American Sniper

I don’t know how high I went. I don’t want to know. Heights are not my favorite thing—it makes my balls go in my throat just thinking about it.

The crane did give me a decent view of the cemetery, which was about eight hundred yards away.

I never took a shot from there. I never saw anything aside from mourners and funerals. But it was worth a try.

Besides looking for people with IEDs, we had to watch out for the bombs themselves. They were everywhere—occasionally, even in the apartment buildings. One team narrowly escaped one afternoon, the explosives going off just after they collapsed down and left the building.

The Guard was using Bradleys to get around. The Bradley looks a bit like a tank, since it has a turret and gun on top, but it’s actually a personnel carrier and scout vehicle, depending on its configuration.

I believe it’s made to fit six people inside. We would try and cram eight or ten in. It was hot, muggy, and claustrophobic. Unless you were sitting by the ramp, you couldn’t see anything. You kind of sucked it up and waited to get wherever it was you were going.

One day, the Bradleys picked us up from a sniper op. We had just turned off Haifa onto one of the side streets, and all of a sudden—buh-lam. We’d been hit by a massive IED. The back of the vehicle lifted up and slammed back down. The inside filled with smoke.

I could see the guy across from me moving his mouth, but I couldn’t hear a word: the blast had blown out my ears.

The next thing I knew, the Bradley started moving again. That was one tough vehicle. Back at the base, the commander kind of shrugged it off.

“Didn’t even knock the tracks off,” he said. He almost sounded disappointed.

It’s a cliche, but it’s true: you form tight friendships in war. And then suddenly circumstances change. I became close friends with two guys in the Guard unit, real good friends; I trusted them with my life.

Today I couldn’t tell you their names if my life depended on it. And I’m not even sure that I can describe them in a way that would show you why they were special.

Me and the boys from Arkansas seemed to get along real well together, maybe because we were all just country boys.

Well, they were hillbillies. You’ve got your regular redneck like me, then you got your hillbilly who’s a whole sight different animal.

Onward

The elections came and went.

The media back in the States made a big thing of the Iraqi government elections, but it was a nonevent for me. I wasn’t even out that day; I caught it on TV.

I never really believed the Iraqis would turn the country into a truly functioning democracy, but I thought at one point that there was a chance. I don’t know that I believe that now. It’s a pretty corrupt place.

But I didn’t risk my life to bring democracy to Iraq. I risked my life for my buddies, to protect my friends and fellow countrymen. I went to war for my country, not Iraq. My country sent me out there so that bullshit wouldn’t make its way back to our shores.

I never once fought for the Iraqis. I could give a flying fuck about them.

A short while after the election, I was sent back to my SEAL platoon. Our time in Iraq was growing short, and I was starting to look forward to going home.

Being at camp in Baghdad meant I had my own little room. My personal gear filled four or five cruise boxes, two big Stanley roller boxes, and assorted rucks. (Cruise boxes are the modern equivalent of footlockers; they’re waterproof and roughly three feet long.) On deployment, we pack heavy.

I also had a TV set. All the latest movies were on pirated DVDs selling at Baghdad street stands for five bucks. I bought a box set of James Bond movies, some Clint Eastwood, John Wayne—I love John Wayne. I love his cowboy movies especially, which makes sense I guess. Rio Bravo may be my favorite.

Besides movies, I spent a bit of time playing computer games—Command and Conquer became a personal favorite. Smurf had a PlayStation, and we started getting into playing Tiger Woods.

I kicked his butt.

DAs, Helos, and Heights

With Baghdad settling down, at least for the moment, the head shed decided they wanted to open up a SEAL base in Habbaniyah.

Habbaniyah is twelve miles to the east of Fallujah, in Anabar Province. It wasn’t quite the hotbed of the insurgency that Fallujah had been, but it wasn’t San Diego, either. This is the area where before the First Gulf War, Saddam built chemical plants devoted to manufacturing weapons of mass destruction, such as nerve gas and other chemical agents. There weren’t a lot of America supporters out there.

There was a U.S. Army base though, run by the famous 506th Regiment—the Band of Brothers. They’d just come over from Korea and, to be polite, had no fucking clue what Iraq was all about. I suppose everybody’s gotta learn the hard way.

Habbaniyah turned out to be a real pain in the ass. We’d been given an abandoned building, but it was nowhere near adequate for what we needed. We had to build a TOC—a tactical operations command—to house all the computers and com gear that helped support us during our missions.

Our morale sunk. We weren’t doing anything useful for the war; we were working as carpenters. It’s an honorable profession, but it’s not ours.

Taya:

It was on this deployment that the medical doctors did a test and, for some reason, thought Chris had TB. The doctors told him he would eventually die of the disease.

I remember talking to him right after he got the news. He was fatalistic about it. He’d already accepted that he was going to die, and he wanted to do it there, not at home from a disease he couldn’t fight with a gun or his fists.

“It doesn’t matter,” he told me. “I’ll die and you’ll find someone else. People die out here all the time. Their wives go on and find someone else.”

I tried to explain to him that he was irreplaceable to me. When that didn’t seem to faze him, I tried another equally valid point. “But you’ve got our son,” I told him.

“So what? You’ll find someone else and that guy will raise him.”

I think he was seeing death so often that he started to believe people were replaceable.

It broke my heart. He truly believed that. I still hate to think that.

He thought dying on the battlefield was the greatest. I tried to tell him differently, but he didn’t believe it.

They redid the tests, and Chris was cleared. But his attitude about death stayed.