American Sniper

were patched after we left.)

One day we set up inside a small office building that had been vacated some time before. We pulled the desks back from the windows and sat deep in the room; the natural shadows that played on the wall outside helped hide the position.

The Bad Guys

The enemies we were fighting were savage and well-armed. In just one house, the Marines found roughly two dozen guns, including machine guns and sniper rifles, along with homemade rocket stands and a mortar base.

That was just one house on a long block. It was a nice house, in fact—it had air conditioning, elaborate chandeliers, and fancy Western furniture. It made a good place to rest while we took a break one afternoon.

The houses were all searched carefully, but the weapons were usually pretty easy to find. The Marines would go inside and see a grenade launcher propped against a china cabinet—with rockets stacked next to the teacups below. At one house, Marines found dive tanks—apparently the insurgent who had been staying at the house used them to sneak across the river and make an attack.

Russian equipment was also common. Most of it was very old—in one house there were rifle grenades that could have been made during World War II. We found binoculars with old Communist hammer-and-sickle emblems. And IEDs, including some cemented into walls, were everywhere.

A lot of people who have written about the battles in Fallujah mention how fanatical the insurgents were. They were fanatical, but it wasn’t just religion that was driving them. A good many were pretty doped up.

Later on in the campaign, we took a hospital they’d been using at the outskirts of the city. There we found cooked spoons, drug works, and other evidence of how they prepared themselves. I’m not an expert, but it looked to me that they would cook up heroin and inject it before a battle. Other things I’ve heard said they would use prescription drugs and basically anything they could get to help get their courage up.

You could see that sometimes when you shot them. Some could take several bullets without seeming to feel it. They were driven by more than just religion and adrenaline, even more than blood lust. They were already halfway to Paradise, in their minds at least.

Under the Rubble

One day I came down from a roof to take a break and headed out into the backyard of the house with another SEAL sniper. I pulled open the bipod on my rifle and set it down.

All of a sudden there was an explosion right across from us, maybe ten feet away. I ducked, then turned and saw the cement block wall crumbling. Just beyond it were two insurgents, AKs slung over their shoulders. They looked as stunned as we must have; they, too, had been taking a break when a stray rocket hit or maybe some sort of IED went off.

It felt like an old western duel—whoever got to their pistol the quickest was going to live.

I grabbed mine and started shooting. My buddy did the same.

We hit them, but the slugs didn’t drop them. They turned the corner and ran through the house where they’d been, then cut out into the street.

As soon as they cleared the house, the Marines pulling security on the road shot them down.

At one point early in the battle an RPG hit the building I was working from.

It was an afternoon when I’d set up back from a window on the top floor. The Marines on the ground had started to take fire on the street ahead. I began covering them, taking down targets one by one. The Iraqis started firing back at me, fortunately not too accurately, which was usually the way they shot.

Then an RPG hit the side of the house. The wall took the brunt of the explosion, which was good news and bad news. On the plus side, it saved me from getting blasted. But the explosion also took down a good chunk of the wall. It crashed onto my legs, slamming my knees into the concrete and temporarily pinning me there.

It hurt like hell. I kicked some of the rubble off and kept firing at the bastards down the block.

“Everybody okay?” yelled one of the other boys I was with.

“I’m good, I’m good,” I yelled back. But my legs were screaming the opposite. They hurt like a son of a bitch.

The insurgents pulled back, then things stoked up again. That was the way it would go—a lull, followed by an intense exchange, then another lull.

When the firefight finally stopped, I got up and climbed out of the room. Downstairs, one of the boys pointed at my legs.

“You’re limping,” he said.

“Fuckin’ wall came down on me.”

He glanced upward. There was a good-sized hole in the house where the wall had been. Until that point, no one had realized that I’d been in the room where the RPG had hit.

I limped for a while after that. A long while—I eventually had to have surgery on both knees, though I kept putting it off for a couple of years.

I didn’t go to a doctor. You go to a doctor and you get pulled out. I knew I could get by.

Fry Me Not

You cannot be afraid to take your shot. When you see someone with an IED or a rifle maneuvering toward your men, you have clear reason to fire. (The fact that an Iraqi had a gun would not necessarily mean he could be shot.) The ROEs were specific, and in most cases the danger was obvious.

But there were times when it wasn’t exactly clear, when a person almost surely was an insurgent, probably was doing evil, but there was still some doubt because of the circumstances or the surroundings—the way he moved, for example, wasn’t toward an area where troops were. A lot of times a guy seemed to be acting macho for friends, completely unaware that I was watching him, or that there were American troops nearby.

Those shots I didn’t take.

You couldn’t—you had to worry about your own ass. Make an unjustified shot and you could be charged with murder.

I often would sit there and think, “I know this motherfucker is bad; I saw him doing such and such down the street the other day, but here he’s not doing anything, and if I shoot him, I won’t be able to justify it for the lawyers. I’ll fry.” Like I said, there is paperwork for everything. Every confirmed kill had documentation, supporting evidence, and a witness.

So I wouldn’t shoot.

There weren’t a lot of those, especially in Fallujah, but I was always extremely aware of the fact that every killing might have to be justified to the lawyers.

My attitude was: if my justification is I thought my target would do something bad, then I wasn’t justified. He had to be doing something bad.

Even with that standard, there were plenty of targets. I was averaging two and three a day, occasionally less, sometimes much more, with no end in sight.