In 2003 he took part in the invasion of Iraq, riding into combat aboard three-man dune buggies and manning the rig’s Mark 48 machine gun. When he came home from that first combat deployment, he spent a week with his family before shipping out to SEAL sniper school.
Like so many great American shooters, Kyle learned to shoot from his father, who gifted him a 30-06 as his first rifle. On their North Texas ranch, Kyle and his father stalked white-tailed deer, wild turkey, pheasants, and quail. Between hunting excursions, his dad showed him the finer points of marksmanship, and soon Chris was zeroing, or sighting in, all the families’ firearms on the back forty.
When he was about ten years old, he was out with his dad, stalking deer while armed with a lever-action 30/30. He crept up to a canyon and discovered his quarry about three hundred yards away and perhaps ninety feet below him. The elevation threw him off, and it took him six tries before he finally brought the deer down. His father told him afterward, “Chris, you’ve got to learn shot placement.” He worked for hours, patiently showing his son how to do this until Chris could routinely kill a turkey with a headshot or bring a buck down at three hundred yards with a bullet to its heart.
In 2003 SEAL sniper school took that raw, backwoods talent and gave Kyle the sophisticated understanding of the long-range precision marksmanship needed to be able to take out targets well over a thousand meters away. The first two weeks of the school taught him how to use photography on the battlefield to provide real-time imagery to his commanders. He learned to take photos through his scope then upload them to headquarters via satellite radios and computers. After that, he went through a four-week-long stalking phase before transitioning to six weeks of shooting. He emerged from the course a master of all four sniper rifles employed by the SEALs. Those included the Mark 11, the Mark 12, the .300 Win Mag (for Winchester Magnum), and the Barrett .50 cal.
In 2004 Kyle served in combat again during Operation Iraqi Freedom, where he took part in the Battle of Najaf that August, then the Second Battle of Fallujah in November. He accounted for forty enemy KIA during the latter campaign.
It did not take Chris Kyle long to make an impact in Ramadi. After arriving at the main base outside the city, Chris learned that most of SEAL Team Three was busy operating on the other side of town. While he waited for a way to get out to his unit, he received permission to climb into one of the base’s guard towers and search for targets. Insurgents had been launching hit-and-run attacks against the perimeter armed with AKs and RPGs (rocket-propelled grenades), and Chris thought he might be able to help out with that situation.
In quick succession, he detected, tracked, and smoke-checked two enemy fighters who were trying to maneuver onto the base and spray the towers with AK fire.
Not long after, he went out with a small team to take up position about two hundred yards forward of a small Marine outpost inside the city. He and the other four men with him climbed a battered and abandoned seven-story office building that overlooked some of the main roads in town. Throughout the day, they saw only a few insurgents moving on the streets below. They would dart from corner to corner, moving like wraiths. Chris killed several of them with well-placed shots.
After sunset, the Jihadists launched an assault at the Marine outpost, just as they had at other isolated Coalition bases scattered in and around the city. This time they advanced right into Chris Kyle’s field of fire. He quickly killed three RPG gunners as the two M60 machine gunners with him opened up as well. The attack slowed momentarily, then the insurgents figured out where Chris and the rest of the team were hiding. They returned fire, and it grew so intense that the Marines at the outpost ordered them to collapse back to the safety of their walls. Two of the men made it, but Chris, an officer, and one of the machine gunners stayed behind to cover their withdrawal. Before they could get out, the enemy had surrounded their building, cutting off their escape route.
As the fighting intensified, the Marines sent out a quick reaction force, or QRF, to fight their way on foot to the building. As they fought through the two hundred yards of urban jungle to Chris’s building, a cagey insurgent lurked in an alleyway and let the patrol pass him by. As soon as the Marines had their backs to him, he swept out of his position, weapon ready. Kyle spotted him and dropped him with a single shot. He was so close to the Marines that Chris’s fellow Americans thought they were taking insurgent sniper fire.
