American Sniper

by Chris Kyle

  Or maybe I should say sometimes he was more of a duck than a point man. If there was a puddle between us and the objective, Tommy took us through it. The deeper the better. He was always having us walk through the worst possible terrain.

  It got so ridiculous that finally I told him, “One more time, I’m going to whup your ass, and you’re fired.”

  On the very next mission, he found a path to a village that he was sure would be dry. I had my doubts. In fact, I pointed them out to him.

  “Oh, no, no,” he insisted, “it’s good, it’s good.”

  Once we were out in the field, we followed him across some farmland on a narrow path that led to a pipe across a path of mud. I was at the back at the group, one of the last to come across the pipe. As I stepped off, I sunk right through the mud and into crap up to my knee. The mud was actually just a thin crust atop a deep pool of sewage.

  It stunk even worse than Iraq usually stunk.

  “Tommy,” I yelled, “I’m going to whip your ass as soon as we get to the house.”

  We pushed on to the house. I was still in the rear. We cleared the house and, once all the snipers were deployed, I went to find Tommy and give him the thrashing I’d promised.

  Tommy was already paying for his sins: when I found him downstairs, he was hooked up to an IV and puking his brains out. He had fallen into the muck and was completely covered with shit. He was sick for a day, and he smelled for a week.

  Every article of clothing he’d been wearing was disposed of, probably by a hazmat unit.

  Served him right.

  I SPENT SOMEWHERE BETWEEN TWO AND THREE MONTHS IN the villages. I had roughly twenty confirmed kills while I was there. The action on any particular op could be fierce; it could also be slow. There was no predicting.

  Most of the houses we took over belonged to families who at least pretended to be neutral; I’d guess that the majority of them hated the insurgents for causing trouble and would have been even happier than we were to have the bad guys leave. But there were exceptions, and we were plenty frustrated when we couldn’t do anything about it.

  We went into one house and saw police uniforms. We knew instantly that the owner was muj—the insurgents were stealing uniforms and using them to disguise themselves in attacks.

  Of course he gave us a BS line about having just gotten a job as a part-time police officer—something he’d mysteriously forgotten to mention when we first interrogated him.

  We called it back to the Army, gave them the information, and asked what to do.

  They had no intelligence on the guy. In the end, they decided the uniforms weren’t evidence of anything.

  We were told to turn him loose. So we did.

  It gave us something to think about every time we heard of an attack by insurgents dressed as policemen, over the next few weeks.

  EXTRACTED

  ONE NIGHT WE ENTERED ANOTHER VILLAGE AND TOOK OVER A house at the edge of some large open fields, including one used for soccer. We set up without a problem, surveying the village and preparing for any trouble we might face in the morning.

  The tempo of the ops had slowed quite a bit over the past week or two; it looked as if things were slacking down, at least for us. I started thinking about going back west and rejoining my platoon.

  I set up in a room on the second floor with LT. We had an Army sniper and his spotter in the room next to us, and a bunch of guys on the roof. I’d taken the .338 Lapua with me, figuring that most of my shots would be on the long side, since we were on the edge of the village. With the area around us quiet, I started scanning out farther, to the next village, a little more than a mile away.

  At some point I saw a one-story house with someone moving on the roof. It was about 2,100 yards away, and even with a twenty-five power scope I couldn’t make out much more than an outline. I studied the person, but at that point he didn’t seem to have a weapon, or at least he wasn’t showing it. His back was to me, so I could watch him, but he couldn’t see me. I thought he was suspicious, but he wasn’t doing anything dangerous, so I let him be.

  A little while later an Army convoy came down the road beyond the other village, heading in the direction of the COP we had staged out of. As it got closer, the man on the roof raised a weapon to his shoulder. Now the outline was clear: he had a rocket launcher, and he was aiming it at Americans.

  RPG.

  We had no way of calling the convoy directly—to this day I don’t know exactly who they were, except that they were Army. But I put my scope on him and fired, hoping to at least scare him off with the shot or maybe warn the convoy.

