American Sniper

by Chris Kyle

  “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.

  IT 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.

  LOCATED 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.

  THEY 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.

  THE ARMY HAD DECIDED TO CREATE A BUFFER ZONE TO PUSH the insurgents far enough away that their rockets would not 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.

  SHOT IN THE BACK

  THEY 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.

  THAT 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.

  BUILDING THE WALL

  WE 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 mig
ht 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.

  He had an RPG in his hand. He knelt quickly, bringing it up to aim.

  I dropped him before he could fire.

  Then it became a waiting game. The rocket was valuable to them. Sooner or later, I knew, someone would be sent to get it.

  I watched. It seemed like forever. Finally, a figure came down the street and scooped up the grenade launcher.

  It was a kid. A child.

  I had a clear view in my scope, but I didn’t fire. I wasn’t going to kill a kid, innocent or not. I’d have to wait until the savage who put him up to it showed himself on the street.

  TARGET-RICH

  I ENDED UP GETTING SEVEN INSURGENTS THAT DAY, AND MORE the next. We were in a target-rich environment.

  Because of the way the streets were laid out and the number of insurgents, we were getting close shots—a number were as close as 200 yards. My longest during this time was only about 880; the average was around 400.

  The city around us was schizophrenic. You’d have ordinary civilians going about their business, selling things, going to market, whatever. And then you’d have guys with guns trying to sneak up on the side streets and attack the soldiers putting up the wall. After we began engaging the insurgents, we would become the targets ourselves. Everyone would know where we were, and the bad guys would come out of their slug holes and try and take us down.

  It got to the point where I had so many kills that I stepped back to let the other guys have a few. I started giving them the best spots in the buildings we took over. Even so, I had plenty of chances to shoot.

  One day we took over this house and, after letting my guys choose their places, there were no more windows to fire from. So I took a sledgehammer and broke a hole in the wall. It took me quite a while to get it right.

  When I finally set up my place, I had about a three-hundred-yard view. Just as I got on my gun, three insurgents came out right across the street, fifteen yards away.

  I killed all of them. I rolled over and said to one of the officers who’d come over, “You want a turn?”

  AFTER A FEW DAYS, WE FIGURED OUT THAT THE ATTACKS WERE concentrating when the work crews reached an intersection. It made sense: the insurgents wanted to attack from a place where they could easily run off.

  We learned to bump up and watch the side streets. Then we started pounding these guys when they showed up.

  FALLUJAH WAS BAD. RAMADI WAS WORSE. SADR CITY WAS THE worst. The overwatches would last two or three days. We’d leave for a day, recharge, then go back out. It was balls-to-the-wall firefights every time.

  The insurgents brought more than just their AKs to a fight. We were getting rocketed every fight. We responded by calling in air cover, Hellfires and what-have-you.

  The surveillance network overhead had been greatly improved over the past several years, and the U.S. was able to make pretty good use of it when it came to targeting Predators and other assets. But in our case, the bastards were right out in the open, extremely easy to spot. And very plentiful.

  THERE WERE CLAIMS BY THE IRAQI GOVERNMENT AT ONE point that we were killing civilians. That was pure bullshit. While just about every battle was going down, Army intelligence analysts were intercepting insurgent cell phone communications that were giving a blow-by-blow account.

  “They just killed so-and-so,” ran one conversation. “We need more mortarmen and snipers . . . . They killed fifteen today.”

  We had only counted thirteen down in that battle—I guess we should have taken two out of the “maybe” column and put them in the “definite” category.

  GET MY GUN

  AS ALWAYS, THERE WERE MOMENTS OF HIGH ANXIETY MIXED with bizarre events and random comic relief.

  One day at the tail end of an op, I hustled back to the Bradley with the rest of the guys. Just as I reached the vehicle, I realized my sniper rifle had been left behind—I’d put it down in one of the rooms, then forgotten to bring it with me when I’d left.

  Yeah. Stupid.

