashback, though it only lasted a few seconds. I was sitting in the room we used as an office in our house in Alpine near San Diego. We had a burglar alarm system, and for some reason, Taya set it off accidentally when she came home.

It scared the ever-living shit out of me. I just immediately went right back to Kuwait. I dove under the desk. I thought it was a Scud attack.

We laugh about it now—but for those few seconds I was truly scared, more scared even than I had been in Kuwait when the Scuds actually did fly over.

I
’ve had more fun with burglar alarms than I can recount. One day I woke up after Taya had left for work. As soon as I got out of bed, the alarm went off. This one was in voice mode, so it alerted me with a computerized voice:

“Intruder alert! Intruder in the house! Intruder alert!”

I grabbed my pistol and went to confront the criminal. No son of a bitch was breaking into my house and living to tell about it.

“Intruder: living room!”

I carefully proceeded to the living room and used all of my SEAL skills to clear the living room.

Vacant. Smart criminal.

I moved down the hall.

“Intruder: kitchen!”

The kitchen was also clear. The son of a bitch was running from me.

“Intruder: hall!”

Motherfucker!

I can’t tell you how long it took before I realized
I
was the intruder: the system was tracking me. Taya had set the alarm to a setting that assumed the house was vacant, turning on the motion detectors.

Y’all feel free to laugh. With me, not at me, right?

I
always seemed more vulnerable at home. After every deployment, something would happen to me, usually during training. I broke a toe, a finger, all sorts of little injuries. Overseas, on deployment, in the war, I seemed invincible.

“You take your superhero cape off every time you come home from deployment,” Taya used to joke.

After a while, I figured it was true.

M
y parents had been nervous the entire time I was away. They wanted to see me as soon as I got home, and I think my need to keep to myself at first probably hurt them more than they’ll say. When we finally did get together, though, it was a pretty happy day.

My dad took my deployment especially hard, outwardly showing his anxiousness a lot more than my mother. It’s funny—sometimes the strongest individuals feel the worst when events are out of their control, and they can’t really be there for the people they love. I’ve felt it myself.

It was a pattern that would repeat itself every time I went overseas. My mom carried on like the stoic one; my otherwise stoic dad became the family worrier.

S
CHOOLED

I
gave up part of my vacation and came back from leave a week early to go to sniper school. I would have given up much more than that for the chance.

Marine snipers have justifiably gotten a lot of attention over the years, and their training program is still regarded as one of the world’s best. In fact, SEAL snipers used to be trained there. But we’ve gone ahead and started our own school, adapting a lot of what the Marines do but adding a number of things to prepare SEAL snipers for our mission. The SEAL school takes a little more than twice as long to complete because of that.

Next to BUD/S, sniper training was the hardest school I ever went through. They were constantly messing with our heads. We had late nights and early mornings. We were always running or being stressed in some way.

That was a key part of the instruction. Since they can’t shoot at you, they put as much pressure on you as they can manage in every other way. From what I’ve heard, only 50 percent of the SEALs who take the school make it through. I can believe it.

The first classes teach SEALs how to use the computers and cameras that are part of our job. SEAL snipers aren’t just shooters. In fact, shooting is only a small part of the job. It’s an important, vital part, but it’s far from everything.

A SEAL sniper is trained to observe. It’s a foundation skill. He may find himself out ahead of a main force, tasked to discover everything he can about the enemy. Even if he’s assigned to get into position to take out a high-value target, the first thing he has to be able to do is observe the area. He needs to be able to use modern navigational skills and tools like GPS, and at the same time present the information he’s gathered. So that’s where we start.

The next part of the course, and in a lot of ways the hardest, is stalking. That’s the part where most guys fall out. Stalking means sneaking into a position without being seen: easier said than done. It’s moving slowly and carefully to the exact right spot for the mission. It’s not patience, or at least that’s not all it is. It’s professional discipline.

I’m not a patient person, but I learned that to succeed as a stalker I need to take my time. If I know I’m going to kill someone, I will wait a day, a week, two weeks.

Make that, I
have
waited.

I will do whatever it takes. And let’s just say there are no bathroom breaks, either.