  At 2,100 yards, plus a little change, it would take a lot of luck to hit him.

  A lot of luck.

  Maybe the way I jerked the trigger to the right adjusted for the wind. Maybe gravity shifted and put that bullet right where it had to be. Maybe I was just the luckiest son of a bitch in Iraq. Whatever—I watched through my scope as the shot hit the Iraqi, who tumbled over the wall to the ground.

  “Wow,” I muttered.

  “You dumb lucky fucker,” said LT.

  Twenty-one hundred yards. The shot amazes me even now. It was a straight-up luck shot; no way one shot should have gotten him.

  But it did. It was my longest confirmed kill in Iraq, even longer than that shot in Fallujah.

  The convoy started reacting, probably unaware of how close they’d come to getting lit up. I went back to scanning for bad guys.

  AS THE DAY WENT ON, WE STARTED TAKING FIRE FROM AKS and rocket-propelled grenades. The conflict ratcheted up quickly. The RPGs began tearing holes in the loose concrete or adobe walls, breaking through and starting fires.

  We decided it was time to leave and called for extraction:

  Send the RG-33s! (RG-33s are big, bulletproof vehicles designed to withstand IEDs and equipped with a machine-gun turret on the top.)

  We waited, continuing the firefight and ducking the insurgents’ growing spray of bullets. Finally, the relief force reported that it was five hundred yards away, on the other side of the soccer field.

  That was as close as they were getting.

  A pair of Army Hummers blew through the village and appeared at the doors, but they couldn’t take all of us. The rest of us started to run for the RG-33s.

  Someone threw a smoke grenade, I guess with the thought that it would cover our retreat. All it really did was make it impossible for us to see. (The grenades should be used to screen movement; you run behind the smoke. In this case, we had to run through it.) We ran from the house, through the cloud of smoke, ducking bullets and dodging into the open field.

  It was like a scene from a movie. Bullets sprayed and plinked into the dirt.

  The guy next to me fell. I thought he’d been hit. I stopped, but before I could grab him, he jumped to his feet—he’d only tripped.

  “I’m good! I’m good!” he yelled.

  Together we continued toward the trucks, bullets and turf flying everywhere. Finally, we reached the trucks. I jumped into the back of one of the RG-33s. As I caught my breath, bullets splashed against one of the bulletproof windows on the side, spiderwebbing the glass.

  A FEW DAYS LATER, I WAS WESTWARD-BOUND, BACK TO DELTA Platoon. The transfer I’d asked for earlier was granted.

  The timing was good. Things were starting to get to me. The stress had been building. Little did I know it was going to get a lot worse, even as the fighting got a lot less.

  CHIEF PETTY OFFICER KYLE

  BY NOW, MY GUYS HAD LEFT AL-QA’IM AND WERE AT A PLACE called Rawah, also out west near the Syrian border. Once again they’d been put to work building barracks and the rest.

  I got lucky; I missed the construction work. But there wasn’t much going on when I arrived, either.

  I was just in time for a long-range desert patrol out on the border. We drove out there for a few days hardly seeing a person, let alone insurgents. There had been reports of smuggling across the desert, but if it was going on, it wasn’t goi
ng on where we were.

  Meanwhile, it was hot. It was 120 degrees at least, and we were driving in Hummers that had no air-conditioning. I grew up in Texas, so I know warm; this was worse. And it was constant; you couldn’t get away from it. It hardly cooled off at night—it might fall to 115. Rolling down the windows meant taking a risk if there was an IED. Almost worse was the sand, which would just blow right in and cover you.

  I decided I preferred the sand and IED danger to the heat. I rolled down the windows.

  Driving, all you saw was desert. Occasionally, there would be a nomad settlement or a tiny village.

  We linked up with our sister platoon, then the next day we stopped at a Marine base. My chief went in and did some business; a little while later he came out and found me.

  “Hey,” he told me, grinning. “Guess what—you just made chief.”

  I HAD TAKEN THE CHIEF’S EXAM BACK IN THE STATES BEFORE we deployed.

