American Sniper: The Autobiography of the Most Lethal Sniper in U.S. Military History (26 page)

We had contact every time we went out.

We loved it.

Taya:

I had a hard time with the kids after Chris deployed. My mom came and helped me, but it was just a difficult time.

I guess I wasn’t ready to have another baby. I was mad at Chris, scared for him, and nervous about raising a baby and a toddler all by myself. My son was only a year and a half old; he was getting into everything, and the newborn happened to be really clingy.

I remember just sitting on the couch and crying in my bathrobe for days. I would be nursing her and trying to feed him. I’d sit there and cry.

The C-section didn’t heal well. I had women tell me, “After my C-section, I was scrubbing the floors a week later and I was all good.” Well, six weeks after mine I was still in pain, still hurting and not healing really well at all. I hated that I wasn’t healing like those women. (I found out later it’s usually the second C-section that women bounce back from. No one told me that part.)

I felt weak. I was mad at myself that I wasn’t tougher. It just sucked.

T
he distances east of Ramadi made the .300 Win Mag my rifle of choice, and I started taking it regularly on patrols. After the Army took the hospital, they continued taking fire and getting attacked. It didn’t take too long before they started getting mortar fire as well. So we bumped out, fighting the insurgents who were shooting at them, and looking for the mortar crews.

One day, we set up in a two-story building a short distance from the hospital. The Army tried using special gear to figure out where the mortars were being fired from, and we chose the house because it was near the area they identified. But, for some reason, that day the insurgents decided to lie low.

Maybe they were getting tired of dying.

I decided to see if we could flush them out. I always carried an American flag inside my body armor. I took it out and strung some 550 cord (general-purpose nylon rope sometimes called
parachute cord
) through the grommets. I tied the line to the lip on the roof, then threw it over the side so it draped down the side of the building.

Within minutes, half a dozen insurgents stepped out with automatic machine guns and started shooting at my flag.

We returned fire. Half of the enemy fell; the other half turned and ran.

I still have the flag. They shot out two stars. Fair trade for their lives, by my accounting.

A
s we bumped out, the insurgents would move farther away and try and put more cover between us and them. Occasionally, we’d have to call in air support to get them from behind walls or berms in the distance.

Because of the fear of collateral damage, command and the pilots were reluctant to use bombs. Instead, the jets would make strafing runs. We’d also get attack helicopters, Marine Cobras and Hueys, which would use machine guns and rockets.

One day, while we were on an overwatch, my chief and I spotted a man putting a mortar in the trunk of a car about eight hundred yards from us. I shot him; another man came out of the building where he’d been and my chief shot him. We called in an airstrike; an F/A-18 put a missile on the car. There were massive secondaries—they’d loaded the car with explosives before we saw them.

A
MONG THE
S
LEEPERS

A
night or two later, I found myself walking in the dark through a nearby village, stepping over bodies—not of dead people, but sleeping Iraqis. In the warm desert, Iraqi families would often sleep outside.

I was on my way to take up a position so we could overwatch a raid on the marketplace where one of the insurgents had a shop. Our intelligence indicated this was where the weapons in the car we’d blown up had come from.

Four other guys and I had been dropped off about six kilometers away by the rest of the team, which was planning to mount a raid in the morning. Our assignment was to get into place ahead of them, scout and watch the area, then protect them as they arrived.

It wasn’t as dangerous as you might think to walk through insurgent-held areas at night. They were almost always asleep. The Iraqis would see our convoys arrive during the day, and then leave before it got dark. So the bad guys would figure we were all back at the base. There’d be no guards posted, no lookouts, no pickets watching the area.

Of course, you had to watch where you stepped—one of my platoon members nearly stepped on a sleeping Iraqi as we walked to our target area in the dark. Fortunately, he caught himself at the last second, and we were able to walk on without waking anyone. The tooth fairy had nothing on us.

We found the marketplace and set up to watch it. It was a small row of tiny, one-story shacks used as stores. There were no windows—you open a door and sell your wares right out of the hut.

Not too long after we got to our hide, we received a radio call telling us that another unit was out somewhere in the area.

A few minutes later, I spotted a suspicious group of people.

“Hey,” I said over the radio. “I see four guys carrying AKs and web gear, all mujed out. Are these our boys?”

Web gear is webbing or vest and strap gears used to hold combat equipment. The men I saw looked like mujahedeen—by “all mujed out” I meant they were dressed the way insurgents often did in the countryside, wearing the long man-jammies and scarves. (In the city, they often wore Western-style clothes—tracksuits and warm-ups were big.)

The four men were coming from the river, which would be where I expected the guys to be coming from.

“Hold on, we’ll find out,” said the com guy on the other end of the radio.

I watched them. I wasn’t going to shoot them—no way I was going to take a chance and kill an American.

The unit took its time responding to our TOC, which, in turn, had to get a hold of my platoon guys. I watched as the men walked on.

“Not ours,” came the call back finally. “They cancelled.”

“Great. Well I just let four guys go in your direction.”

(I’m sure if they had been out there, I never would have seen them.
Ninjas
.)

Everybody was pissed. My guys back at the Hummers sat ready, scanning the desert, waiting for the muj to appear. I went back to my own scan, watching the area they were supposed to hit.

A few minutes later, what did I see but the four insurgents who’d passed me earlier.

I got one; one of the other snipers got another before they could take cover.

