American Sniper: The Autobiography of the Most Lethal Sniper in U.S. Military History (35 page)

He had an RPG in his hand. He knelt quickly, bringing it up to aim.

I dropped him before he could fire.

Then it became a waiting game. The rocket was valuable to them. Sooner or later, I knew, someone would be sent to get it.

I watched. It seemed like forever. Finally, a figure came down the street and scooped up the grenade launcher.

It was a kid. A child.

I had a clear view in my scope, but I didn’t fire. I wasn’t going to kill a kid, innocent or not. I’d have to wait until the savage who put him up to it showed himself on the street.

T
ARGET
-R
ICH

I
ended up getting seven insurgents that day, and more the next. We were in a target-rich environment.

Because of the way the streets were laid out and the number of insurgents, we were getting close shots—a number were as close as 200 yards. My longest during this time was only about 880; the average was around 400.

The city around us was schizophrenic. You’d have ordinary civilians going about their business, selling things, going to market, whatever. And then you’d have guys with guns trying to sneak up on the side streets and attack the soldiers putting up the wall. After we began engaging the insurgents, we would become the targets ourselves. Everyone would know where we were, and the bad guys would come out of their slug holes and try and take us down.

It got to the point where I had so many kills that I stepped back to let the other guys have a few. I started giving them the best spots in the buildings we took over. Even so, I had plenty of chances to shoot.

One day we took over this house and, after letting my guys choose their places, there were no more windows to fire from. So I took a sledgehammer and broke a hole in the wall. It took me quite a while to get it right.

When I finally set up my place, I had about a three-hundred-yard view. Just as I got on my gun, three insurgents came out right across the street, fifteen yards away.

I killed all of them. I rolled over and said to one of the officers who’d come over, “You want a turn?”

A
fter a few days, we figured out that the attacks were concentrating when the work crews reached an intersection. It made sense: the insurgents wanted to attack from a place where they could easily run off.

We learned to bump up and watch the side streets. Then we started pounding these guys when they showed up.

F
allujah was bad. Ramadi was worse. Sadr City was the worst. The overwatches would last two or three days. We’d leave for a day, recharge, then go back out. It was balls-to-the-wall firefights every time.

The insurgents brought more than just their AKs to a fight. We were getting rocketed every fight. We responded by calling in air cover, Hellfires and what-have-you.

The surveillance network overhead had been greatly improved over the past several years, and the U.S. was able to make pretty good use of it when it came to targeting Predators and other assets. But in our case, the bastards were right out in the open, extremely easy to spot. And very plentiful.

T
here were claims by the Iraqi government at one point that we were killing civilians. That was pure bullshit. While just about every battle was going down, Army intelligence analysts were intercepting insurgent cell phone communications that were giving a blow-by-blow account.

“They just killed so-and-so,” ran one conversation. “We need more mortarmen and snipers. . . . They killed fifteen today.”

We had only counted thirteen down in that battle—I guess we should have taken two out of the “maybe” column and put them in the “definite” category.

G
ET
M
Y
G
UN

A
s always, there were moments of high anxiety mixed with bizarre events and random comic relief.

One day at the tail end of an op, I hustled back to the Bradley with the rest of the guys. Just as I reached the vehicle, I realized my sniper rifle had been left behind—I’d put it down in one of the rooms, then forgotten to bring it with me when I’d left.

Yeah. Stupid.

I reversed course. LT, one of my officers, was just running up.

“Hey, we gotta go back,” I said. “My gun’s in the house.”

“Let’s do it,” said LT, following me.

We turned around and raced back to the house. Meanwhile, insurgents were sweeping toward it—so close we could hear them. We cleared the courtyard, sure we would run into them.

Fortunately, there was no one there. I grabbed the rifle and we raced back to the Bradleys, about two seconds ahead of a grenade attack. The ramp shut and the explosions sounded.

“What the hell?” demanded the officer in charge as the vehicle drove off.

LT smirked.

“I’ll explain later,” he said.

I’m not sure he ever did.

V
ICTORY

I
t took about a month to get the barriers up. As the Army reached its objective, the insurgents started to give up.

It was probably a combination of them realizing the wall was going to be finished whether they liked it or not, and the fact that we had killed so many of the bastards that they couldn’t mount much of an attack. Where thirty or forty insurgents would gather with AKs and RPGs to fire on a single fence crew at the beginning of the op, toward the end the bad guys were putting together attacks with two or three men. Gradually, they faded into the slums around us.

Muqtada al-Sadr, meanwhile, decided it was time for him to try and negotiate a peace with the Iraqi government. He declared a ceasefire and started talking to the government.

Imagine that.

Taya:

People always told me I didn’t really know Chris or what he was doing, because he was a SEAL. I remember going to an accountant one time. He said he knew some SEALs and those guys told him no one ever really knew where they went.

“My husband’s on a training trip,” I said. “I know where he is.”

“You don’t know that.”

“Well, yes I do. I just talked to him.”

“But you don’t know really what they’re doing. They’re SEALs.”

“I—”

“You can never know.”

“I know my husband.”

“You just can’t know. They’re trained to lie.”

People would say that a lot. It irritated me when it was someone I didn’t know well. The people I did know well respected that I might not know every detail but I knew what I needed to know.