  In the Navy, you usually have to take a written test to get promoted. But I’d lucked out. I got a field promotion to E5 during my second deployment and made E6 thanks to a special merit program before my third deployment. Both came without taking written tests.

  (In both cases I had been doing a lot of extra work within the Team, and had made a reputation on the battlefield. Those were the important factors in awarding the new ranks.)

  That didn’t fly for the chief’s exam. I took the written test and barely passed.

  I SHOULD EXPLAIN A BIT MORE ABOUT WRITTEN TESTS AND promotions. I’m not unusually adverse or allergic to tests, at least no more than anyone else. But the tests for SEALs added an extra burden.

  At the time, in order to get promoted, you had to take an exam in your job area—not as a SEAL, but in whatever area you had selected before being a SEAL. In my case, that would have meant being evaluated in the intelligence area.

  Obviously, I wasn’t in a position to know anything about that area. I was a SEAL, not an intelligence analyst. I didn’t have a clue what sort of equipment and procedures intel used to get their jobs done.

  Considering the accuracy of the intel we usually got, I would have guessed dartboard, maybe. Or just a fine pair of dice.

  In order to get promoted, I would have had to study for the test, which would have involved going to a secure reading area, a special room where top-secret material can be reviewed. Of course, I would have had to do this in my spare time.

  There weren’t any secure reading areas in Fallujah or Ramadi where I fought. And the literature in the latrines and heads wouldn’t have cut it.

  (The tests are now in the area of special operations, and pertain to things SEALs actually do. The exams are incredibly detailed, but at least it has to do with our job.)

  BECOMING A CHIEF WAS A LITTLE DIFFERENT. THIS TEST WAS on things SEALs should know.

  That hurdle cleared, my case had to be reviewed by a board and then go through further administrative review by the upper echelon. The board review process included all these chief petty officers and master chiefs sitting down and reviewing a package of my accomplishments. The package is supposed to be a long dossier of everything you’ve done as a SEAL. (Minus the bar fights.)

  The only thing in my package was my service record. But that had not been updated since I graduated BUD/S. My Silver Stars and Bronze Medals weren’t even in there.

  I wasn’t crazy about becoming a chief. I was happy where I was. As chief, I would have all sorts of administrative duties, and I wouldn’t get as much action. Yes, it was more money for our family, but I wasn’t thinking about that.

  Chief Primo was on the review board back at our base in the States. He was sitting next to one of the chiefs when they began reviewing my case.

  “Who the hell is this dipshit?” said the other chief when he saw my thin folder. “Who does he think he is?”

  “Why don’t you and I go to lunch?” said Primo.

  He agreed. The other chief came back with a different attitude.

  “You owe me a Subway sandwich, fucker,” Primo told me when I saw him later on. Then he told me the story.

  I owe him all that and more. The promotion came through, and, to be honest, being chief wasn’t near as bad as I thought it would be.

  TRUTH IS, I NEVER CARED ALL THAT MUCH ABOUT RANK. I never tried to be one of the highest-ranking guys. Or even, back in high school, to be one of the students with the highest average.

  I’d do my homework in the truck in the morning. When they stuck me in the Honor Society, I made sure my grades dipped just enough the next semester to get kicked out. Then I brought them up again so my parents wouldn’t get on me.

  Maybe the rank thing had to do with the fact that I preferred being a leader on the ground, rather than an administrator in a back room. I didn’t want to have to sit at a computer, plan everything, then tell everyone about it. I wanted to do my thing, which was being a sniper—get into combat, kill the enemy. I wanted to be the best at what I wanted to do.

  I think a lot of people had trouble with that attitude. They naturally thought that anyone who was good should have a very high rank. I guess I’d seen enough people with high rank who weren’t good not to be swayed.

  TOO MUCH THINKING

  “ON THE ROAD AGAIN . . .”

