American Sniper

by Chris Kyle

  The people sleeping in the courtyard turned out to be just a regular extended family. Some of my guys got them situated without firing any shots, rounding them up and moving them to a safe area. Meanwhile, the rest of us ran in to the buildings, clearing each room as quickly as we could. There was a main building, and then a smaller cottage nearby. While my boys checked for weapons and bombs, anything suspicious, I raced to the rooftop.

  One of the reasons we’d selected the building was its height—the main structure was three stories tall, and so I had a decent view of the surrounding area.

  Nothing stirred. So far, so good.

  “Building secure,” the com guy radioed to the Army. “Come on in.”

  We had just taken the house that would become COP Falcon, and, once more, done so without a fight.

  PETTY OFFICER/PLANNER

  OUR HEAD SHED HAD HELPED PLAN THE COP FALCON OPERATION, working directly with the Army commanders. Once they were done, they came to the platoon leadership and asked for our input. I got involved in the tactical planning process more deeply than I ever had before.

  I had mixed feelings. On the one hand, I had experience and knowledge to add something useful. On the other hand, it got me doing the kind of work I don’t like to do. It seemed a little “admin” or bureaucratic—coat-and-tie stuff, to use a civilian workplace metaphor.

  AS AN E6, I WAS ONE OF THE MORE SENIOR GUYS IN THE PLATOON. Usually you have a chief petty officer (E7), who’s the senior enlisted guy, and an LPO, the lead petty officer. Generally the LPO is an E6, and the only one in the platoon. In our platoon, we had two. I was the junior E6, which was great—Jay, the other E6, was LPO, and so I missed a lot of the admin duties that go with that post. On the other hand, I had the benefits of the rank. For me, it was kind of like the story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears—I was too senior to do the bullshit jobs and too junior to do the political jobs. I was just right.

  I hated sitting down at a computer and mapping everything out, let alone making a slideshow presentation out of it. I would have much rather just said, “Hey, follow me; I’ll show what we’re going to do on the fly.” But writing it all down was important: if I went down, someone else would have to be able to step in and know what was going on.

  I did get stuck with one admin job that had nothing to do with mission planning: evaluating the E5s. I truly hated it. (Jay arranged some sort of trip and left me with that—I’m sure because he didn’t want to do it, either.) The bright side was that I realized how good our people were. There were absolutely no turds in that platoon—it was a real outstanding group.

  ASIDE FROM MY RANK AND EXPERIENCE, THE HEAD SHED wanted me involved in planning, because snipers were taking a more aggressive role in battle. We had become, in military terms, a force multiplier, able to do a lot more than you might think based on our sheer numbers alone.

  Most planning decisions involved details like the best houses to take for overwatch, the route to take in, how we’d be dropped off, what we would do after the initial houses were taken, etc. Some of the decisions could be very subtle. How you get to a sniper hide, for example. The preference would be to get there as stealthily as possible. That might suggest walking in, as we had in some of the villages. But you don’t want to walk through narrow alleys where there’s a lot of trash—too much noise, too many chances for an IED or an ambush.

  There’s a misperception among the general public that SpecOp troops always parachute or fast-rope into a trouble zone. While we certainly do both where appropriate, we didn’t fly into any of the areas in Ramadi. Helicopters do have certain advantages, speed and the ability to travel relatively long distances being one of them. But they’re also loud and attract attention in an urban environment. And they’re relatively easy targets to shoot down.

  In this case, coming in by water made a great deal of sense, because of the way Ramadi is laid out and where the target was located. It allowed us to get to a spot near the target area stealthily, comparatively quickly, and with less chance of contact than the overland routes. But that decision led to an unexpected problem—we had no boats.

  ORDINARILY, SEALS WORK WITH SPECIAL BOAT TEAMS, known at the time and in the past as Special Boat Units, or SBUs. Same mission, different name. They drive the fast boats that insert SEALs and then retrieve them; we were rescued by one when we were “lost” on the California coast during training.

