American Sniper

by Chris Kyle

  For some reason, this car came flying over the rocks and floored it, speeding toward us and passing all sorts of dead men on the way.

  I threw a flash-crash but the grenade didn’t get the driver to stop. So, I fired into the front of the car. The bullet went through the engine compartment. He stopped and bailed out of the car, yelling as he hopped around.

  Two women were with him in the car. They must have been the stupidest people in the city, because even with all that had happened, they were oblivious to us or the danger around them. They started coming toward our house. I threw another flash grenade and finally they started moving back in the direction they’d come. Finally, they seemed to notice some of the bodies that were littered around and started screaming.

  They seem to have gotten away okay, except for the foot wound. But it was a miracle they hadn’t been killed.

  THE PACE WAS HOT AND HEAVY. IT MADE US WANT MORE. WE ached for it. When the bad guys were hiding, we tried to dare them into showing themselves so we could take them down.

  One of the guys had a bandanna, which we took and fashioned into a kind of mummy head. Equipped with goggles and a helmet, it looked almost like a soldier—certainly at a few hundred yards. So we attached it to a pole and held it up over the roof, trying to draw fire one day when the action slowed. It brought a couple of insurgents out and we bagged them.

  WE WERE JUST SLAUGHTERING THEM.

  There were times when we were so successful on overwatch that I thought our guys on the street were starting to get a little careless. I once spotted them going down the middle of the street, rather than using the side and ducking into the little cover area provided by the walls and openings.

  I called down on the radio.

  “Hey, y’all need to be going cover to cover,” I told them, scolding them gently.

  “Why?” answered one of my platoon mates. “You’ve got us covered.”

  He may have been joking, but I took it seriously.

  “I can’t protect you from something I don’t see,” I said. “If I don’t see a glint or movement, the first time I know he’s there is when he shoots. I can get him after he’s shot you, but that’s not going to help you.”

  HEADING BACK TO SHARK BASE ONE NIGHT, WE GOT INVOLVED in another firefight, a quick hit-and-run affair. At some point, a frag came over and exploded near some of the guys.

  The insurgents ran off, and we picked ourselves back up and got going.

  “Brad, what’s with your leg?” someone in the platoon asked.

  He looked down. It was covered with blood.

  “Nothin’,” he said.

  It turned out he’d caught a piece of metal in his knee. It may not have hurt then—I don’t know how true that is, since no SEAL has ever actually admitted feeling pain since the beginning of Creation—but when he got back to Shark Base, it was clear the wound wasn’t something he could just blow off. Shrapnel had wedged itself behind his patella. He needed to be operated on.

  He was airlifted out, our first casualty in Ramadi.

  THE CONSTANT GARDENER

  OUR SISTER PLATOON WAS ON THE EAST SIDE OF THE CITY, helping the Army put in COPs there. And to the north, the Marines were doing their thing, taking areas, holding and clearing them of insurgents.

  We went back for a few days to work with the Marines when they took down a hospital north of the city on the river.

  The insurgents were using the hospital as a gathering point. As the Marines came in, a teenager, I’d guess about fifteen, sixteen, appeared on the street and squared up with an AK-47 to fire at them.

  I dropped him.

  A minute or two later, an Iraqi woman came running up, saw him on the ground, and tore off her clothes. She was obviously his mother.

  I’d see the families of the insurgents display their grief, tear off clothes, even rub the blood on themselves. If you loved them, I thought, you should have kept them away from the war. You should have kept them from joining the insurgency. You let them try and kill us—what did you think would happen to them?

  It’s cruel, maybe, but it’s hard to sympathize with grief when it’s over someone who just tried to kill you.

  Maybe they’d have felt the same way about us.

  People back home, people who haven’t been in war, or at least not that war, sometimes don’t seem to understand how the troops in Iraq acted. They’re surprised—shocked—to discover we often joked about death, about things we saw.