  I reversed course. LT, one of my officers, was just running up.

  “Hey, we gotta go back,” I said. “My gun’s in the house.”

  “Let’s do it,” said LT, following me.

  We turned around and raced back to the house. Meanwhile, insurgents were sweeping toward it—so close we could hear them. We cleared the courtyard, sure we would run into them.

  Fortunately, there was no one there. I grabbed the rifle and we raced back to the Bradleys, about two seconds ahead of a grenade attack. The ramp shut and the explosions sounded.

  “What the hell?” demanded the officer in charge as the vehicle drove off.

  LT smirked.

  “I’ll explain later,” he said.

  I’m not sure he ever did.

  VICTORY

  IT TOOK ABOUT A MONTH TO GET THE BARRIERS UP. AS THE Army reached its objective, the insurgents started to give up.

  It was probably a combination of them realizing the wall was going to be finished whether they liked it or not, and the fact that we had killed so many of the bastards that they couldn’t mount much of an attack. Where thirty or forty insurgents would gather with AKs and RPGs to fire on a single fence crew at the beginning of the op, toward the end the bad guys were putting together attacks with two or three men. Gradually, they faded into the slums around us.

  Muqtada al-Sadr, meanwhile, decided it was time for him to try and negotiate a peace with the Iraqi government. He declared a ceasefire and started talking to the government.

  Imagine that.

  TAYA:

  People always told me I didn’t really know Chris or what he was doing, because he was a SEAL. I remember going to an accountant one time. He said he knew some SEALs and those guys told him no one ever really knew where they went.

  “My husband’s on a training trip,” I said. “I know where he is.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “Well, yes I do. I just talked to him.”

  “But you don’t know really what they’re doing. They’re SEALs.”

  “I—”

  “You can never know.”

  “I know my husband.”

  “You just can’t know. They’re trained to lie.”

  People would say that a lot. It irritated me when it was someone I didn’t know well. The people I did know well respected that I might not know every detail but I knew what I needed to know.

  IN THE VILLAGES

  WITH THINGS RELATIVELY CALM IN SADR CITY, WE WERE given a new area to target. IED-makers and
other insurgents had set up shop in a series of villages near Baghdad, trying to operate under the radar as they supplied weapons and manpower to fight Americans and the loyal Iraqi forces. The Mahdi army was out there, and the area was a virtual no-go zone for Americans.

  We had worked with members of 4-10 Mountain Division during much of the Sadr City battle. They were fighters. They wanted to be in the shit—and they certainly got their wish there. Now as we bumped out into the villages outside the city, we were happy to have a chance to work with them again. They knew the area. Their snipers were especially good, and having them along improved our effectiveness.

  OUR JOBS ARE THE SAME, BUT THERE ARE A FEW DIFFERENCES between Army and SEAL snipers. For one thing, Army snipers use spotters, which we don’t, as a general rule. Their weapon set is a bit smaller than ours.

  But the bigger difference, at least at first, had to do with tactics and the way they were deployed. Army snipers were more used to going out in three- or four-man groups, which meant they couldn’t stay out for very long, certainly not all night.

  The SEAL task unit, on the other hand, moved in heavy and locked down an area, basically looking for a fight and having the enemy provide us with one. It wasn’t so much an overwatch anymore as a dare: Here we are; come and get us.

  And they did: village after village, the insurgents would come and try and kill us; we’d take them down. Typically, we’d spend at least one night and usually a few, going in and extracting after sunset.

  In this area, we ended up going back to the same village a few times, usually taking a different house each time. We’d repeat the process until all the local bad guys were dead, or at least until they understood that attacking us was not very smart.

  It was surprising how many idiots you had to kill before they finally got that point.

  COVERED WITH CRAP

  THERE WERE LIGHTER MOMENTS, BUT EVEN SOME OF THOSE were shitty. Literally.

  Our point man, Tommy, was a great guy but, as it turned out, a terrible point in a lot of ways.