  There was a bit of friction between SEALs and SBUs back home in the bars, where you’d occasionally hear some SBU members claiming to be SEALs. Team guys would think, and sometimes say, that’s like a taxi driver claiming to be a movie star because he drove someone to the studio.

  Whatever. There are some damn good guys out there. The last thing we need is to be picking fights with the people who are supporting us.

  But that’s a point that works both ways. Our problem in Ramadi came from the fact the unit that was supposed to be working with us refused to help.

  They told us they were too important to be working with us. In fact, they claimed to be standing by for a unit with a higher priority, just in case they were needed. Which they weren’t.

  Hey, sorry. I’m pretty sure their job was to help whoever needed it, but whatever. We hunted around and found a Marine unit that was equipped with SURC boats—small, shallow-draft vessels that could get right up to the shore. They were armored and equipped with machine guns fore and aft.

  The guys driving them were bad-ass. They did everything an SBU was supposed to do. Except that they did it for us.

  They knew their mission. They didn’t pretend to be someone else. They just wanted to get us there, the safest way possible. And when our mission was done, they came for us—even if it was a hot extract. These Marines would come in a heartbeat.

  COP FALCON

  THE ARMY ROLLED IN WITH TANKS, ARMORED VEHICLES, AND trucks. Soldiers humped sandbags and reinforced weak spots in the house. The house we were on was at the corner of a T-intersection of two major roads, one of which we called Sunset. The Army wanted the spot because of its strategic location; it was a choke point and a pretty clear presence inside the city.

  Those factors also made it a prime target.

  The tanks drew attention right away. A couple of insurgents began moving toward the house as they arrived. The bad guys were armed with AKs, maybe foolishly thinking they could scare the armor off. I waited until they were two hundred yards from the tanks before picking them off. They were easy shots, nailed before they could coordinate an organized attack.

  A FEW HOURS PASSED. I KEPT FINDING SHOTS—THE INSURGENTS were probing the area, one or two at a time, trying to sneak in behind us.

  It was never hot and heavy, but there was a steady stream of opportunity. Pop shots, I called them later.

  The Army commander estimated we got two dozen insurgents in the first twelve hours of the fight. I don’t know how accurate that is, but I did take down a few myself that first day, each with one shot. It wasn’t particularly great shooting—they were all around four hundred yards and less. The .300 Win Mag is a hard-hitter at that range.

  While it was still dark, the Army now had enough defenses at Falcon to hold their own if they were attacked. I went down off the roof and with my boys moved out again, running toward a rundown apartment building a few hundred yards away. The building, one of the tallest around, had a good vantage not only on Falcon but on the rest of the area. We called it Four Story; it would end up being a home away from home for much of the battle that followed.

  We got in without trouble. It was empty.

  WE DIDN’T SEE MUCH FOR THE REST OF THE NIGHT. BUT WHEN the sun came up, so did the bad guys.

  They targeted COP Falcon, but ineptly. They’d walk, drive, ride mopeds, trying to get close enough to launch an attack. It was always obvious what they were doing: you’d see a couple of guys on a moped. The first would have an AK and the second would have a grenade launcher.

  I mean, come on.

  We started ge
tting a lot of shots. Four Story was a great sniper hide. It was the tallest building around, and you couldn’t get close enough to shoot at it without exposing yourself. It was easy to pick an attacker off. Dauber says we took twenty-three guys in the first twenty-four hours we were there; in the days that followed, we’d get plenty more targets.

  Of course, after the first shot, it was a fighting position, not a sniper hide. But in a way, I didn’t mind being attacked—the insurgents were just making it easier for me to kill them.

  NUMBERS 100 AND 101

  IF THE ACTION AROUND COP IRON HAD BEEN DULL TO NONE, the action around COP Falcon was the exact opposite: intense and thick. The Army camp was a clear threat to the insurgents, and they wanted it gone.

  A flood of bad guys came at us. That only made it easier for us to defeat them.

  Very shortly after Ramadi started, I reached a huge milestone for a sniper: I got my 100th and my 101st confirmed kills for that deployment. One of the guys took a photo of me for posterity, holding up the brass.