  Willie Nelson cranked through the speaker system of our Hummer as we set out for our base the next day. Music was about the only diversion we had out here, outside of the occasional stop in a village to talk to the locals. Besides the old-school country my buddy behind the wheel preferred, I listened to a bit of Toby Keith and Slipknot, country and heavy metal vying for attention.

  I’m a big believer in the psychological impact of music. I’ve seen it work on the battlefield. If you’re going into combat, you want to be pumped up. You don’t want to be stupid crazy, but you do want to be psyched. Music can help take the fear away. We’d listen to Papa Roach, Dope, Drowning Pool—anything that amped us up. (They’re all in heavy rotation on my workout mix now.)

  But nothing could amp me up on the way back to base. It was a long, hot ride. Even though I’d just gotten some good news about my promotion, I was in a dark mood, bored on the one hand, and tense on the other.

  Back at base, things were incredibly slow. Nothing was going on. And it started to get to me.

  As long as I had been in action, the idea of my being vulnerable, being mortal, had been something I could push away. There was too much going on to worry about it. Or rather, I had so much else to do, I didn’t really focus on it.

  But now, it was practically all I could think of.

  I had time to relax, but I couldn’t. Instead, I’d lie on my bed thinking about everything I’d been through—getting shot especially.

  I relived the gunshot every time I lay down to rest. My heart thumped hard in my chest, probably a lot harder than it had that night in Sadr City.

  Things seemed to go downhill in the few days after we got back from our border patrol. I couldn’t sleep. I felt very jumpy. Extremely jumpy. And my blood pressure shot up again, even higher than before.

  I felt like I was going to explode.

  Physically, I was beat up. Four long combat deployments had taken their toll. My knees felt better, but my back hurt, my ankle hurt, my hearing was screwed up. My ears rang. My neck had been injured, my ribs cracked. My fingers and knuckles had been broken. I had floaters and decreased vision in my right eye. There were dozens of deep bruises and an assortment of aches and pains. I was a doctor’s wet dream.

  But the thing that really bothered me was my blood pressure. I sweated buckets and my hands would even shake. My face, pretty white to begin with, became pale.

  THE MORE I TRIED TO RELAX, THE WORSE THINGS GOT. IT WAS as if my body had started to vibrate, and thinking about it only made it buzz more.

  Imagine climbing a tall ladder out over a river, a thousand miles up, and there you’re struck by lightning. Your body becomes electric, but you’re still alive. In fact, you’re not only aware of eve
rything that’s happening, but you know you can deal with it. You know what you have to do to get down.

  So you do. You climb down. But when you’re back on the ground, the electricity won’t go away. You try to find a way to discharge the electricity, to ground yourself, but you can’t find the damn lightning rod to take the electricity away.

  UNABLE TO EAT OR SLEEP, I FINALLY WENT TO THE DOCS AND told them to check me out. They took a look at me, and asked if I wanted medication.

  Not really, I told them. But I did take the meds.

  They also suggested that, since the mission tempo was practically nonexistent and we were only a few weeks from going home anyway, it made sense for me to go home.

  Not knowing what else to do, I agreed.

  14

  HOME AND OUT

  DUCKING OUT

  IT WAS LATE AUGUST WHEN I LEFT. AS USUAL, IT WAS ALMOST surreal—one day I was in the war; the next I was home. I felt bad about leaving. I didn’t want to tell anyone about the blood pressure, or anything else. I kept it to myself as best I could.

  To be honest, it felt a little like I was ducking out on my boys, running away because my heart was pounding funny or whatever the hell it was doing.

  Nothing that I had accomplished earlier could erase the feeling that I was letting my boys down.

  I know it doesn’t make sense. I know I had accomplished a huge amount. I needed a rest, but felt I shouldn’t take one. I thought I should be stronger than was possible.

  To top things off, some of the medication apparently didn’t agree with me. Trying to help me sleep, a doctor back home in San Diego prescribed a sleeping pill. It put me out—so much so that when I really woke up I was on base with no recollection of working out at home and driving myself to base. Taya told me about my workout and I knew I had driven to work, because my truck was there.

  I never took that one again. It was nasty.

  TAYA: