Shock Factor (7 page)

There are some advanced ways to get around the uncertainty of what an enemy will do. If a sniper team has been watching a particular place for an extended period of time, he and his partner will study the terrain and tactical situation. Based on that study, they will assign areas of responsibility to each other. Then, within those areas, they will create their preplanned ambush points based on possible routes of movement the enemy might use. From there, the team can build a decision tree that covers all possible enemy behaviors. This is called Planning the Target Zone.

Let's say our sniper team is covering a street with a couple of doorways and alleys in their areas of responsibility. Each man will select ambush points between the alleys and doorways to ensure that any enemy entering the area can be taken out with this method.

The downside to this, of course, is the enemy can either do something unexpected or the snipers don't have time to work through all the possible scenarios. In that case, they have to switch to tracking their targets.

When Muhammad made his run for it, Chris Kyle had been covering his area of responsibility to the right of the vehicle. In a split second, Kyle had to judge how fast his target was running, the angle he was to the SEAL's rifle, and his probable path. It was clear Muhammad was trying to get to the front door. Kyle had planned his target zone carefully. He shifted his reticle to one of his preplanned ambush points. Muhammad moved into his scope, sprinting flat out now. Running lead, left to right, adjusting for low wind (0–3 mph). He'd already fed proper DOPE (data on previous engagement) into his scope, so he didn't need to factor in temperature and drop. He had a good zero.

When Muhammad reached the mil lead threshold, Kyle pulled the trigger. The Win Mag's heavy bullet punched through Muhammad's rib cage, knocking him off his feet.

It was a remarkable shot. Kyle had hit a moving target's profile exactly center mass. The target area on Muhammad's body was probably less than eight by eight inches. It was a wound that no man could survive, the sort of shot Chris had learned to make with his father while out hunting deer on the family spread back in Texas. Shot placement was everything.

The bullet did its work. Muhammad died in seconds, his body splayed on the ground only a few steps short of the front gate.

Justice served, SEAL style. The team called for extraction. The Marine Super Stallion reappeared and touched down near the hide site. Kyle and the rest of the team rushed aboard. As they choppered their way back to base, the SEALs broke out celebratory cigars. Mission accomplished. And this one felt good.

There were at least four al-Qaida operatives involved in the executions of our soldiers. Other special operations teams killed two of them. Seal Team Three took care of the other two. It was a clean sweep. In September 2001 President George Bush had told the American people, “Americans should not expect one battle, but a lengthy campaign unlike any other we have ever seen. It may include dramatic strikes visible on TV and covert operations secret even in success.” Kyle's bullet scored one of those secret successes. The country did not learn that the men responsible for murdering Menchaca and Tucker had been hunted down and killed. There was no closure for the families back in Oregon and Texas as a result. But behind the scenes, the SEALs made sure the executioners faced a reckoning—a far more permanent one than the driver of the truck that carried the bodies received in 2008.

*   *   *

Chris Kyle retired from the U.S. Navy in 2009 with two hundred fifty-five confirmed kills to his credit, more than any other sniper in American history. His service during eight years of combat in some of the heaviest fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan earned him two Silver Stars and five Bronze Stars for Valor. He was wounded in action repeatedly, but never received a single Purple Heart. Just before one firefight he had been talking to his wife on a sat phone. When the bullets started flying, he dropped it and picked up his rifle. Moments later, he and several members of his team were wounded, and his wife heard him shout “I'm hit!” before the sat phone cut out. For three days she waited for word, terrified that she'd heard her husband's final words.

When Kyle came home from his final deployment, he saw what eight years of combat had done to his wife. He made the decision to retire from the Navy to devote himself to his family. He returned to his beloved state of Texas, where he now ran a company that trains law enforcement and military snipers. But for Kyle the future wasn't in the corporate rat race. He dreamed of a day he could throw his cell phone away, put on a pair of boots, and ride among his own herd of cattle on a north Texas prairie he could call his own.

In 2010, his best-selling book,
American Sniper,
was released. Chris gave most of the book's proceeds to the families of fallen SEALs he had served with during his time in combat. He spent his days running his consulting business and reaching out to veterans with disabilities.