Later, after the Marine QRF had extracted Chris and the rest of the men, an officer approached him and thanked him for saving his life. Apparently, the insurgent who had moved in behind the patrol had been drawing a bead on him when Chris’s bullet ended the threat.
In the days and weeks that followed, Chris took part in dozens of patrols and missions. He killed two enemy sharpshooters during countersniper missions in support of the 8th Marines as they sought to increase the size of their footprint in the city. In other actions, he and Team Three worked with Army units and National Guard troops. They conducted joint patrols, provided overwatch for Marine units, and went after insurgent leaders in kill or capture missions. Through all the fighting around Ramadi, Chris Kyle’s coolness under fire and incredible accuracy had become almost mythic to his fellow Navy SEALs, who nicknamed him “The Legend.” Around Ramadi, as Chris’s kills mounted, the insurgents came to know who he was, too. They dubbed him Al Shatan, or “The Devil.” The Sunni terrorists grew so desperate to stop him that they put a twenty-thousand-dollar bounty on his head. Though he was blown up in IED (improvised explosive devise) attacks seven times and wounded by gunfire on six other occasions during his ten-year career as a SEAL, no insurgent ever collected that bounty.
* * *
Meanwhile, as the fighting raged in Ramadi and around Youssifiyah, American intelligence picked up the trail of the men who had murdered Thomas Tucker, Kristian Menchaca, and David Babineau.
In early July, the insurgents released a second video that showed terrorists dragging Tucker’s and Menchaca’s bodies through a street while a crowd looked on and cheered. They then set the bodies afire, and kicked Thomas Tucker’s head around as if it were a soccer ball.
These were the images the Mujahideen Shura Council showed the world. But there was another video that American intelligence captured that proved the insurgents were lying about who actually killed the two 101st Airborne troopers. The Mujahideen council had announced that al-Masri, the new leader of al-Qaida Iraq, had personally executed the men. The video showed that another high-level al-Qaida leader had actually been the perpetrator. Dubbed “Muhammad” by the Americans, he had used a large knife to behead the helpless prisoners. It was reminiscent of the murder of American civilian Nicholas Berg, which was personally carried out by al-Qaida’s leader in Iraq, Musab al-Zarqawi.
Zarqawi had been killed only ten days before Tucker and Menchaca were captured. The truth was that al-Qaida’s senior command structure in Iraq had suffered a staggering blow, and the organization was struggling to recover with al-Masri now at the controls. American intelligence believed that Muhammad had been in the running to be al-Zarqawi’s replacement, at least for a short time. He had been a highly successful bomb maker for years. Personally killing two American airborne soldiers was part of his power play within al-Qaida.
Muhammad was a dead man walking, he just didn’t know it. There was no way he and the rest of those responsible for these savage killings would escape American justice. Our intel types thirsted for revenge, eager to get Muhammad in the sights of a kill or capture mission. That was no easy task. He was elusive, cagey, and well protected. Our intelligence assets pursued every lead and angle they could develop to find a way to get him.
This wasn’t just a matter of vengeance. Muhammad stood poised to seize an even more important role for himself within al-Qaida. If we could eliminate him, the terrorist command structure in Iraq would take another significant hit. Take out these al-Qaida-sponsored or controlled networks and Iraq had a chance at stability again.
That job fell to ou
r special operations task forces and their interrogation teams. Throughout the country, the special operators were knocking big holes in al-Qaida’s local networks. Here and there, a valuable nugget of information was culled from some of the detainees grabbed on these missions.
In one case, a Special Forces team found an adolescent boy whose father had been a key player in an Anbar Province suicide-bomb cell. The team surprised the boy’s dad and several suicide bombers inside their apartment. The cell had been about to initiate an attack, and as the Americans entered the building, the suicide bombers detonated themselves. The boy and his mentally retarded brother were the only survivors.
The boy had been steeped in Jihadist propaganda. He proudly told American interrogators how the network functioned, where they kept their weapons and ammo, and pointed out all the safe houses his father had taken him to over the past several months. He was completely unaware that his bragging to the “American infidels” caused the downfall of his dad’s node in the al-Qaida network.
