American Sniper

As fighters went, they sucked. The brightest Iraqis, it seemed, were usually insurgents, fighting against us. I guess most of our jundis had their hearts in the right place. But as far as proficient military fighting went…

Let’s just say they were incompetent, if not outright dangerous.

One time a fellow SEAL named Brad and I were fixing to go into a house. We were standing outside the front door, with one of our jundis directly behind us. Somehow the jundi’s gun got jammed. Idiotically, he flicked off the safety and hit the trigger, causing a burst of rounds to blow right next to me.

I thought they’d come from the house. So did Brad. We started returning fire, dumping bullets through the door.

Then I heard all this shouting behind me. Someone was dragging an Iraqi whose gun had gone off—yes, the gunfire had come from us, not anyone inside the house. I’m sure the jundi was apologizing, but I wasn’t in the mood to listen, then or later.

Brad stopped firing and the SEAL who’d come up to get the door leaned back. I was still sorting out what the hell had happened when the door to the house popped open.

An elderly man appeared, hands trembling.

“Come in, come in,” he said. “There’s nothing here, nothing here.”

I doubt he realized how close it came to that being true.

Besides being particularly inept, a lot of jundis were just lazy. You’d tell them to do something and they’d reply, “Inshallah.”

Some people translate that as “God willing.” What it really means is “ain’t gonna happen.”

Most of the jundis wanted to be in the army to get a steady paycheck, but they didn’t want to fight, let alone die, for their country. For their tribe, maybe. The tribe, their extended family—that was where their true loyalty lay. And for most of them, what was going on in Ramadi had nothing to do with that.

I realize that a lot of the problem has to do with the screwed-up culture in Iraq. These people had been under a dictatorship for all their lives. Iraq as a country meant nothing to them, or at least nothing good. Most were happy to be rid of Saddam Hussein, very happy to be free people, but they didn’t understand what that really meant—the other things that come with being free.

The government wasn’t going to be running their lives anymore, but it also wasn’t going to be giving them food or anything else. It was a shock. And they were so backward in terms of education and technology that for Americans it often felt like being in the Stone Age.

You can feel sorry for them, but at the same time you don’t want these guys trying to run your war for you.

And giving them the tools they needed to progress is not what my job was all about. My job was killing, not teaching.

We went to great lengths to make them look good.

At one point during the campaign, a local official’s son was kidnapped. We got intel that he was being held at a house next to a local college. We went in at night, crashing through the gates and taking down a large building to use for the overwatch. While I watched from the roof of the building, some of my boys took down the house, freeing the hostage without any resistance.

Well, this was a big deal locally. So when it was photo op time, we called in our jundis. They got credit for the rescue, and we drifted into the background.

Silent professionals.

That sort of thing happened all across the theater. I’m sure there were plenty of stories back in the States about how much good the Iraqis were doing, and how we were training them. Those stories will probably fill the history books.

They’re bullshit. The reality was quite a bit different.

I think the whole idea of putting an Iraqi face on the war was garbage. If you want to win a war, you go in and win it. Then you can train people. Doing it in the middle of a battle is stupid. It was a miracle it didn’t fuck things up any worse than it did.

COP Iron

The thin dust from the dirt roads mixed with the stench of the river and city as we came up into the village. It was pitch-black, somewhere between night and morning. Our target was a two-story building in the center of a small village at the south side of Ramadi, separated from the main part of the city by a set of railroad tracks.

We moved into the house quickly. The people who lived there were shocked, obviously, and clearly wary. Yet they didn’t seem overly antagonistic, despite the hour. While our terps and jundis dealt with them, I went up to the roof and set up.

It was June 17, the start of the action in Ramadi. We had just taken the core of what would become COP Iron, the first stepping stone of our move into Ramadi. (COP stands for Command Observation Post.)

I eyed the village carefully. We’d been briefed to expect a hell of a fight, and everything we’d been through over the past few weeks in the east reinforced that. I knew Ramadi was going to be a hell of a lot worse than the countryside. I was tense, but ready.

With the house and nearby area secured, we called the Army in. Hearing the tanks coming in the distance, I scanned even more carefully through the scope. The bad guys could hear it, too. They’d be here any second.

The Army arrived with what looked like a million tanks. They took over the nearby houses, and then began building walls to form a compound around them.

No insurgents came. Taking the house, taking the village—it was a nonevent.

Looking around, I realized the area we had taken was both literally and figuratively on the other side of the tracks from the main city. Our area was where the poorer people lived, quite a statement for Iraq, which wasn’t exactly the Gold Coast. The owners and inhabitants of the hovels around us barely scratched out a living. They couldn’t care less about the insurgency. They couldn’t care even less about us.

Once the Army got settled, we bumped out about two hundred yards to protect the crews as they worked. We were still expecting a hell of a fight. But there wasn’t much action at all. The only interesting moment came in the morning, when a mentally handicapped kid was caught wandering around writing in a notebook. He looked like a spy, but we quickly realized he wasn’t right in the head and let him and his gibberish notes go.

We were all surprised by the calm. By noon, we were sitting there twiddling our thumbs. I won’t say we were disappointed but… it felt like a letdown after what we had been told.

This was the most dangerous city in Iraq?

10. THE DEVIL OF RAMADI

Going In

A few nights later, I climbed into a shallow Marine Corps riverboat known as a SURC (“small unit riverine craft”), ducking down onto the deck behind the armored gunwale. The Marines manning 60s near the bow kept watch as the boat and a second one with the rest of our group slipped upriver, heading quietly