American Sniper

column and put them in the “definite” category.

Get My Gun

As always, there were moments of high anxiety mixed with bizarre events and random comic relief.

One day at the tail end of an op, I hustled back to the Bradley with the rest of the guys. Just as I reached the vehicle, I realized my sniper rifle had been left behind—I’d put it down in one of the rooms, then forgotten to bring it with me when I’d left.

Yeah. Stupid.

I reversed course. LT, one of my officers, was just running up.

“Hey, we gotta go back,” I said. “My gun’s in the house.”

“Let’s do it,” said LT, following me.

We turned around and raced back to the house. Meanwhile, insurgents were sweeping toward it—so close we could hear them. We cleared the courtyard, sure we would run into them.

Fortunately, there was no one there. I grabbed the rifle and we raced back to the Bradleys, about two seconds ahead of a grenade attack. The ramp shut and the explosions sounded.

“What the hell?” demanded the officer in charge as the vehicle drove off.

LT smirked.

“I’ll explain later,” he said.

I’m not sure he ever did.

Victory

It took about a month to get the barriers up. As the Army reached its objective, the insurgents started to give up.

It was probably a combination of them realizing the wall was going to be finished whether they liked it or not, and the fact that we had killed so many of the bastards that they couldn’t mount much of an attack. Where thirty or forty insurgents would gather with AKs and RPGs to fire on a single fence crew at the beginning of the op, toward the end the bad guys were putting together attacks with two or three men. Gradually, they faded into the slums around us.

Muqtada al-Sadr, meanwhile, decided it was time for him to try and negotiate a peace with the Iraqi government. He declared a ceasefire and started talking to the government.

Imagine that.

Taya:

People always told me I didn’t really know Chris or what he was doing, because he was a SEAL. I remember going to an accountant one time. He said he knew some SEALs and those guys told him no one ever really knew where they went.

“My husband’s on a training trip,” I said. “I know where he is.”

“You don’t know that.”

“Well, yes I do. I just talked to him.”

“But you don’t know really what they’re doing. They’re SEALs.”

“I—”

“You can never know.”

“I know my husband.”

“You just can’t know. They’re trained to lie.”

People would say that a lot. It irritated me when it was someone I didn’t know well. The people I did know well respected that I might not know every detail but I knew what I needed to know.

In the Villages

With things relatively calm in Sadr City, we were given a new area to target. IED-makers and other insurgents had set up shop in a series of villages near Baghdad, trying to operate under the radar as they supplied weapons and manpower to fight Americans and the loyal Iraqi forces. The Mahdi army was out there, and the area was a virtual no-go zone for Americans.

We had worked with members of 4–10 Mountain Division during much of the Sadr City battle. They were fighters. They wanted to be in the shit—and they certainly got their wish there. Now as we bumped out into the villages outside the city, we were happy to have a chance to work with them again. They knew the area. Their snipers were especially good, and having them along improved our effectiveness.

Our jobs are the same, but there are a few differences between Army and SEAL snipers. For one thing, Army snipers use spotters, which we don’t, as a general rule. Their weapon set is a bit smaller than ours.

But the bigger difference, at least at first, had to do with tactics and the way they were deployed. Army snipers were more used to going out in three- or four-man groups, which meant they couldn’t stay out for very long, certainly not all night.

The SEAL task unit, on the other hand, moved in heavy and locked down an area, basically looking for a fight and having the enemy provide us with one. It wasn’t so much an overwatch anymore as a dare: Here we are; come and get us.

And they did: village after village, the insurgents would come and try and kill us; we’d take them down. Typically, we’d spend at least one night and usually a few, going in and extracting after sunset.

In this area, we ended up going back to the same village a few times, usually taking a different house each time. We’d repeat the process until all the local bad guys were dead, or at least until they understood that attacking us was not very smart.

It was surprising how many idiots you had to kill before they finally got that point.

Covered with Crap

There were lighter moments, but even some of those were shitty. Literally.

Our point man, Tommy, was a great guy but, as it turned out, a terrible point in a lot of ways.

Or maybe I should say sometimes he was more of a duck than a point man. If there was a puddle between us and the objective, Tommy took us through it. The deeper the better. He was always having us walk through the worst possible terrain.

It got so ridiculous that finally I told him, “One more time, I’m going to whup your ass, and you’re fired.”

On the very next mission, he found a path to a village that he was sure would be dry. I had my doubts. In fact, I pointed them out to him.

“Oh, no, no,” he insisted, “it’s good, it’s good.”