American Sniper: The Autobiography of the Most Lethal Sniper in U.S. Military History (18 page)

Our company logo and slogan (“Despite what your momma told you . . . violence does solve problems”) honor my SEAL brethren, especially my fallen comrades. I’ll never forget them.

Me and Taya, the love of my life and better half.
Photograph courtesy of
Heather Hurt/Calluna Photography

My son and I check out a C-17.

7

Down in the Shit

O
N THE
S
TREET

T
he kid looked at me with a mixture of excitement and disbelief. He was a young Marine, eager but tempered by the fight we’d been waging the past week.

“Do you want to be a sniper?” I asked him. “Right now?”

“Hell yeah!” he said finally.

“Good,” I told him, handing over my Mk-11. “Give me your M-16. You take my sniper rifle. I’m going in the front door.”

And with that, I headed over to the squad we’d been working with and told them I was helping them hit the houses.

O
ver the past few days, the insurgents had stopped coming out to fight us. Our kill rate from the overwatches had declined. The bad guys were all staying inside, because they knew if they came outside, we were going to shoot them.

They didn’t give up. Instead, they would take their stands inside the houses, ambushing and battling the Marines in the small rooms and tiny hallways. I was seeing a lot of our guys being carried out and medevac’d.

I’d been turning the idea of going down on the street over in my head for a while, before finally deciding to go ahead with it. I picked out one of the privates who’d been helping the sniper team. He seemed like a good kid, with a lot of potential.

Part of the reason I went down on the streets was because I was bored. The bigger part was that I felt I could do a better job protecting the Marines if I was with them. They were going in the front door of these buildings and getting whacked. I’d watch as they went in, hear gunshots, and then the next thing I knew, they’d be hauling someone out in a stretcher because he just got shot up. It pissed me off.

I love the Marines, but the truth is these guys had never been taught to do room clearances like I had. It’s not a Marine specialty. They were all tough fighters, but they had a lot to learn about urban warfare. Much was simple stuff: how to hold your rifle as you come into a room so it’s hard for someone else to grab; where to move as you enter the room; how to fight 360 degrees in a city—things that SEALs learn so well we can do them in our sleep.

The squad didn’t have an officer; the highest-ranking NCO was a staff sergeant, an E6 in the Marine Corps. I was an E5, junior to him, but he didn’t have a problem letting me take control of the takedowns. We’d already been working together for a while, and I think I’d won a certain amount of respect. Plus, he didn’t want his guys getting shot up, either.

“Look, I’m a SEAL, you’re Marines,” I told the boys. “I’m no better than you are. The only difference between you and me is I’ve spent more time specializing and training in this than you did. Let me help you.”

We trained a little bit during the break. I gave some of my explosives to one of the squad members with experience in explosives. We did a little run-through on how to blow locks off. Until that point, they’d had such a small amount of explosives that they’d mostly been knocking the doors in, which, of course, took time and made them more vulnerable.

Break time over, we started going in.

I
NSIDE

I
took the lead.

Waiting outside the first house, I thought about the guys I saw being pulled out.

I did not want to be one of them.

I could be, though.

It was hard to get that idea out of my mind. I also knew that I would be in a shitload of trouble if I did get hurt—going down on the streets was not what I was supposed to be doing, at least from an official point of view. It was definitely right—what I felt I
had
to do—but it would severely piss the top brass off.

But that would be the least of my problems if I got shot, wouldn’t it?

“Let’s do it,” I said.

We blew the door open. I led the way, training and instincts taking over. I cleared the front room, stepped to the side, and started directing traffic. The pace was quick, automatic. Once things got started and I began to move into the house, something took over inside me. I didn’t worry about casualties anymore. I didn’t think about anything except the door, the house, the room—all of which was plenty enough.

G
oing into a house, you never knew what you were going to find. Even if you cleared the rooms on the first floor without any trouble, you couldn’t take the rest of the house for granted. Going up to the second floor, you might start to get a feeling that the rooms were empty or that you weren’t going to have any problems up there, but that was a dangerous feeling. You never really know what’s anywhere. Each room had to be cleared, and even then, you had to be on your guard. Plenty of times after we secured a house we took rounds and grenades from outside.

While many of the houses were small and cramped, we also made our way through a well-to-do area of the city as the battle progressed. Here the streets were paved, and the buildings looked like miniature palaces from the outside. But once you got past the façade and looked in the rooms, most were broken messes. Any Iraqi who had that much money had fled or been killed.

D
uring our breaks, I would take the Marines out and go through some drills with them. While other units were taking their lunch, I was teaching them everything I’d learned about room clearance.

“Look, I don’t want to lose a guy!” I yelled at them. I wasn’t about to get an argument there. I ran them around, busting their asses while they were supposed to be resting. But that’s the thing with Marines—you beat them down and they come back for more.

W
e broke into one house with a large front room. We’d caught the inhabitants completely by surprise.

But I was surprised as well—as I burst in, I saw a whole bunch of guys standing there in desert camouflage—the old brown chocolate-chip stuff from Desert Storm, the First Gulf War. They were all wearing gear. They were all Caucasian, including one or two with blond hair, obviously not Iraqis or Arabs.

What the fuck?

We looked at each other. Something flicked in my brain, and I flicked the trigger on the M-16, mowing them down.

A half-second’s more hesitation, and I would have been the one bleeding out on the floor. They turned out to be Chechens, Muslims apparently recruited for a holy war against the West. (We found their passports after searching the house.)

