American Sniper: The Autobiography of the Most Lethal Sniper in U.S. Military History (34 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.

P
UNCHED
O
UT

T
here’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.

R
EADY TO
G
O

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

B
LIND

I
t 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.

O
UT
W
EST

U
ntil that point, I had spent an uneventful, even boring fourth deployment in Iraq.

Delta Platoon had arrived roughly a month before, traveling out to al-Qa’im in western Iraq, near the Syrian border. Our mission was supposed to involve long-range desert patrols, but we’d spent our time building a base camp with the help of a few Seabees. Not only was there no action to speak of, but the Marines who owned the base were in the process of shutting it down, meaning that we’d have to move out soon after we set it up. I have no idea what the logic was.

Morale had hit rock bottom when my chief risked his life early one morning—by that I mean he entered my room and shook me awake.

“What the hell?” I yelled, jumping up.

“Easy,” said my chief. “You need to get dressed and come with me.”

“I just got to sleep.”

“You’ll want to come with me. They’re putting together a task unit over in Baghdad.”

A task unit?
All right!

It was like something out of the movie
Groundhog Day,
but in a good way. The last time this had happened to me, I was in Baghdad heading west. Now I was west, and heading east.

Why exactly, I wasn’t sure.

According to the chief, I had been chosen for the unit partly because I was qualified to be an LPO, but mostly because I was a sniper. They were pulling snipers from all over the country for the operation, though he had no details of what was being planned. He didn’t even know whether I was going to a rural or urban environment.

Shit,
I thought,
we’re going to Iran.

I
t was an open secret that the Iranians were arming and training insurgents and in some cases even attacking Western troops themselves. There were rumors that a force was being formed to stop the infiltrators on the border.

I was convoyed over to al-Asad, the big airbase in al-Anbar Province, where our top head shed was located. There, I found out we weren’t going to the border, but a place much worse: Sadr City.

L
ocated on the outskirts of Baghdad, Sadr City had become even more of a snake pit since the last time I’d been with the GROMs a few years before. Two million Shiites lived there. The rabidly anti-American cleric Muqtada al-Sadr (the city had been named for his father) had been steadily building his militia, the Mahdi Army (known in Arabic as the
Jaish al-Mahdi
). There were other insurgents operating in the area, but the Mahdi Army was by far the biggest and most powerful.

With covert help from Iran, the insurgents had gathered arms and started launching mortars and rockets into Baghdad’s Green Zone. The entire place was a vipers’ nest. Like Fallujah and Ramadi, there were different cliques and varying levels of expertise among the insurgents. The people here were mostly Shiites, whereas my earlier battles in Iraq had been primarily with Sunnis. But otherwise it was a very familiar hellhole.

This was all fine with me.

T
hey pulled snipers and JTACs, along with some officers and chiefs, from Teams 3 and 8 to create a special task unit. There were about thirty of us altogether. In a way it was an all-star team, with some of the best of the best guys in the country. And it was very sniper-heavy, because the idea was to implement some of the tactics we’d used in Fallujah, Ramadi, and elsewhere.

There was a lot of talent, but because we were drawn from all different units, we needed to spend a bit of time getting used to each other. Small differences in the way East Coast and West Coast teams typically operated could make for a big problem in a firefight. We also had a lot of personnel decisions to make, selecting point men and the like.

T
he Army had decided to create a buffer zone to push the insurgents far enough away that their rockets would reach the Green Zone. One of the keys to this was erecting a wall in Sadr City—basically, a huge cement fence called a “T-wall” that would run down a major thoroughfare about a quarter of the way into the slum. Our job was to protect the guys building that wall—and take down as many bad guys as possible in the process.

The boys building that wall had an insanely dangerous job. A crane would take one of the concrete sections off the back of a flatbed and haul it into place. As it was set down, a private would have to climb up and unhook it.

Under fire, generally. And not just pop shots—the insurgents would use any weapon they had, from AKs to RPGs. Those Army guys had serious balls.

A
Special Forces unit had already been operating in Sadr City, and they gave us some pointers and intel. We took about a week getting things all worked out and figuring out how we were going to skin this cat. Once everything was settled, we were dropped off at an Army FOB (forward operating base).

At this point, we were told we were going to foot patrol into Sadr City at night. A few of us argued that it didn’t make much sense—the place was crawling with people who wanted to kill us, and on foot we’d be easy targets.

But someone thought it would be smart if we walked in during the middle of the night. Sneak in, they told us, and there won’t be trouble.

So we did.