For one of the exercises, we had to sneak through a hay field. I took hours arranging the grass and hay in my ghillie suit. The ghillie suit is made of burlap and is a kind of camouflage base for a sniper on a stalking mission. The suit allows you to add hay or grass or whatever, so you can blend in with your surroundings. The burlap adds depth, so it doesn’t look like a guy with hay sticking out of your butt as you cross a field. You look like a bush.

But the suits are hot and sweaty. And they don’t make you invisible. When you come to another piece of terrain, you have to stop and rearrange your camouflage. You have to look like whatever it is you’re crossing.

I remember one time I was making my way s-l-o-w-l-y across a field when I heard the distinct rattle of a snake nearby. A rattler had taken a particular liking to the piece of real estate I had to cross. Willing it away didn’t work. Not wanting to give away my position to the instructor grading me, I crept slowly to the side, altering my course. Some enemies aren’t worth fighting.

D
uring the stalking portion of our training, you’re not graded on your first shot. You’re graded on your second. In other words, once you’ve fired, can you be seen?

Hopefully, no. Because not only is there a good possibility you’ll have to take more shots, but you have to get out of there, too. And it would be nice to do that alive.

It’s important to remember that perfect circles do not exist in nature, and that means you have to do what you can to camouflage your scope and rifle barrel. I would take tape and put it over my barrel, then spray-paint the tape up to camouflage it further. I’d keep some vegetation in front of my scope as well as my barrel—you don’t need to see everything, just your target.

For me, stalking was the hardest part of the course. I nearly failed because of a lack of patience.

It was only after we mastered stalking that we moved on to shooting.

G
UNS

P
eople ask a lot about weapons, what I used as a sniper, what I learned on, what I prefer. In the field, I matched the weapon to the job and the situation. At sniper school, I learned the basics of a range of weapons, so I was prepared not only to use them all, but also to choose the right one for the job.

I used four basic weapons at sniper school. Two were magazine-fed semiautomatics: the Mk-12, a 5.56 sniper rifle; and the Mk-11, a 7.62 sniper rifle. (When I talk about a gun, I often just mention the caliber, so the Mk-12 is the 5.56. Oh, and there’s no “point” in front of the numbers; it’s understood.)

Then there was my .300 Win Mag. That was magazine-fed, but it was bolt-action. Like the other two, it was suppressed. Which means that it has a device on the end of the barrel that suppresses muzzle flash and reduces the sound of bullet as it leaves the gun, much like a muffler on a car. (It’s not actually a silencer, though some think of it that way. Without getting too technical, the suppressor works by letting gas out of the barrel as the bullet discharges. Generally speaking, there are two types, one that attaches to the barrel of the weapon and another that’s integrated with the barrel itself. Among the practical effects of the suppressor on a sniper rifle is that it tends to reduce the amount of “kick” the shooter experiences. This helps make it more accurate.)

I also had a .50 caliber, which was not suppressed.

Let’s talk about each weapon individually.

Mk-12

O
fficially, the United States Navy Mk-12 Special Purpose Rifle, this gun has a sixteen-inch barrel, but is otherwise the same platform as an M-4. It fires a 5.56 × 45 mm round from a thirty-round magazine. (It can also be fitted with a twenty-round box.)

Derived from what became known as the .223 cartridge and therefore smaller and lighter than most earlier military rounds, the 5.56 is not a preferred bullet to shoot someone with. It can take a few shots to put someone down, especially the drugged-up crazies we were dealing with in Iraq, unless you hit him in the head. And contrary to what you’re probably thinking, not all sniper shots, certainly not mine, take the bad guys in the head. Usually I went for center mass—a nice fat target somewhere in the middle of the body, giving me plenty of room to work with.

The gun was super-easy to handle, and was virtually interchangeable with the M-4, which, though not a sniper weapon, is still a valuable combat tool. As a matter of fact, when I got back to my platoon, I took the lower receiver off my M-4 and put it on the upper receiver of my Mk-12. That gave me a collapsible stock and allowed me to go full-auto. (I see now that some Mk-12s are being equipped with the collapsible stock.)

On patrol, I like to use a shorter stock. It’s quicker to get up to my shoulder and get a bead on somebody. It’s also better for working inside and in tight quarters.

Another note on my personal configuration: I never used full auto on the rifle. The only time you really want full auto is to keep someone’s head down—spewing bullets doesn’t make for an accurate course of fire. But since there might be a circumstance where it would come in handy, I always wanted to have that option in case I needed it.