  Maybe it seems cruel or inappropriate. Maybe it would be, under different circumstances. But in the context of where we were, it made a lot of sense. We saw terrible things, and lived through terrible things.

  Part of it was letting off pressure or steam, I’m sure. A way to cope. If you can’t make sense of things, you start to look for some other way to deal with them. You laugh because you have to have some emotion, you have to express yourself somehow.

  EVERY OP COULD MIX LIFE AND DEATH IN SURREAL WAYS.

  On that same operation to take the hospital, we secured a house to scout the area before the Marines moved in. We’d been in the hide for a while when a guy came out with a wheelbarrow to plant an IED in the backyard where we were. One of our new guys shot him. But he didn’t die; he fell and rolled around on the ground, still alive.

  It happened that the man who shot him was a corpsman.

  “You shot him, you save him,” we told him. And so he ran down and tried to resuscitate him.

  Unfortunately, the Iraqi died. And in the process, his bowels let loose. The corpsman and another new guy had to carry the body out with us when we left.

  Well, they eventually reached a fence at the Marine compound, they didn’t know what to do. Finally they just threw him up and over, then clambered after him. It was like Weekend at Bernie’s.

  In the space of less than an hour, we’d shot a guy who wanted to blow us up, tried to save his life, and desecrated his body.

  The battlefield is a bizarre place.

  SOON AFTER THE HOSPITAL WAS SECURED, WE WENT BACK TO the river where the Marine boats had dropped us off. As we got down the bank, an enemy machine gun started tearing up the night. We hit the dirt, lying there for several long minutes, pinned down by a single Iraqi gunner.

  Thank God he sucked at shooting.

  It was always a delicate balance, life and death, comedy and tragedy.

  TAYA:

  I never played the video Chris had recorded of himself reading the book for our son. Part of it was the fact that I didn’t want to see Chris getting all choked up. I was emotional enough as it was; seeing him choked up reading to our son would have torn me up more than I already was.

  And part of it was just a feeling on my part—anger toward Chris, maybe—you left, you’re gone, go.

  It was harsh, but maybe it was a survival instinct.

  I was the same way when it came to his death letters.

  While he was deployed, he wrote letters to be delivered to the kids and me if he died. After the first deployment, I asked to read whatever he had written, and he said he didn’t have it anymore. After that he never offered them up and I never asked to see them.

  Maybe it was just because I was mad at him, but I thought to myself, We are not glorifying this after you’re dead. If you feel loving and adoring, you better let me know while you’re alive.

  Maybe it wasn’t fair, but a lot of life then wasn’t fair and that’s the way I felt.

  Show me now. Make it real. Don’t just say some sappy shit when you’re gone. Otherwise, it’s a load of crap.

  GUARDIANS AND DEVILS

  NINETY-SIX AMERICANS WERE KILLED DURING THE BATTLE OF Ramadi; countless more were wounded and had to be taken from the battlefield. I was lucky not to be one of them, though there were so many close calls I began to think I had a guardian angel.

  One time we were in a building and we were hosed down by the insurgents outside. I was out in the hallway, and as the shooting died down, I went into one of the rooms to check on some of
my guys. As I came in, I jerked straight back, falling backward as a shot came in through the window at my head.

  The bullet flew just over me as I fell.

  Why I went down like that, how I saw that bullet coming at me—I have no idea. It was almost as if someone had slowed time down and pushed me straight back.

  Did I have a guardian angel?

  No idea.

  “Fuck, Chris is dead,” said one of my boys as I lay on my back.

  “Damn,” said the other.

  “No, no,” I yelled, still flat on the floor. “I’m good, I’m good. I’m okay.”

  I checked for holes a few dozen times, but there were none.

  All good.

  IEDS WERE MUCH MORE COMMON IN RAMADI THAN THEY had been in Fallujah. The insurgents had learned a lot about setting them since the beginning of the war, and they tended to be pretty powerful—strong enough to lift a Bradley off the ground, as I’d found out earlier in Baghdad.