O
LD
M
AN

I
have no idea how many blocks, let alone how many houses, we took down. The Marines were following a carefully laid out plan—we had to be at a certain spot each lunchtime, then reach another objective by nightfall. The entire invasion force moved across the city in choreographed order, making sure there were no holes or weak spots the insurgents could use to get behind us and attack.

Every once in a while, we’d come across a building still occupied by families, but for the most part, the only people we were seeing were insurgents.

We would do a full search of each house. In this one house, we heard faint moans as we went down into the basement. There were two men hanging from chains on the wall. One was dead; the other barely there. Both had been severely tortured with electric shock and God knows what else. They were both Iraqi, apparently mentally retarded—the insurgents had wanted to make sure they wouldn’t talk to us, but decided to have a little fun with them first.

The second man died while our corpsman worked on him.

There was a black banner on the floor, the kind the fanatics liked to show on their videos when beheading Westerners. There were amputated limbs, and more blood than you can imagine.

It was a nasty-smelling place.

A
fter a couple of days, one of the Marine snipers decided to come down with me, and both of us started leading the DAs.

We would take a house on the right side of the street, then cross to the left and take the house across the way. Back and forth, back and forth. All of this took a lot of time. We’d have to go around the gates, get to the doors, blow up the doors, rush in. The scum inside had plenty of time to get prepared. Not to mention the fact that even with what I’d contributed, we were running out of explosives.

A Marine armored vehicle was working with us, moving down the center of the street as we went. It only had a .50-cal for a weapon, but its real asset was its size. No Iraqi wall could stand up to it once it got a head of steam.

I went over to the commander.

“Look, here’s what I want you to do,” I told him. “We’re running out of explosives. Run through the wall in front of the house and put about five rounds of .50-cal through the front door. Then back up and we’ll take it from there.”

So we started doing it that way, saving explosives and moving much faster.

Pounding up and down the stairs, running to the roof, coming back down, hitting the next house—we got to where we were taking from fifty to one hundred houses a day.

The Marines were hardly winded, but I lost over twenty pounds in those six or so weeks I was in Fallujah. Most of it I sweated off on the ground. It was exhausting work.

The Marines were all a lot younger than me—practically teenagers, some of them. I guess I still had a bit of a baby face, because when we’d get to talking, and for some reason or another I’d tell them how old I was, they’d stare at me and say, “You’re
that
old?”

I was thirty. An old man in Fallujah.

J
UST
A
NOTHER
D
AY

A
s the Marine drive neared the southern edge of the city, the ground action in our section started to peter out. I went back up on the roofs and started doing overwatches again, thinking I would catch more targets from there. The tide of the battle had turned. The U.S. had mostly wrested control of the city from the bad guys, and it was now just a matter of time before resistance collapsed. But being in the middle of the action, I couldn’t tell for sure.

Knowing that we considered cemeteries sacred, the insurgents typically used them to hide caches of weapons and explosives. At one point, we were in a hide overlooking the walled-in boundaries of a large cemetery that sat in the middle of the city. Roughly three football fields long by two football fields wide, it was a cement city of the dead, filled with tombstones and mausoleums. We set up on a roof near a prayer tower and mosque overlooking the cemetery.

The roof we were on was fairly elaborate. It was ringed with a brick wall punctuated with iron grates, giving us excellent firing positions; I sat down on my haunches and spotted in my rifle through a gap in the grid work, studying the paths between the stones a few hundred yards out. There was so much dust and grit in the air, I kept my goggles on. I’d also learned in Fallujah to keep my helmet cinched tight, wary of the chips and cement frags that flew from the battered masonry during a firefight.

I picked out some figures moving through the cemetery yard. I zeroed in on one and fired.

Within seconds, we were fully engaged in a firefight. Insurgents kept popping up from behind the stones—I don’t know if there was a tunnel or where they came from. Brass flew from the 60 nearby.

I studied my shots as the Marines around me poured out fire. Everything they did faded into the background as I carefully put my scope on a target, steadied the aim on center mass, then squeezed ever so smoothly. When the bullet leapt from the barrel, it was almost a surprise.

My target fell. I looked for another. And another. And on it went.

Until, finally, there were no more. I got up and moved a few feet to a spot where the wall completely shielded me from the cemetery. There I took my helmet off and leaned back against the wall. The roof was littered with spent shells—hundreds if not thousands.

Someone shared a large plastic bottle of water. One of the Marines pulled his ruck over and used it as a pillow, catching some sleep. Another went downstairs, to the store on the first story of the building. It was a smoke shop; he returned with cartons of flavored cigarettes. He lit a few, and a cherry scent mingled with the heavy stench that always hung over Iraq, a smell of sewage and sweat and death.

Just another day in Fallujah.

T
he streets were covered with splinters and various debris. The city, never exactly a showcase, was a wreck. Squashed water bottles sat in the middle of the road next to piles of wood and twisted metal. We worked on one block of three-story buildings where the bottom level was filled with shops. Each of their awnings were covered with a thick layer of dust and grit, turning the bright colors of the fabric into a hazy blur. Metal shields blocked most of the storefronts; they were pockmarked with shrapnel chips. A few had handbills showing insurgents wanted by the legitimate government.

I have a few photos from that time. Even in the most ordinary and least dramatic scenes, the effects of war are obvious. Every so often, there’s a sign of normal life before the war, something that has nothing to do with it: a kid’s toy, for example.

War and peace don’t seem to go together right.

T
HE
B
EST
S
NIPER
S
HOT
E
VER