  There was a little bit of a competition between myself and some of the other snipers during this deployment, to see who got the most kills. Not that we had all that much to do with the numbers—they were more a product of how many targets we had to shoot at. It’s just the luck of the draw—you want to have the highest numbers, but there’s not much you can do about it.

  I did want to be the top sniper. At first, there were three of us who had the most kills; then two of us started pulling away. My “competition” was in my sister platoon, working on the east side of the city. His totals shot up at one point, pulling ahead.

  Our big boss man happened to be on our side of the city, and he was keeping track of how the platoons were doing. As part of that, he had the sniper totals. He tweaked me a little as the other sniper pulled in front.

  “He’s gonna break your record,” he’d tease. “You better get on that gun more.”

  Well, things evened out real fast—all of a sudden I seemed to have every stinkin’ bad guy in the city running across my scope. My totals shot up, and there was no catchin’ me.

  Luck of the draw.

  IF YOU’RE INTERESTED, THE CONFIRMED KILLS WERE ONLY kills that someone else witnessed, and cases where the enemy could be confirmed dead. So if I shot someone in the stomach and he managed to crawl around where we couldn’t see him before he bled out, he didn’t count.

  WORKING WITH THE ARMY

  WITH THE INITIAL ATTACKS DYING DOWN AFTER A COUPLE OF days, we foot-patrolled back to COP Falcon from Four Story. There we met with the captain of the force, and told him that we wanted to be based out of Falcon rather than having to go all the way back to Camp Ramadi every few days.

  He gave us the in-law suite. We were the Army’s in-laws.

  We also told him that we would help him clear whatever area he wanted. His job was to clear the city around COP Falcon, and ours was to help him.

  “What’s the worst spot you got?” we asked.

  He pointed it out.

  “That’s where we’re going,” we said.

  He shook his head and rolled his eyes.

  “You guys are crazy,” he said. “You can have that house, you can outfit it however you want, you can go wherever you want. But I want you to know—I’m not coming to get you if you go out there. There are too many IEDs, I’m going to lose a tank. I can’t do it.”

  LIKE A LOT OF THE ARMY, I’M SURE THE CAPTAIN INITIALLY looked at us skeptically. They all assumed we thought we were better than they were, that we had out-sized egos and shot off our mouths without being able to back it up. Once we proved to them that we didn’t think we were better than them—more experienced, yes, but not stuck up, if you know what I mean—then they usually came around. We formed strong working relationships with the units, and even friendships that lasted after the war.

  The captain’s unit was doing cordon and search operations, where they would take an entire block and search it. We started working with them. We’d do daylight presence patrols—the idea was to make civilians see troops on a regular basis, gaining more confidence that they were going to be protected, or that at least we were there to stay. We would put half the platoon on an overwatch while the rest patrolled.

  A lot of these overwatches would be near Four Story. The guys downstairs would patrol and almost always be contacted. I’d be upstairs with other snipers and nail whoever was trying to attack them.

  Or we would bump out five hundred yards, six or eight hundred yards, going deep into Injun territory to look and wait for the bad guys. We’d set up on overwatch ahead of one of his patrols. As soon as his people showed up, they’d draw all sorts of insurgents toward them. We’d take them down. The bad guys would turn and try and fire on us; we’d pick them off. We were protectors, bait, and slayers.

  After a few days, the captain came up to us and said, “Y’all are bad-ass. I don’t care where you go, if you need me, I’m comin’ to get you. I’ll drive the tank to the front door.”

  And from that moment on, he had our faith and our back.

  I WAS ON OVERWATCH AT FOUR STORY ONE MORNING WHEN some of our guys started doing a patrol nearby. As they moved to cross the street, I spotted some insurgents coming down J Street, which was one of the main roads in that area.

  I took down a couple. My guys scattered. Not knowing what was going on, someone asked over the radio why the hell I was shooting at them.

  “I’m shooting over your head,” I told him. “Look down the street.”