  The EOD guys who worked with us were not SEALs, but we came to trust them as much as if they were. We’d stick them on the back of the train when we went into a building, then call them forward if we saw something suspicious. At that point, their job was to identify the booby-trap; if it was a bomb, and we were in a house, we would have gotten the hell out of there fast.

  That never happened to us, but there was one time when we were in a house and some insurgents managed to plant an IED right outside the front door. They had stacked two 105-mm shells, waiting for us to come out. Fortunately, our EOD guy spotted it before we moved out. We were able to sledgehammer our way out through a second-story wall and escape across a low roof.

  A WANTED MAN

  ALL AMERICANS WERE WANTED MEN IN RAMADI, SNIPERS most of all. Reportedly, the insurgents put out a bounty on my head.

  They also gave me a name: al-Shaitan Ramadi—“the Devil of Ramadi.”

  It made me feel proud.

  The fact is, I was just one guy, and they had singled me out for causing them a lot of damage. They wanted me gone. I had to feel good about that.

  They definitely knew who I was, and had clearly gotten intelligence from some fellow Iraqis who were supposedly loyal to us—they described the red cross I had on my arm.

  The other sniper from my sister platoon got a bounty on his head as well. His ended up being more—well, that did make me a little jealous.

  But it was all good, because when they put their posters together and made one of me, they used his photo instead of mine. I was more than happy to let them make that mistake.

  The bounty went up as the battle went on.

  Hell, I think it got so high, my wife may have been tempted to turn me in.

  PROGRESS

  WE HELPED SET UP SEVERAL MORE COPS, AND MEANWHILE our sister platoon did the same on the eastern side of the city. As the weeks turned into months, Ramadi started to change.

  The place was still a hellhole, extremely dangerous. But there were signs of progress. The tribal leaders were more vocal about wanting peace, and more began working together as a unified council. The official government still wasn’t functioning here, and the Iraqi police and army were nowhere near capable of keeping order, naturally. But there were large sections of the city under relative control.

  The “inkblot strategy” was working. Could those blots spread over the entire city?

  Progress was never guaranteed, and even when we succeeded for a while there was no guarantee things wouldn’t go backward. We had to return to the area near the river around COP Falcon several times, providing overwatch while the area was searched for caches and insurgents. We’d clear a block, it would be peaceful for a while, then we’d have to start all over again.

  We worked a bit more with the Marines as well, stopping and inspecting small craft, going after a suspected weapons cache, and even running a few DAs for them. A few times we were tasked to check and then blow up abandoned boats to make sure they couldn’t be used for smuggling.

  Funny thing: the SBU unit that had blown us off earlier heard about how much action we were getting and contacted us, asking now if they could come up and work with us. We told them thanks but no thanks; we were doing just fine with the Marines.

  WE GOT INTO A CERTAIN RHYTHM WORKING WITH THE ARMY as they continued cordoning off areas and searching them for weapons and bad guys. We’d drive in with them, take over a building, and go up on the roof for overwatch. Most times there would be three of us—myself and another sniper, along with Ryan on the 60.

  Meanwhile, the Army would move out to the next building. That taken, they’d work their way down the street. Once they reached a certain spot where we couldn’t see to provide them security, we’d come down and move to a new spot. The process would start all over again.

  It was on one of these ops that Ryan got shot.

  11

  MAN DOWN

  “WHAT THE HELL?”

  ONE VERY HOT SUMMER DAY WE TOOK A SMALL APARTMENT building with a good view of one of the major east-west roads through the center of Ramadi. It was four stories high, the staircase lined with windows, the roof open and with a good view of the area. It was a clear day.