Such strokes of luck played out all over Iraq that summer, dealing further body blows to the terrorists wreaking havoc among the nation’s citizenry. Finally, Intel picked up a few tidbits about Muhammad. We learned that he used two safe houses outside of Ramadi and was known to frequent both several times a month. We also discovered that he traveled in a Chevy Suburban sport utility vehicle.
Based on this intel, plus photos we had acquired of Muhammad, SEAL Team Three was ordered to kill or capture him. To the team, there was no question of capturing Muhammad. They’d seen too many murderous terrorists released from Iraqi prisons after risking their lives to detain them to allow Muhammad a chance to escape justice.
SEAL Team Three was uniquely suited for the mission. Consisting of eight sixteen-man platoons, the team had been operating around Ramadi for months and had already been through multiple seven-month deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan. They knew Anbar Province and the areas around Muhammad’s safe house very well already. And, of course, SEAL Team Three included one of the most lethal snipers in American history: Petty Officer Chris Kyle.
Given Kyle’s record, he was a natural for the mission against Muhammad. The plan called for Kyle’s platoon to establish a hide site overlooking the primary safe house. If their target failed to show up after a week, they would switch to the secondary safe house and wait for him there. A CH-53 Super Stallion Marine helicopter would insert them into both locations at night, and the team would take enough food and supplies for a week at each position.
The team consisted of four snipers, four AWs (automatic weapons gunners using Mark 48 machine guns) and twelve riflemen. The snipers selected a mix of SR-25s, a .50 caliber MacMillan, and Kyle’s Winchester .300 Win Mag bolt-action rifle. Kyle settled on the Win Mag as, beyond a thousand yards, it was the most accurate of the available weapons. Should they have to take a long-range shot, Kyle and his rifle would handle it.
Rounding out the team would be several “straphangers”—specialists who work with SEAL teams. This included an interpreter, a master-at-arms (Navy military policeman), a SEAL spook with sophisticated signals intelligence gathering equipment that would enable them to listen to enemy radio and cell phone conversations, plus several techs who were experts at exploiting intelligence on the battlefield, such as DNA from the men the SEALs killed.
Before departure, the plan hit a snag. Everyone wanted a piece of this mission. Menchaca’s and Tucker’s brutal murders left everyone in Special Operations Command full of rage and a desire to be in on the payback. From the original sixteen men, the team grew to over thirty, far too many than were necessary.
In early July, the Super Stallion inserted the team at the first hide site, which was a walled compound not far from Muhammad’s safe house. For a week they waited for Muhammad to show up in his American-built SUV. But his Suburban never came bouncing down the rutted dirt road to the farm that served as his hideout. The men grew bored and restless. Day after day they took three-hour watches behind their weapons and tried to remain alert. When off duty, they slept or dined on Meals Ready to Eat (MREs). Some of the men had brought books or magazines.
The magazine selection led to a lot of banter and teasing. When one SEAL noticed that his buddies were reading back issues of Men’s Health, he shook his head sadly. That prompted a long back and forth on the quality of the porn the SEALs had brought along. Playboy was always excluded from such hide sites as it was considered far too tame. Cherry and Hustler were favorites. Military History was also a staple, and the SEALs sat in their Iraqi hide site reading accounts of the Alamo, Normandy, and Waterloo as they waited for their quarry to show up.
The first hide site turned out to be a bust. At the end of the first week, the team got permission to switch to the secondary target house. The CH-53 picked them up and moved them to the alternate hide site, which was a walled farmhouse about three hundred yards from the target area.
Their new hide had been long abandoned. Surrounded by a brown-gray outside wall, the house had no running water and only bare, dirty floors. The kitchen was empty and little furniture remained. The SEALs found a single table on the first floor, which Kyle carried upstairs and positioned in the back of one room with a window that overlooked Muhammad’s crash pad. Then he and another sniper pulled a door off its hinges and laid it atop the table. That gave the men a stable firing platform, set back away from the window so that anyone outside would be unable to see the shooter and the weapon.