I
N THE
V
ILLAGES

W
ith things relatively calm in Sadr City, we were given a new area to target. IED-makers and other insurgents had set up shop in a series of villages near Baghdad, trying to operate under the radar as they supplied weapons and manpower to fight Americans and the loyal Iraqi forces. The Mahdi army was out there, and the area was a virtual no-go zone for Americans.

We had worked with members of 4-10 Mountain Division during much of the Sadr City battle. They were fighters. They wanted to be in the shit—and they certainly got their wish there. Now as we bumped out into the villages outside the city, we were happy to have a chance to work with them again. They knew the area. Their snipers were especially good, and having them along improved our effectiveness.

O
ur jobs are the same, but there are a few differences between Army and SEAL snipers. For one thing, Army snipers use spotters, which we don’t, as a general rule. Their weapon set is a bit smaller than ours.

But the bigger difference, at least at first, had to do with tactics and the way they were deployed. Army snipers were more used to going out in three- or four-man groups, which meant they couldn’t stay out for very long, certainly not all night.

The SEAL task unit, on the other hand, moved in heavy and locked down an area, basically looking for a fight and having the enemy provide us with one. It wasn’t so much an overwatch anymore as a dare:
Here we are; come and get us.

And they did: village after village, the insurgents would come and try and kill us; we’d take them down. Typically, we’d spend at least one night and usually a few, going in and extracting after sunset.

In this area, we ended up going back to the same village a few times, usually taking a different house each time. We’d repeat the process until all the local bad guys were dead, or at least until they understood that attacking us was not very smart.

It was surprising how many idiots you had to kill before they finally got that point.

C
OVERED WITH
C
RAP

T
here were lighter moments, but even some of those were shitty. Literally.

Our point man, Tommy, was a great guy but, as it turned out, a terrible point in a lot of ways.

Or maybe I should say sometimes he was more of a duck than a point man. If there was a puddle between us and the objective, Tommy took us through it. The deeper the better. He was always having us walk through the worst possible terrain.

It got so ridiculous that finally I told him, “One more time, I’m going to whup your ass, and you’re fired.”

On the very next mission, he found a path to a village that he was sure would be dry. I had my doubts. In fact, I pointed them out to him.

“Oh, no, no,” he insisted, “it’s good, it’s good.”

Once we were out in the field, we followed him across some farmland on a narrow path that led to a pipe across a path of mud. I was at the back at the group, one of the last to come across the pipe. As I stepped off, I sunk right through the mud and into crap up to my knee. The mud was actually just a thin crust atop a deep pool of sewage.

It stunk even worse than Iraq usually stunk.

“Tommy,” I yelled, “I’m going to whip your ass as soon as we get to the house.”

We pushed on to the house. I was still in the rear. We cleared the house and, once all the snipers were deployed, I went to find Tommy and give him the thrashing I’d promised.

Tommy was already paying for his sins: when I found him downstairs, he was hooked up to an IV and puking his brains out. He had fallen into the muck and was completely covered with shit. He was sick for a day, and he smelled for a week.

Every article of clothing he’d been wearing was disposed of, probably by a hazmat unit.

Served him right.

I
spent somewhere between two and three months in the villages. I had roughly twenty confirmed kills while I was there. The action on any particular op could be fierce; it could also be slow. There was no predicting.

Most of the houses we took over belonged to families who at least pretended to be neutral; I’d guess that the majority of them hated the insurgents for causing trouble and would have been even happier than we were to have the bad guys leave. But there were exceptions, and we were plenty frustrated when we couldn’t do anything about it.

We went into one house and saw police uniforms. We knew instantly that the owner was muj—the insurgents were stealing uniforms and using them to disguise themselves in attacks.

Of course he gave us a BS line about having just gotten a job as a part-time police officer—something he’d mysteriously forgotten to mention when we first interrogated him.

We called it back to the Army, gave them the information, and asked what to do.

They had no intelligence on the guy. In the end, they decided the uniforms weren’t evidence of anything.

We were told to turn him loose. So we did.

It gave us something to think about every time we heard of an attack by insurgents dressed as policemen, over the next few weeks.

E
XTRACTED

O
ne night we entered another village and took over a house at the edge of some large open fields, including one used for soccer. We set up without a problem, surveying the village and preparing for any trouble we might face in the morning.

The tempo of the ops had slowed quite a bit over the past week or two; it looked as if things were slacking down, at least for us. I started thinking about going back west and rejoining my platoon.

I set up in a room on the second floor with LT. We had an Army sniper and his spotter in the room next to us, and a bunch of guys on the roof. I’d taken the .338 Lapua with me, figuring that most of my shots would be on the long side, since we were on the edge of the village. With the area around us quiet, I started scanning out farther, to the next village, a little more than a mile away.

At some point I saw a one-story house with someone moving on the roof. It was about 2,100 yards away, and even with a twenty-five power scope I couldn’t make out much more than an outline. I studied the person, but at that point he didn’t seem to have a weapon, or at least he wasn’t showing it. His back was to me, so I could watch him, but he couldn’t see me. I thought he was suspicious, but he wasn’t doing anything dangerous, so I let him be.

A little while later an Army convoy came down the road beyond the other village, heading in the direction of the COP we had staged out of. As it got closer, the man on the roof raised a weapon to his shoulder. Now the outline was clear: he had a rocket launcher, and he was aiming it at Americans.