Then another six or seven insurgents appeared behind them.

Now we were in the middle of a firefight. We started launching grenades. The rest of the platoon heard the gunfire and came hard. But fighters who’d stumbled past us melted away.

The element of surprise lost, the platoon went ahead with the raid on the marketplace in the dark. They found some ammo and AKs, but nothing important in terms of a real weapons cache.

W
e never found out what the insurgents who slipped past were up to. It was just another mystery of war.

T
HE
E
LITE
E
LITE

I
think all SEALs highly respect our brothers in the elite anti-terror unit you’ve read so much about at home. They are an elite group within an elite group.

We didn’t interact with them in Iraq much. The only other time I had much to do with them came a few weeks later, after we got into Ramadi proper. They had heard we were out there slaying a huge number of savages, and so they sent one of their snipers over to see what we were doing. I guess they wanted to find out what we were doing that worked.

Looking back, I regret not having tried to join. At the time, they weren’t using snipers as heavily as the other teams were. The assaulters were doing the majority of the work, and I didn’t want to be an assaulter. I was loving what I was doing. I wanted to be a sniper. I was getting to use my rifle, and killing enemies. Why give it up, move to the East Coast, and become a new guy all over again? And that’s not even considering the BUD/S-like school you have to get through to prove you belong.

I would have had to spend a number of years as an assaulter before working my way up to be a sniper again. Why do that when I was already sniping, and loving it?

But now that I’ve heard about their ops and what they accomplished, I think I should have gone for it.

The guys have a reputation for being arrogant and more than a little full of themselves. That’s plain wrong. I had the opportunity to meet a few after the war when they came out to a training facility I run. They were extremely down-to-earth, very humble about their achievements. I absolutely wished I was going back out with them.

C
IVILIANS AND
S
AVAGES

T
he offensive in Ramadi had yet to start, officially, but we were getting plenty of action.

One day, intel came in concerning insurgents planting IEDs along a certain highway. We went out there and put it under surveillance. We’d also hit the houses and watch for ambushes on convoys and American bases.

It’s true that it can be difficult to sort out civilians from insurgents in certain situations, but here the bad guys made it easy for us. UAVs would watch a road, for example, and when they saw someone planting a bomb, they could not only pinpoint the booby-trap but follow the insurgent back to his house. That gave us excellent intel on where the bad guys were.

Terrorists going to attack Americans would give themselves away by moving tactically against approaching convoys or when coming close to a base. They’d sneak around with their AKs ready—it was very easy to spot them.

They also learned to spot us. If we took over a house in a small hamlet, we would keep the family inside for safety. The people who lived nearby would know that if the family wasn’t outside by nine o’clock in the morning, there were Americans inside. That was an open invitation for any insurgent in the area to come and try to kill us.

It became so predictable, it seemed to happen according to a time schedule. Around about nine in the morning you’d have a firefight; things would slack off around midday. Then, around three or four in the afternoon, you’d have another. If the stakes weren’t life and death, it would have been funny.

And at the time, it
was
funny, in a perverse kind of way.

You didn’t know which direction they’d attack from, but the tactics were almost always the same. The insurgents would start out with automatic fire, pop off a bit here, pop off there. Then you’d get the RPGs, a flurry of fire; finally, they’d scatter and try to get away.

O
ne day, we took out a group of insurgents a short distance from the hospital. We didn’t realize it at the time, but Army intel passed the word later on that the insurgent command had made a cell phone call to someone, asking for more mortarmen, because the team that had been hitting the hospital had just been killed.

Their replacements never showed up.

Shame. We would have killed them, too.

E
veryone knows by now about Predators, the UAVs that supplied a lot of intelligence to American forces during the war. But what many don’t know is that we had our own backpack UAVs—small, man-launched aircraft about the size of an RC aircraft kids of all ages play with in the States.

They fit in a backpack. I never got to operate one, but they did seem kind of cool. The trickiest part—at least from what I could see—was the launch. You had to throw it pretty hard to get it airborne. The operator would rev the engine, then fling it into the air; it took a certain amount of skill.

Because they flew low and had relatively loud little engines, the backpack UAVs could be heard on the ground. They had a distinctive whine, and the Iraqis soon learned that the noise meant we were watching. They became cautious as soon as they heard it—which defeated the purpose.

T
hings got so heavy at some points that we had to take up two different radio bands, one to communicate with our TOC and one to use among the platoon. There was so much radio traffic back and forth that comms from the TOC would overrun us during contact.

When we first started going out, our CO told our top watch to wake him every time we got into a TIC—a military acronym that stands for “troops in contact,” or combat. Then we were getting in so much combat that he revised the order—we were only to notify him if we’d been in a TIC for an hour.

Then it was, only notify me if someone gets injured.

S
hark Base was a haven during this time, a little oasis of rest and recreation. Not that it was very fancy. It had a stone floor, and the windows were blocked by sandbags. At first, our cots were practically touching, and the only homey touch was the banged-up footlockers. But we didn’t need much. We’d go out for three days, come back for a day. I’d sleep, then maybe play video games for the rest of the day, talk on the phone to back home, use the computer. Then it was time to gear up and go back out.

You had to be careful when you were talking on the phone. Operational security—OpSec, to use yet another military term—was critical. You couldn’t say anything to anyone that might give away what we were doing, or what we planned to do, or even specifically what we had done.