After serving as guardian angel for countless Marines around Ramadi in 2006, Chris and his business partner were murdered on February 2, 2013, by a Marine veteran suffering from an acute case of post-traumatic stress disorder. After a furious law enforcement chase, the Marine drove Chris's pickup into a police car and was captured. His motives for the murder were unclear.

Chris Kyle's memorial service was held at the Dallas Cowboys football stadium. Thousands of mourners lined the streets and filled the stands to pay their final respects to an American icon whose life had been devoted to protecting his fellow Americans. That he was slain by one of those very men in a fit of senseless violence after he had done so much for his country remains one of the most painful ironies of the War on Terror.

 

CHAPTER FOUR

The Playground of Snipers

SUMMER 2006
RAMADI, IRAQ

Ramadi in the late summer of 2006 was a city in its death throes. Unlike Fallujah, this battle was drawn out, a slow-motion car wreck that consumed Ramadi in a way not seen in military history since the Battle of Stalingrad in 1942–1943. While the U.S. forces showed restraint and only used such firepower as aerial bombs, rockets, or the main gun on an M1 Abrams tank as an absolute last resort, the insurgents were under no such limitations.

Enemy car bomb factories hidden in warehouses in or around the city churned out dump trucks filled with thousands of pounds of ammonium nitrate. Foreign volunteers, whom al-Qaida cell leaders leg-cuffed in place should they have any second thoughts about martyrdom, drove the trucks into Iraqi Police checkpoints or Coalition combat outposts. The massive blasts from these deadly weapons took down buildings and left the streets heaped with burned debris and human remains. Through some freak of physics, the drivers were usually blown straight up into the air. Their bodies would come apart, but the head was almost always found intact. During the cleanup after these attacks, it fell to American and Iraqi troops to locate the driver's head, photograph it, and conduct a retinal scan to identify the terrorist if his eyes remained in their sockets.

Each bomb factory had specific tells picked up by U.S. military forensics experts. Some set up fail-safes, or “chicken switches,” so that if the driver tried to opt out at the last minute, the vehicle could be detonated remotely by observers watching from a safe distance. Others tore down vehicles to their bare frames, welded modifications and explosives in place, then rebuilt the rig so it looked like any other on the streets. Some of these were so cunningly constructed that even a detailed search by Iraqi security forces missed the threat concealed within them. Al-Qaida's factories grew so sophisticated that they were able to produce tractor-trailer rigs loaded with six to eight thousand pounds of explosives. Such infernal devices took down entire city blocks when they went off.

Sometimes the bomb makers improvised even deadlier ways to attack the Coalition. On August 21, 2006, al-Qaida operatives drove a dump truck filled with fuel up to a Coalition outpost on the edge of town and successfully detonated it. The blast drenched the base in flaming fuel, killing three Iraqi police officers and horribly burning eight American soldiers.

The truck and car bomb menace grew so severe that summer that three or four bombs a week were blowing up in and around the city. Finding the factories became a key priority, as these attacks almost always inflicted military and civilian casualties. But finding them required venturing into the heart of the city, where al-Qaida's legions had seeded the streets and alleys with thousands of IEDs. In some places, so many had been emplaced that they resembled urban minefields, and some of the bombs were so powerful they could (and did) destroy M1 Abrams tanks and M2 Bradley Fighting Vehicles.

When the troops tried to move off the streets and into businesses and homes, they faced another threat—building contained IEDs. Al-Qaida would wire a dwelling with propane tanks, explosives, or artillery rounds left over from the Saddam era. Once a door was opened and a wire or infrared beam was broken, the entire building would explode and come down around the patrol. Dozens of these BCIEDs detonated around the city that summer, leaving entire blocks in ruins.

