American Sniper: The Autobiography of the Most Lethal Sniper in U.S. Military History (7 page)

We got back that night to our temporary base and went inside to the mission-planning room. The chief told everybody that we’d relax and have a few beers while we mapped out the next day’s operation. Then he turned to me.

“Hey, new guy,” he told me. “Go grab the beer and the booze out of the van and bring it in here.”

I hopped to.

When I came back in, everyone was sitting in chairs. There was only one left, and it was kind of in the middle of a circle of the others. I didn’t think too much about it as I sat down.

“All right, this is what we’re going to do,” my chief said, standing in front of dry-erase board at the front of the room. “The operation will be an ambush. The target will be in the center. We will completely encircle it.”

That doesn’t sound too smart,
I thought.
If we come in from every direction, we’ll be shooting each other.
Usually our ambushes are planned in an L-shape to avoid that.

I looked at the chief. The chief looked at me. Suddenly, his serious expression gave way to a shit-ass grin.

With that, the rest of the platoon bum-rushed me.

I hit the floor a second later. They cuffed me to a chair, and then began my kangaroo court.

There were a lot of charges against me. The first was the fact that I had let it be known that I wanted to become a sniper.

“This new guy is ungrateful!” thundered the prosecutor. “He does not want to do his job. He thinks he is better than the rest of us.”

I tried to protest, but the judge—none other than the chief himself—quickly ruled me out of order. I turned to my defense attorney.

“What do you expect?” he said. “He’s only got a third-grade edu-Kay-shun.”

“Guilty!” declared the judge. “Next charge!”

“Your Honor, the defendant is disrespectful,” said the prosecutor. “He told the CO to fuck off.”

“Objection!” said my lawyer. “He told the
OIC
to fuck off.”

The CO is the commanding officer of the Team; the OIC is the officer in charge of the platoon. A pretty big difference, except in this case.

“Guilty! Next charge!”

For every offense I was found guilty of—which meant anything and everything they could make up—I had to take a drink of Jack Daniels and Coke, followed by a shooter of Jack.

They got me pretty wasted before we even got to the felonies. At some point, they stripped me down and put ice down my drawers. Finally I passed out.

Then they spray-painted me, and for good measure, drew Playboy bunnies on my chest and back with a marker. Just the sort of body art you want for your honeymoon.

At some point, my friends apparently became concerned about my health. So they taped me to a spine board completely naked, took me outside, and stood me up in the snow. They left me for a while until I regained some amount of consciousness. By then I was jackhammering hard enough to put a hole through a bunker roof. They gave me an IV—the saline helps cut down the alcohol in your system—and finally took me back to the hotel, still taped to the spine board.

All I remember from the rest of the night is being lifted up a bunch of stairs, apparently to my motel room. There must have been a few spectators, because the boys were yelling, “Nothing to see here, nothing to see!” as they carried me in.

T
aya washed off most of the paint and the bunnies when I met up with her the next day. But a few were still visible under my shirt. I kept my jacket tightly buttoned for the ceremony.

By then, the swelling in my face was almost completely gone. The stitches in my eyebrow (from a friendly fight among teammates a few weeks early) were healing nicely. The cut on my lip (from a training exercise) was also healing pretty well. It’s probably not every bride’s dream to have a spray-painted, beat-up groom, but Taya seemed happy enough.

The amount of time we had for our honeymoon, though, was a sore point. The Team was gracious enough to give me three days to get hitched and honeymoon. As a new guy, I was appreciative of the brief leave. My new wife wasn’t quite as understanding, and made that clear. Nonetheless, we married and honeymooned quickly. Then I got back to work.

3

Takedowns

G
UN
R
EADY

“W
ake up. We got a tanker.”

I roused myself from the side of the boat where I’d been catching some rest despite the cold wind and choppy waters. I was soaked from the spray. Despite the fact that I was a new guy on my first deployment, I’d already mastered the art of sleeping in all sorts of conditions—an unheralded but critical SEAL skill.

An oil tanker loomed ahead. A helicopter had spotted it trying to sneak down the Gulf after loading up illegally in Iraq. Our job was to get aboard her, inspect her papers, and if, as suspected, she was violating the U.N. sanctions, turn her over to the Marines or other authorities for processing.

I scrambled to get ready. Our RHIB (rigid hulled inflatable boat, used for a variety of SEAL tasks) looked like a cross between a rubber life raft and an open speedboat with two monster motors in the back. Thirty-six feet long, it held eight SEALs and hit upward of forty-five knots on a calm sea.

The exhaust from the twin motors wafted over the boat, mixing with the spray as we gathered speed. We were hauling at a good pace, riding the wake of the tanker where radar couldn’t pick us up. I went to work, taking a long pole from the deck of the boat. Our speed dropped as our RHIB cut alongside the tanker, until we were just about matching its pace. The Iranian ship’s engines pulsed in the water, so loud our own motors were drowned out.