Part of the team, including the machine gunners, took station on the second floor in rooms on either side of Kyle’s. The rest of the SEALs found good spots on the first floor or on the roof. The men on the roof would be their fail-safe. Their job was to stay hidden. If the firefight threatened to get out of hand and the SEALs needed additional weapons in action, they would either knock loopholes in the three-foot parapet that skirted the roof, or, in a dire situation, just come up over the wall and start shooting.
The snipers established fields of fire and handed out assigned sectors to search and target. Once all of that had been worked out, the men settled back into all the boredom of a Stateside police stakeout.
Halfway through the second week, the SEALs grew convinced that the Intel guys had blown this one. Though the team never let its guard down, and the men standing watch were always hypervigilant, the mood in the hide grew more relaxed. The scene took on the trappings of a camping trip with a gaggle of old pals. The bloated size of the team led to everyone being more cramped than usual, and living atop one another created its own stress and internal dynamics.
Then one afternoon a dust trail appeared in the distance. Three vehicles approached from a rutted dirt road, and as the snipers scanned the rigs, they could see that the middle rig was a candy apple Chevy Suburban with tinted windows.
Muhammad had arrived.
“Check this guy out,” somebody said. “He’s got to be driving the only candy apple red Suburban in Iraq.”
“Arrogant bastard,” somebody else muttered.
Given how his vehicle stood out, Kyle wondered how it had taken so long to track the al-Qaida leader down.
Muhammad’s convoy was coming from a different direction than the Intel guys expected, and the SEALs would not have the shot they had prepared for as a result. The original plan had called for the snipers to take Muhammad out as soon as he dismounted from his SUV and was positively identified. Now they realized that, thanks to the direction Muhammad was coming from, by the time his Suburban reached the farmhouse, he’d be on the wrong side of the rig for an easy kill shot. He would dismount and have the vehicle between him and the American snipers.
No plan survives first contact, and the SEALs adeptly switched gears. Instead of taking Muhammad out with sniper fire alone, they decided to use every rifle and machine gun to flay the enemy convoy with gunfire once they parked. They’d kill everyone, then get back aboard the CH-53.
The three vehicles rolled up to the safe house. The lead and trail rigs were Toyota H
iLux pickup trucks, each with members of Muhammad’s personal security detail. Altogether, the SEALs counted seven tangos plus their primary target.
The Mark 48 gunners fingered their triggers and waited. Before anyone could open fire, the team had to be absolutely certain they were going to kill the right people. This would entail a delay that could cost them a shot, but it had to be done.
The three rigs stopped near the safe house’s front gate and the drivers shut their engines off. A passenger in Muhammad’s Suburban dismounted and walked around to open the door for his commander.
The SEALs only had seconds now. Chances were, Muhammad would get out and walk straight through the front gate and disappear behind the nine-foot wall that surrounded the safe house.
The door opened. A dim figure wearing a Western-style jogging suit could be seen inside. He looked to be the right size and build for what they knew of Muhammad, but his face wasn’t visible.
Both Toyota drivers popped their doors and stepped outside. They held AK-47s at the ready and began scanning the area with a professionalism the SEALs did not usually see from these terrorists. This bunch had been well trained.
The figure inside the Suburban moved. His face slipped into the afternoon sunlight as he climbed out of the SUV. It gave the SEALs the glimpse they needed. No doubt, the man in the jogging suit was Muhammad. As the snipers reported the positive ID, Muhammad’s feet hit the dirt and he disappeared behind the Suburban. Their window to take him out had vanished that quickly.
The passengers in both Toyotas cracked their doors. Soon, the SEALs would face a tricky tactical challenge of having to take out all eight targets simultaneously before their quarry could take cover or return fire. No doubt the team’s firepower could overwhelm Muhammad’s security detail, but nobody wanted to suffer casualties from whatever return fire the enemy could muster. The trick was to bring everyone down before they could even get a shot off.
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