American Sniper

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.

My 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.

Schooled

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.

During 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.

Guns

People 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.