As we pushed alongside the tanker, I extended the pole upward, trying to angle the grappling hook at the top onto the ship’s rail. Once the hook caught, I jerked the pole down.

Gotcha.

A bungee cord connected the hook to the pole. A steel cable ladder was connected to the hook. Someone grabbed hold of the bottom and held it while the lead man began climbing up the side of the ship.

A loaded oil tanker can sit fairly low in the water, so low, in fact, that you sometimes can just grab the rail and hop over. That wasn’t the case here—the railing was quite a bit higher than our little boat. I’m not a fan of heights, but as long as I didn’t think too much about what I was doing, I was fine.

The ladder rocked with the ship and the wind; I pulled myself upward as quickly as I could go, my muscles remembering all those pull-ups in BUD/S. By the time I reached the deck, the lead guys were already headed toward the wheelhouse and bridge of the ship. I ran to catch up.

Suddenly the tanker began gaining speed. The captain, belatedly realizing he was being boarded, was trying to head for Iranian waters. If he reached them, we’d have to jump off—our orders strictly forbade taking any ship outside of international waters.

I caught up to the head of the team just as they reached the door to the bridge. One of the crew got there at roughly the same time, and tried to lock it. He wasn’t fast enough, or strong enough—one of the boarding party threw himself against the door and bashed it open.

I ran through, gun ready.

We’d done dozens of these operations over the past few days, and rarely had anyone even hinted of resistance. But the captain of this ship had some fight in him, and even though he was unarmed, he wasn’t ready to surrender.

He made a run at me.

Pretty stupid. First of all, I’m not only bigger than him, but I was wearing full body armor. Not to mention the fact that I had a submachine gun in my hand.

I took the muzzle of my gun and struck the idiot in his chest. He went right down.

Somehow, I managed to slip as well. My elbow flew out and landed straight on his face.

A couple of times.

That pretty much took the fight out of him. I rolled him over and cuffed him.

B
oarding and searching ships—officially known as VBSS, for Visit, Board, Search, Seize—is a standard SEAL mission. While the “regular” Navy has specially trained sailors to handle the job in peacetime, we’re trained to handle the searches in places where resistance is likely. And in the lead-up to war during the winter of 2002–03, that meant the Persian Gulf off Iraq. The U.N. later estimated that, in violation of international sanctions, billions of dollars of oil and other items were smuggled out of Iraq and into the pockets of Saddam’s regime.

Smuggling took all sorts of forms. You’d find oil being carried in wheat carriers, hidden in barrels. More commonly, tankers took on thousands and thousands of gallons in excess of what they were permitted in the U.N. Oil-for-Food program.

It wasn’t just oil. One of the biggest contraband shipments we came across that winter were dates. Apparently they could fetch a decent price on the world market.

I
t was during those first months of my first deployment that I became acquainted with the Polish
Wojskowa Formacja Specjalna GROM im. Cichociemnych Spadochroniarzy Armii Krajowej
—Special Military Formation GROM of the Dark and Silent Parachutists of the Polish Army—better known as GROM. They’re the Polish version of the Special Forces, with an excellent reputation in special operations, and they worked on the takedowns with us.

Generally, we worked off a big ship, which we used as kind of a floating home port for our RHIBs. Half of the platoon would go out for one twenty-four-hour period. We would sail to a designated spot and drift in the night, waiting. With luck, a helo or a ship would radio intel about a ship coming out of Iraq sailing pretty low in the water. Anything that had a cargo would be boarded and inspected. We’d go out and take it down.

A few times we worked with an Mk-V boat. The Mk-V is a special operations craft that some people have compared to World War II–era PT boats. The craft looks like an armored speedboat, and its job is to get SEALs into harm’s way as quickly as possible. Built out of aluminum, it can haul serious ass—the boats are said to hit sixty-five knots. But what we liked about them were their flat decks behind the superstructure. Ordinarily, we would load two Zodiacs back there. But since the Zodiacs weren’t needed, the whole company would board from the RHIBs and stretch out to grab some sleep until ships were spotted. That beat leaning across the seat or twisting yourself around to rest on the gunwale.

Taking down ships in the Gulf quickly became routine. We could take dozens in a night. But our biggest takedown didn’t come off Iraq; it was some fifteen hundred miles away, off the coast of Africa.

S
CUDS

I
n late fall, a SEAL platoon in the Philippines snuck alongside a freighter.
From that point on, the North Korean ship was literally a marked vessel.

The 3,500-ton freighter had an interesting history of transporting items to and from North Korea. According to one rumor, she had transported chemicals that could be used to create nerve weapons. In this case, though, the ship’s papers
declared that she was carrying cement.

What she was really carrying were Scud missiles.

The ship was tracked around the Horn of Africa while the Bush administration decided what to do about it. Finally, the President ordered that the ship be boarded and searched: just the sort of job SEALs excel at.

