American Sniper: The Autobiography of the Most Lethal Sniper in U.S. Military History (25 page)

You see us? We’re the people kicking your ass. Fear us. Because we will kill you, motherfucker.

You are bad. We are badder. We are bad-ass.

Our sister platoon wanted to use the template we used to mark our gear, but we wouldn’t let them. We told them
we
were the Punishers. They had to get their own symbol.

W
e went a bit light with our Hummers. They were named, mostly, for
G.I. Joe
characters, like Duke and Snake Eyes. Just because war is hell doesn’t mean you can’t have a little fun.

W
e had a good team that deployment, starting at the top. Decent officers, and a really excellent chief named Tony.

Tony had trained as a sniper. He was not only a bad-ass, he was an
old
bad-ass, at least for a SEAL—rumor has it he was forty that deployment.

SEALs usually do not make it to forty and stay out in the field. We’re too beat-up. But Tony somehow managed it. He was a hard-core son of a bitch, and we would have followed him to hell and back.

I was the point man—snipers usually are—when we went on patrols. Tony was almost always right behind me. Generally, the chief will be toward the rear of the formation, covering everybody else’s ass, but in this case our LT reasoned that having two snipers at the head of the platoon was more effective.

O
ne night soon after the entire platoon had gotten back together, we traveled about seventeen kilometers east of Ramadi. The area was green and fertile—so much so that it looked to us like the Vietnamese jungle, compared to the desert we’d been operating in. We called it Viet Ram.

One night not long after the unit reunited, we were deposited at a patrol area and began walking toward a suspected insurgent stronghold on foot. Eventually, we came to a huge ditch with a bridge going across it. Most of the time, these bridges were booby-trapped, and in this case we had intel indicating this one definitely was. So I went up and stood there, shining my laser to look for a trip wire.

I played the light across the top of the bridge but saw nothing. I ducked a little lower and tried again. Still nothing. I looked everywhere I could think of, but found no contact wires, no IEDs, no booby-traps, nothing.

But since I’d been told the bridge was booby-trapped, I was sure there
had
to be something there.

I looked again. My EOD—the bomb disposal expert—was waiting behind me. All I had to do was find a trip wire or the bomb itself, and he’d have it disarmed in seconds.

But I couldn’t find shit. Finally, I told Tony, “Let’s go across.”

Don’t get the wrong image: I wasn’t charging across that bridge. I had my rifle in one hand and the other parked protectively over my family jewels.

That wouldn’t have saved my life if an IED exploded, but at least I’d be intact for the funeral.

The bridge was all of ten feet long, but it must have taken me an hour to get across that thing. When I finally reached the other side, I was soaking wet from sweat. I turned around to give the other guys the thumbs-up. But there was no one there. They’d all ducked behind some rocks and brush, waiting for me to blow up.

Even Tony, who, as point man, should have been right behind me.

“Motherfucker!” I yelled. “Where the hell did you go?”

“There’s no reason for more than one of us to get blown up,” he told me matter-of-factly as he came across.

T
ERPS

F
allujah had been taken in an all-out assault, moving through the city in a very organized fashion. While it had been successful, the attack had also caused a lot of damage, which had supposedly hurt support for the new Iraqi government.

You can argue whether that’s true or not—I sure would—but the top American command didn’t want the same thing to happen in Ramadi. So, while the Army worked on a plan for taking Ramadi with minimal destruction, we went to war in the area nearby.

We started with DAs. We had four interpreters—terps, as we called them—who helped us deal with the locals. At least one and usually two would go out with us.

One terp we all really liked was Moose. He was a bad-ass. He’d been working since the invasion in 2003. He was Jordanian, and he was the only one of the terps we gave a gun. We knew he would fight—he wanted to be an American so bad he would have died for it. Every time we got contacted, he would be out there shooting.

He wasn’t a great shot, but he could keep the enemy’s heads down. Most importantly, he knew when he could and couldn’t shoot—not as easy a call as it might seem.

T
here was this little village outside Shark Base we called Gay Tway. It was infested with insurgents. We would open the gates, walk out, and hit our target. There was one house we went to three or four times. After the first time, they didn’t even bother putting the door back.

Why they kept going back to that house, I don’t know. But we kept going back, too; we got to know the place pretty well.

It didn’t take too long before we started getting a lot of contact in Gay Tway and the village of Viet Ram. An Army National Guard unit covered that area, and we started working with them.

T
ARGETS

A
mong our first jobs was to help the Army reclaim the area around a hospital along the river in Viet Ram. The four-story concrete building had been started and then abandoned a few years before. The Army wanted to finish it for the Iraqis; decent medical care was a big need out there. But they couldn’t get close to it to do any work, because as soon as they did, they came under fire. So we went to work.

Our platoon, sixteen guys, teamed up with about twenty soldiers to clear the nearby village of insurgents. Entering town early one morning, we split up and started taking houses.

I was at point, carrying my Mk-12, the first guy in each building. Once the house was secure, I’d go up to the roof, cover the guys on the ground, and look for insurgents, who we expected to attack once they knew we were there. The group leapfrogged forward, clearing the area as we went.

Unlike in the city, these houses weren’t right next to each other, so the process took longer and was more spread-out. But soon enough, the terrorists realized where we were and what we were up to, and they put together a little attack from a mosque. Holed up behind its walls, they started raining AK fire at a squad of soldiers on the ground.

