American Sniper by The Autobiography of the Most Lethal Sniper in U.S. Military History

Author:The Autobiography of the Most Lethal Sniper in U.S. Military History
Language: eng
Format: epub

second C-section that women bounce back from. No one told me

that part.)

I felt weak. I was mad at myself that I wasn’t tougher. It

just sucked.

The distances east of Ramadi made the .300 Win Mag my rifle of

choice, and I started taking it regularly on patrols. After the Army took the hospital, they continued taking fire and getting attacked. It didn’t take too long before they started getting mortar fire as well. So we

bumped out, fighting the insurgents who were shooting at them, and

looking for the mortar crews.

One day, we set up in a two-story building a short distance from

the hospital. The Army tried using special gear to figure out where the

mortars were being fired from, and we chose the house because it was

near the area they identified. But, for some reason, that day the insur-

gents decided to lie low.

Maybe they were getting tired of dying.

I decided to see if we could flush them out. I always carried an

American flag inside my body armor. I took it out and strung some

550 cord (general-purpose nylon rope sometimes called parachute

cord) through the grommets. I tied the line to the lip on the roof, then threw it over the side so it draped down the side of the building.

Within minutes, half a dozen insurgents stepped out with auto-

matic machine guns and started shooting at my flag.

We returned fire. Half of the enemy fell; the other half turned and

ran.

I still have the flag. They shot out two stars. Fair trade for their

lives, by my accounting.

289/439

As we bumped out, the insurgents would move farther away and try

and put more cover between us and them. Occasionally, we’d have to

call in air support to get them from behind walls or berms in the

distance.

Because of the fear of collateral damage, command and the pilots

were reluctant to use bombs. Instead, the jets would make strafing

runs. We’d also get attack helicopters, Marine Cobras and Hueys,

which would use machine guns and rockets.

One day, while we were on an overwatch, my chief and I spotted a

man putting a mortar in the trunk of a car about eight hundred yards

from us. I shot him; another man came out of the building where he’d

been and my chief shot him. We called in an airstrike; an F/A-18 put a

missile on the car. There were massive secondaries—they’d loaded the

car with explosives before we saw them.

AMONG THE SLEEPERS

A night or two later, I found myself walking in the dark through a nearby village, stepping over bodies—not of dead people, but sleeping

Iraqis. In the warm desert, Iraqi families would often sleep outside.

I was on my way to take up a position so we could overwatch a

raid on the marketplace where one of the insurgents had a shop. Our

intelligence indicated this was where the weapons in the car we’d

blown up had come from.

Four other guys and I had been dropped off about six kilometers

away by the rest of the team, which was planning to mount a raid in

the morning. Our assignment was to get into place ahead of them,

scout and watch the area, then protect them as they arrived.

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