We had a platoon in Djibouti, which was a hell of a lot closer to the craft than we were. But because of the way the chain of command and assignments worked—the unit happened to be working for the Marines while we were directly under a Navy command—we were tasked to take down the freighter.

You can imagine how happy our sister platoon was to see us when we landed in Djibouti. Not only had we “stolen” a mission they considered theirs, they had to suffer the indignity of helping us offload and get ready for action.

As soon as I got off the plane, I spotted a buddy.

“Hey!” I shouted.

“Fuck off,” he answered.

“What’s up?”

“Fuck you.”

That was the extent of his welcome. I couldn’t blame him; in his place, I’d have been pissed myself. He and the others eventually came around—they weren’t mad at us; they were mad at the situation. Grudgingly, they helped us prepare for the mission, then got us aboard a mail-and-resupply helicopter from the USS
Nassau,
an amphibious assault ship out in the Indian Ocean.

Amphibs, as they’re called, are large assault ships that carry troops and helicopters, and occasionally Marine Harrier attack aircraft. They look like old-fashioned aircraft carriers with a straight-through flight deck. They’re fairly large, and have command and control facilities that can be used as forward planning and command posts during assault operations.

There are several ways to take down a ship, depending on the conditions and the target. While we could have used helicopters to get to the North Korean freighter,
looking at photos of the ship we noticed that there were a number of wires running above the deck. Those wires would have to be removed before we could land, which would add time to the operation.

Knowing we’d lose the element of surprise if we went in with helos, we opted to use RHIBs instead. We started doing practice runs off the side of the
Nassau
with boats that had been brought out there by a Special Boat Unit. (Special Boat Units are the SEALs’ dedicated taxi service. They run the RHIBs, Mk-Vs, and other SEAL-related vessels. Among other things, the units are equipped and trained to make combat insertions, braving fire to get SEALs in and out of trouble.)

The freighter, meanwhile,
continued sailing toward us. We geared up as it came within range, preparing to hit it. But before we could board the boats, we got a call telling us to stand by—the Spaniards had moved in.

What?

The Spanish frigate
Navarra
had confronted the North Korean ship,
which had been fooling exactly nobody by sailing without a flag and with her name covered up. According to later reports, Spanish spec-op troops went in after the freighter failed to comply with the frigate’s orders to stop. Of course, they used helicopters, and just as we had thought, were delayed by having to shoot out the wires. From what I’ve heard, that delay would have given the captain aboard the vessel time to get rid of incriminating paperwork and other evidence, that’s what I think happened.

O
bviously, there was a lot going on behind the scenes that we weren’t aware of.

Whatever.

Our mission was quickly changed from taking down the ship to going aboard and securing it—and uncovering the Scud missiles.

You wouldn’t think missiles would be hard to find. But in this case, they were nowhere to be seen. The ship’s hold was full of bags of cement—eighty-pound bags. There must have been hundreds of thousands.

There was only one place the Scuds could be. We started moving cement. Bag after bag. That was our job for twenty-four hours. No sleep, just move bags of cement. I must have moved thousands myself. It was miserable. I was covered with dust. God knows what my lungs looked like. Finally, we found shipping containers underneath. Out came our torches and saws.

I worked one of the quickie saws. Also known as a cut-off saw, it looks like a chain saw with a circular blade on the front. It cuts through just about anything, including Scud containers.

Fifteen Scud missiles lay under the cement. I’d never seen a Scud up close before, and to be honest, I thought they were kind of cool-looking. We took pictures, then waved the EOD guys—“explosive ordinance disposal,” or bomb disposal experts—in to make sure they were inert.

By that point, the entire platoon was completely covered with cement dust. A few guys went over the side to clean off. Not me. Given my history with dives, I wasn’t taking any chances. That much cement, who the hell knows what happens when it touches the water?

W
e handed the freighter over
to the Marines and went back aboard the
Nassau
. Command sent word that we would be pulled out and returned to Kuwait in “the same expedient fashion you were brought in
.
”

Of course, they were full of shit. We stayed on the
Nassau
for two weeks. For some reason, the Navy couldn’t figure out how to free up one of the umpteen helicopters they had sitting on the flight deck to get us back to Djibouti. So we played video games and pumped iron, waiting. That and slept.

Unfortunately, the only video game we had with us was Madden Football. I got pretty good at it. Up until that time, I hadn’t been much for playing video games. Now I’m an expert—especially at Madden. That was probably where I got hooked. I think my wife still cusses my two weeks aboard the
Nassau
to this very day.

A
footnote on the Scuds: the missiles were bound for Yemen. Or at least that’s what Yemen said. There have been rumors that they were part of some sort of a deal with Libya involving a payoff to take Saddam Hussein into exile, but I have no idea whether that’s true or not. In any event, the Scuds were released and went on to Yemen, Saddam stayed in Iraq, and we went back to Kuwait to get ready for war.

C
HRISTMAS

T
hat December was the first Christmas I’d ever been away from my family, and it felt a little depressing. The day kind of came and went without a memorable celebration.