I was up on one of the roofs when the fight started. Within moments, we started firing everything we had at the bad guys: M-4s, M-60s, sniper rifles, 40-mm grenades, LAW rockets—everything we had. We lit that mosque up.

The momentum of the battle quickly shifted in our favor. The soldiers on the ground began maneuvering to assault the mosque, hoping to catch the insurgents before they could slide back into whatever sewer they’d emerged from. We shifted our fire higher, moving our aim above their heads to allow them to get in.

Somewhere in the middle of the fight, a piece of hot brass from another gun—probably an M-60 machine gun next to me—shot against my leg and landed in my boots next to my ankle. It burned like hell, but I couldn’t do anything about it—there were too many bad guys popping up from behind the walls, trying to get my people.

I was wearing simple hiking boots rather than combat boots. That was my normal style—they were lighter and more comfortable, and ordinarily more than enough to protect my feet. Unfortunately, I hadn’t bothered to lace them up very well before the battle, and there was a space between my pants and the boot where the brass happened to fall after it ejected.

What had the instructors told me in BUD/S about not being able to call “time out” in battle?

When things quieted down, I stood up and pulled out the casing. A good wedge of skin came out with it.

We secured the mosque, worked through the rest of the village, then called it a day.

D
IFFERENT
W
AYS OF
K
ILLING

W
e went on patrols with the Army unit several more times, trying to reduce resistance in the area. The idea was simple, if potentially risky: we’d make ourselves visible, trying to draw fire from the insurgents. Once they showed themselves, we could fire back and kill them. And usually we did.

Pushed from the village and the mosque, the insurgents retreated to the hospital. They loved hospital buildings, not only because they were big and usually well-made (and therefore protective), but because they knew we were reluctant to attack hospitals, even after they were taken over by terrorists.

It took a while, but the Army command finally decided to attack the building.

Good, we all told them when we heard the plan. Let’s go do it.

W
e set up an overwatch in a house some two or three hundred yards from the hospital building, across a clear field. As soon as the insurgents saw us, they started letting us have it.

One of my guys shot off a Carl Gustav rocket at the top of the building where they were shooting from. The Gustav put a big ol�� hole there. Bodies flew everywhere.

The rocket helped take some of the fight out of them, and as resistance weakened, the Army punched in and took the building. By the time they reached the grounds, there was almost no resistance. The few people we hadn’t killed had run away.

I
t was always hard to tell how many insurgents were opposing us in a battle like that. A small handful could put up a pretty good fight. A dozen men fighting behind cover could hold up a unit advance for quite a while, depending on the circumstances. Once the insurgents were met with a lot of force, however, you could count on about half squirting out the back or wherever to get away.

W
e’d had the Carl Gustav with us earlier, but as far as I know, this was the first time we’d actually killed anyone with it, and it may have been the first time any SEAL unit did so. It was certainly the first time we used it against a building. Once word spread, of course, everyone wanted to use them.

Technically, the Carl Gustav was developed to combat armor, but as we found out, it was pretty potent against buildings. In fact, it was perfect in Ramadi—it just blew right through reinforced concrete and took out whoever was inside. The overpressure from the explosion wiped out the interior.

We had different rounds for the gun. (Remember, it’s actually considered a recoilless rifle rather than a rocket launcher.) A lot of times, the insurgents would hide behind embankments and other barriers, well protected. In that case, you could set an air-burst round to explode over them. The air burst was a lot worse than anything that detonated on the ground.

The Gustav is relatively easy to use. You have to wear double ear-protection and be careful where you stood when it’s fired, but the results are awesome. Everyone in the platoon wanted to use it after a while—I swear there were fights over who was going to launch it.

W
hen you’re in a profession where your job is to kill people, you start getting creative about doing it.

You think about getting the most firepower you possibly can into the battle. And you start trying to think of new and inventive ways to eliminate your enemy.

We had so many targets out in Viet Ram we started asking ourselves, what weapons have we
not
used to kill them?

No pistol kill yet? You have to get at least one.

We’d use different weapons for the experience, to learn the weapon’s capabilities in combat. But at times it was a game—when you’re in a firefight every day, you start looking for a little variety. No matter what, there were plenty of insurgents, and plenty of firefights.

T
he Gustav turned out to be one of our most effective weapons when we came up against insurgents shooting from buildings. We had LAW rockets, which were lighter and easier to carry. But too many of them turned out to be duds. And once you fired a LAW, you were done; it wasn’t a reloadable weapon. The Carl Gustav was always a big hit—pun intended.

Another weapon we used quite a bit was the 40-mm grenade launcher. The launcher comes in two varieties, one that attaches under your rifle and another that is a stand-alone weapon. We had both.

Our standard grenade was a “frag”—a grenade that exploded and sprayed an area with shrapnel or fragments. This is a traditional antipersonnel weapon, tried and true.

While we were on this deployment, we received a new type of projectile using a thermobaric explosive. Those had a lot more “boom”—a single grenade launched at an enemy sniper in a small structure could bring the whole building down because of the over-pressure created by the explosion. Most times, of course, we were firing at a larger building, but the destructive power was still intense. You’d have a violent explosion, a fire, and then no more enemy. Gotta love it.

You shoot grenades with what we call Kentucky windage—estimating the distance, adjusting the elevation of the launcher, and firing. We liked the M-79—the standalone version that was first used during the Vietnam War—because it had sights, making it a bit easier to aim and hit what you wanted. But one way or another, you quickly got the hang of things, because you were using the weapon so much.