American Sniper

mind, at least, they weren’t my fault—in that last case, I was on my way out when the idiot’s girlfriend tried picking a fight with my friend, a SEAL. Which was absolutely as ridiculous in real life as it must look on the printed page.

But taken together, it was a bad pattern. It might even have been a disturbing trend. Unfortunately, I didn’t recognize it at the time.

Punched Out

There’s a postscript to the story about “some guy” and my broken hand.

The incident happened while we were training in an Army town. I knew pretty much when I punched him that I’d broken my hand, but there was no way in hell that I was going to the base hospital; if I did, they’d realize I was (a) drunk and (b) fighting, and the MPs would be on my ass. Nothing makes an MP’s day like busting a SEAL.

So I waited until the next day. Now sober, I reported to the hospital and claimed I had broken my fist by punching out my gun before I actually cleared the doorjamb. (Theoretically possible, if unlikely.)

While I was getting treated, I saw a kid in the hospital with his jaw wired shut.

Next thing I knew, some MPs came over and started questioning me.

“This kid is claiming you broke his jaw,” said one of them.

“What the hell is he talking about?” I said, rolling my eyes. “I just came in off a training exercise. I broke my damn hand. Ask the SF guys; we’re training with them.”

Not so coincidentally, all of the bouncers at the bar where we’d been were Army SF; they would surely back me up if it came to that.

It didn’t.

“We thought so,” said the MPs, shaking their heads. They went back over to the idiot soldier and started bitching him out for lying and wasting their time.

Serves him right for getting into a fight started by his girlfriend.

I came back West with a shattered bone. The guys all made fun of me for my weak genes. But the injury wasn’t all that funny for me, because the doctors couldn’t figure out whether they should operate or not. My finger set a little deeper in my hand, not quite where it should be.

In San Diego, one of the doctors took a look and decided they might be able to fix it by pulling it and resetting it in the socket.

I told him to give it a go.

“You want some painkiller?” he asked.

“Nah,” I said. They’d done the same thing at the Army hospital back East, and it hadn’t really hurt.

Maybe Navy doctors pull harder. The next thing I knew I was lying flat back on a table in the cast room. I’d passed out and pissed myself from the pain.

But at least I got away without surgery.

And for the record, I’ve since changed my fighting style to accommodate my weaker hand.

Ready to Go

I had to wear a cast for a few weeks, but more and more I got into the swing of things. The pace built up as we got ready to ship out. There was only one down note: we had been assigned to a western province in Iraq. From what we had heard, nothing was going on there. We tried to get transferred to Afghanistan, but we couldn’t get released by the area commander.

That didn’t sit too well with us, certainly not with me. If I was going back to war, I wanted to be in the action, not twiddling my (broken) fingers in the desert. Being a SEAL, you don’t want to sit around with your thumb up your ass; you want to get in the action.

Still, it felt good to be getting back to war. I’d been burned out when I came home, completely overwhelmed and emotionally drained. But now I felt recharged and ready to go.

I was ready to kill some more bad guys.

13. MORTALITY

Blind

It seemed like every dog in Sadr City was barking.

I scanned the darkness through my night vision, tense as we made our way down one of the nastiest streets in Sadr City. We walked past a row of what might have been condos in a normal city. Here they were little better than rat-infested slums. It was past midnight in early April 2008, and, against all common sense but under direct orders, we were walking into the center of an insurgent hellhole.

Like a lot of the other drab-brown buildings on the street, the house we were heading to had a metal grate in front of the door. We lined up to breach it. Just then, someone appeared from behind the grate at the door and said something in Arabic.

Our interpreter stepped over and told him to open up.

The man inside said he didn’t have a key.

One of the other SEALs told him to go get it. The man disappeared, running up the stairs somewhere.

Shit!

“Go!” I yelled. “Break the grate the fuck in.”

We rushed in and started clearing the house. The two bottom levels were empty.

I raced up the stairs to the third floor and moved to the doorway of a room facing the street, leaning back against the wall as the rest of my guys stacked to follow. As I started to take a step, the whole room blew up.

By some miracle, I hadn’t been hit, though I sure felt the force of the blast.

“Who the fuck just threw a frag!” I yelled.

Nobody. And the room itself was empty. Someone had just fired an RPG into the house.

Gunfire followed. We regrouped. The Iraqi who’d been inside had clearly escaped to alert the nearby insurgents where we were. Worse, the walls in the house proved pretty flimsy, unable to stand up to the rocket grenades that were being fired at us. If we stayed here, we were going to get fried.

Out of the house! Now!

The last of my guys had just cleared out of the building when the street shook with a huge force: the insurgents had set off an IED down the street. The blast was so powerful it knocked a few of us off our feet. Ears ringing, we ran to another building nearby. But as we were fixing to enter it, all hell broke loose. We got gunfire from every direction, including above.

A shot flew into my helmet. The night went black. I was blind.

It was my first night in Sadr City, and it looked like it was soon going to be my last on earth.

Out West