  Ryan was joking with me as we went in. He was cracking me up—he always made me laugh, made me relax. Smiling, I posted him to watch the road. Our troops were working on a side street on the other side of the roof, and I figured that if the insurgents were going to launch an ambush or try and attack us, they would come down that road. Meanwhile, I watched the team on the ground. The assault began smoothly, with the soldiers taking first one house and then another. They moved quickly, without a snag.

  Suddenly, shots flew through our position. I ducked down as a round hit the cement nearby, splattering chips everywhere. This was an everyday occurrence in Ramadi, something that happened not once a day but several times.

  I waited a second to make sure the insurgents were done firing, then got back up.

  “You guys all right?” I yelled, looking down the street toward the soldiers on the ground, making sure they were okay.

  “Yeah,” grunted the other sniper.

  Ryan didn’t answer. I glanced back and saw him, still down.

  “Hey, get up,” I told him. “They stopped firing. Come on.”

  He didn’t move. I went over.

  “What the hell?” I yelled at him. “Get up. Get up.”

  Then I saw the blood.

  I knelt down and looked at him. There was blood all over. The side of his face had been smashed in. He’d taken a bullet.

  We had pounded into him the fact that you have to always have your weapon up and ready; he’d had it up and scanning when the bullet hit. It apparently got the rifle first, then ricocheted into his face.

  I grabbed the radio. “Man down!” I yelled. “Man down!”

  I dropped back and examined his wounds. I didn’t know what to do, where to start. Ryan looked as if he’d been hit so bad that he was going to die.

  His body shook. I thought it was a death spasm.

  Two of our platoon guys, Dauber and Tommy, ran up. They were both corpsmen. They slipped down between us and started treating him.

  Marc Lee came up behind them. He took the 60 and began laying down fire in the direction the shots had come from, chasing the insurgents back so we could carry Ryan down the stairs.

  I picked him up and held him up over my shoulder, then started to run. I reached the stairs and started going down quickly.

  About halfway, he started groaning loudly. The way I was holding him, the blood had rushed into his throat and head; he was having trouble breathing.

  I set him down, even more worried, knowing in my heart he was going to die, hoping that somehow, some way, I might do something to keep him going, even though it was hopeless.

  Ryan began spitting blood. He caught his breath—he was breathing, a miracle in itself.

  I reached out to grab him and pick him up again.

  “No,” he said. “No, no I’m good. I got this
. I’m walking.”

  He put an arm around me and walked himself down the rest of the way.

  Meanwhile, the Army rolled a tracked vehicle, a personnel carrier, up to the front door. Tommy went in with Ryan and they pulled away.

  I ran back upstairs, feeling as if I’d been shot and wishing that it had been me, not him, who was hit. I was sure he was going to die. I was sure I’d just lost a brother. A big, goofy, lovable, great brother.

  Biggles.

  Nothing I’d experienced in Iraq had ever affected me like this.

  PAYBACK

  WE COLLAPSED BACK TO SHARK BASE.

  As soon as we got there, I shed my gear and put my back against the wall, then slowly lowered myself to the ground.

  Tears started flowing from my eyes.

  I thought Ryan was dead. Actually, he was still alive, if just barely. The docs worked like hell to save him. Ryan would eventually be medevac’d out of Iraq. His wounds were severe—he’d never see again, not only out of the eye that had been hit but the other as well. It was a miracle that he lived.

  But at that moment at base, I was sure he was dead. I knew it in my stomach, in my heart, in every part of me. I’d put him in the spot where he got hit. It was my fault he’d been shot.

  A hundred kills? Two hundred? More? What did they mean if my brother was dead?

  Why hadn’t I put myself there? Why hadn’t I been standing there? I could have gotten the bastard—I could have saved my boy.

  I was in a dark hole. Deep down.

  How long I stayed there, head buried, tears flowing, I have no idea.

  “Hey,” said a voice above me, finally.

  I looked up. It was Tony, my chief.

  “You wanna go get some payback?” he asked.

  “Fuck yeah I do!” I jumped to my feet.