S
HOT IN THE
B
ACK

T
hey were wrong.

There I was, shot in the head and blind. Blood streamed down my face. I reached up to my scalp. I was surprised—not only was my head still there, but it was intact. But I knew I’d been shot.

Somehow I realized that my helmet, which hadn’t been strapped, had been pushed back. I pulled it forward. Suddenly I could see again. A bullet had struck the helmet, but with incredible luck had ricocheted off my night vision, slamming the helmet backward but otherwise not harming me. When I pulled it forward, I brought the scope back down in front of my eyes, and could see again. I hadn’t been rendered blind at all, but in the confusion I couldn’t tell what was going on.

A few seconds later, I got hit in the back with a heavy round. The bullet pushed me straight to the ground. Fortunately, the round hit one of the plates in my body armor.

Still, it left me dazed. Meanwhile, we were surrounded. We called to each other and organized a retreat to a marketplace we’d passed on the way in. We started laying down fire and moving together.

By this time, the blocks around us looked like the worst scenes in
Black Hawk Down
. It seemed like every insurgent, maybe every occupant, wanted a piece of the idiot Americans who’d foolishly blundered into Sadr City.

We couldn’t get into the building we retreated to. By now we’d called for QRF—a quick response force, a fancy name for the cavalry. We needed backup and extraction—“HELP” in capital letters.

A group of Army Strykers came in. Strykers are heavily armed personnel carriers, and they were firing everything they had. There were plenty of targets—upward of a hundred insurgents lined the roofs on the surrounding streets, trying to get us. When they saw the Strykers, they changed their aim, trying to take out the Army’s big personnel carriers. There they were overmatched. It started looking like a video game—guys were falling off the rooftops.

“Motherfucker, thank you,” I said aloud when the vehicles reached our building. I swear I could hear a cavalry horn somewhere in the background.

They dropped their ramps and we ran inside.

“Did you see how many motherfuckers were up there?” said one of the crewmen as the vehicle sped back to the base.

“No,” I answered. “I was too busy shooting.”

“They were all over the place.” The kid was stoked. “We were dropping them and that wasn’t even half of them. We were just laying it down. We thought y’all were fuckin’ done.”

That made more than two of us.

T
hat night scared the shit out of me. That’s when I came to the realization that I’m not superhuman. I can die.

All through everything else, there had been points where I thought,
I’m going to die.

But I never did die. Those thoughts were fleeting. They evaporated.

After a while, I started thinking, they can’t kill me. They can’t kill us. We’re fucking undefeatable.

I have a guardian angel and I’m a SEAL and I’m lucky and whatever the hell it is:
I cannot die.

Then, all of a sudden, within two minutes I was nailed twice.

Motherfucker, my number is up.

B
UILDING THE
W
ALL

W
e felt happy and grateful to have been rescued. We also felt like total asses.

Trying to sneak into Sadr City was not going to work, and command should have known that from the start. The bad guys would always know we were there. So we would just have to make the most of it.

Two days after getting our butts kicked out of the city, we came back, this time riding in Strykers. We took over a place known as the banana factory. This was a building four or five stories high, filled with fruit lockers and assorted factory gear, most of it wrecked by looters long before we got there. I’m not sure exactly what it had to do with bananas or what the Iraqis might have done there; all I knew at the time was that it was a good place for a sniper hide.

Wanting a little more cover than I would have had on the roof, I set up in the top floor. Around nine o’clock in the morning, I realized the number of civilians walking up and down the street had started to thin. That was always a giveaway—they spotted something and knew they didn’t want to end up in the line of fire.

A few minutes later, with the street now deserted, an Iraqi came out of a partially destroyed building. He was armed with an AK-47. When he reached the street he ducked down, scouting in the direction of the engineers who were working down the road on the wall, apparently trying to pick one out to target. As soon as I was sure what he was up to, I aimed center-mass and fired.

He was forty yards away. He fell, dead.

An hour later, another guy poked his head out from behind a wall on another part of the street. He glanced in the direction of the T-wall, then pulled back.

It may have seemed innocent to someone else—and certainly didn’t meet the ROEs—but I knew to watch more carefully. I’d seen insurgents follow this same pattern now for years. They would peek out, glance around, then disappear. I called them “peekers”—they “peeked” out to see if anyone was watching. I’m sure they knew they couldn’t be shot for glancing around.

I knew it, too. But I also knew that if I was patient, the guy or whoever he was spotting for would most likely reappear. Sure enough, the fellow reappeared a few moments later.