Piles of concrete and rebar heaped on either side of garbage-strewn roads littered with the burned-out carcasses of cars and tireless, bullet-riddled trucks became the indelible image of Ramadi for countless American soldiers who struggled to defeat al-Qaida. Water mains were ruptured by IEDs and flooded the streets. Sewage lines, never Iraq's strong point, clogged up or broke and added a foul stench to the ruins. Severed power lines hung limply across sidewalks, festooned trees and walls, and lay in tangles in the streets. Animals caught in cross fires lay rotting in the rubble, as nobody was willing to risk removing them since al-Qaida had been known to plant bombs around or inside their corpses. On one wall deep in the city, the enemy had spray-painted in Arabic “This is the graveyard of Americans.”

It was a graveyard. The soccer stadium, controlled that summer by al-Qaida, became a dumping ground for corpses. The enemy dug up the field and turned it into a mass grave. Civilians they'd tortured and killed were laid to rest there atop Jihadists and foreign fighters alike.

All the while, the civilians trapped within their devastated neighborhoods sought any means to survive. With shops closed and the economy destroyed, for many men the only way to feed their families was to do al-Qaida's dirty work. The terrorists hired children to be lookouts, or to scout locations for IEDs. They paid adults to plant the bombs or to assist in their construction. Others received a bounty for the Americans they killed.

There were even contract snipers working for al-Qaida. One used a van as a mobile sniper hide. Concealed in back behind a curtain, he killed a U.S. soldier with a shot to the head, only to be overrun and captured a short time later. When he was interrogated and identified, the Americans discovered the gunman was a teacher at a nearby vocational school for women. For extra money, he moonlighted as a sniper for al-Qaida.

The Anbar Provincial Government was located in downtown Ramadi. It was a sole enclave in a sea of hostility. The governor and his staff were frequent targets of assassination attempts, and they lived under siege surrounded by a protective cordon of Marines. Anytime the governor tried to go anywhere, he and his security detail almost always came under attack. In such a situation, the government had no hope of functioning. The governor controlled nothing beyond the rifle barrels of the Marines keeping him alive.

Day after day, the fighting demolished Ramadi a little at a time. Where Fallujah had been a full-on onslaught, a set-piece battle that ended after two months of fighting, Ramadi was the battle without end. It became the Guadalcanal of the Iraq War, a brutal struggle of attrition that wore away the souls of the Americans caught in its vortex of violence and misery.

Every time an American patrol left an outpost, they were sure to encounter some sort of opposition. The threats were everywhere—bombs buried under the asphalt in the streets they used, buildings wired to blow. Random gunmen lurked in the shadows to spray AK fire and run. Zealots wearing suicide vests, grenades, and mortar fire launched from tubes mounted in the beds of flatbed “bongo” trucks so they could keep mobile were just a few of the threats the Americans faced every day. On average, any patrol in the city that summer would get attacked within eight minutes of heading out the front gate.

Despite the lethality of IEDs and suicide bombers, al-Qaida's snipers were the threat American troops feared the most. In an IED environment, slow movement is the best way for a foot patrol to detect that sort of threat. But with al-Qaida snipers lurking in the shadows of broken buildings, atop minarets and mosques, slow movement was a death sentence. Marines and soldiers alike took to sudden rushes from one concealed position to another. They dashed down streets in one-hundred-thirty-eight-degree heat, laden with eighty pounds of gear or more, hoping the speed and sudden changes of direction would throw off the aim of any marksman who had them in his crosshairs.

Though IEDs killed more Americans in Ramadi, the sniper shots were the ones that affected the troops the most. In three months, 2nd Battalion, 8th Marines (2/8) suffered eight casualties to enemy snipers. Two journalists embedded with 1/506th Parachute Infantry at Camp Corregidor (located just outside Ramadi) also fell wounded to sniper rounds.

On June 21, 2006, Lance Corporal Nicholas Whyte prepared to depart from a forward outpost on a foot patrol through a Ramadi neighborhood. Whyte, who was two days shy of his twenty-second birthday, had served in Fallujah and had done an earlier tour in Haiti before his company from 3rd Battalion, 8th Marines joined the central battle of the Iraq War. He'd been raised in Brooklyn, New York, in a tough neighborhood near East Flatbush, graduating from James Madison High School in 2002. After a year of college, he volunteered for the Marine Corps.