  Insurgents started feeding into the area and a huge firefight erupted. I saw one guy with an RPG; I got him in my crosshairs, squeezed easy on the trigger.

  He fell.

  A few minutes later, one of his friends came out to grab the rocket launcher.

  He fell.

  This went on for quite a while. Down the block, another insurgent with an AK tried to get a shot on my boys. I took him down—then took down the guy who came to get his gun, and the next one.

  Target-rich environment?! Hell, there were piles of insurgents littering the road. They finally gave up and disappeared. Our guys continued to patrol. The jundis saw action that day; two of them died in a firefight.

  It was tough to keep track of how many kills I got that day, but I believe the total was the highest I’d ever had in a single day.

  WE KNEW WE WERE IN GOOD WITH THE ARMY CAPTAIN WHEN he came over to us one day and said, “Listen, y’all gotta do one thing for me. Before I get shipped out of here, I want to shoot my main tank gun one time. All right? So call me.”

  It wasn’t too long after that we got in a firefight and we got his unit on the radio. We called him over, and he got his tank in and he got his shot.

  There were a lot more in the days that followed. By the time he left Ramadi, he’d shot it thirty-seven times.

  PRAYERS AND BANDOLIERS

  BEFORE EVERY OP, A BUNCH OF THE PLATOON WOULD GATHER and say a prayer. Marc Lee would lead it, usually speaking from the heart rather than reciting a memorized prayer.

  I didn’t pray every time going out, but I did thank God every night when I got back.

  There was one other ritual when we returned: cigars.

  A few of us would get together and smoke them at the end of an op. In Iraq, you can get Cubans; we smoked Romeo y Julieta No. 3s. We’d light up to top off the day.

  IN A WAY, WE ALL THOUGHT WE WERE INVINCIBLE. IN ANOTHER way, we also accepted the fact that we could die.

  I didn’t focus on death, or spend much time thinking about it. It was more like an idea, lurking in the distance.

  IT WAS DURING THIS DEPLOYMENT THAT I INVENTED A LITTLE wrist bandolier, a small bullet-holder that allowed me to easily reload without disturbing my gun setup.

  I took a holder that had been designed to be strapped on a gun stock and cut it up. Then I arranged some cord through it and tied it to my left wrist.

  Generally, when I fired, I would have my fist balled up under the gun to help me aim. That
brought the bandolier close. I could fire, take my right hand, and grab more bullets, and keep my eye sighted through the scope at all times.

  AS LEAD SNIPER, I TRIED TO HELP THE NEW GUYS, TELLING them what details to look for. You could tell someone was an insurgent not just by the fact that he was armed but by the way he moved. I started giving advice I’d been given back at the beginning of Fallujah, a battle that by now seemed like a million years ago.

  “Dauber, don’t be afraid to pull the trigger,” I’d tell the younger sniper. “If it’s within the ROEs, you take him.”

  A little bit of hesitation was common for the new guys. Maybe all Americans are a little hesitant to be the first to shoot, even when it’s clear that we’re under attack, or will be shortly.

  Our enemy seemed to have no such problem. With a little experience, our guys didn’t, either.

  But you could never tell how a guy was going to perform under the stress of combat. Dauber did real well—real well. But I noticed that, for some snipers, the extra strain made them miss shots that they would have no trouble with in training. One guy in particular—an excellent guy and a good SEAL—went through a spell where he was missing quite a lot.

  You just couldn’t tell how someone was going to react.

  RAMADI WAS INFESTED WITH INSURGENTS, BUT THERE WAS A large civilian population. Sometimes they’d wander into firefights. You’d wonder what the hell they were thinking.

  One day, we were in a house in another part of the city. We’d engaged a bunch of insurgents, killing quite a few, and were waiting through a lull in the action. The bad guys were probably nearby, waiting for another chance to attack.

  Insurgents normally put small rocks in the middle of the road to warn others where we were. Civilians usually saw the rocks and quickly realized what was going on. They always stayed far away. Hours might pass before we saw any people again—and, of course, by that point, the people we would be seeing would have guns and be trying to kill us.