American Sniper: The Autobiography of the Most Lethal Sniper in U.S. Military History (36 page)

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.

A
s 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.

C
HIEF
P
ETTY
O
FFICER
K
YLE

B
y 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 going 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.)

B
ecoming 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.

T
ruth 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.

T
OO
M
UCH
T
HINKING

“O
n 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.

T
he 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 everything 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.

U
nable 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

D
UCKING
O
UT

I
t 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:

It’s taken me years to get my head around some of this stuff. On the surface, Chris wants to just go and have a good time. When people really need him though—when lives are on the line—he is the most dependable guy. He’s got a situational sense of responsibility and caring.

I saw this in his promotions in the military: he didn’t care. He didn’t want the responsibility of the higher rank, even though it would mean providing better for his family. And yet if a job needed to be done, he was there. He will always rise to the challenge. And he’s prepared, because he’s been thinking about it.

It was a real dichotomy, and I don’t think a lot of people understood it. It was even hard for me to reconcile at times.

P
ROTECTING
P
EOPLE

W
hile I was home, I got involved in a fairly interesting scientific program relating to stress and combat situations.

It used virtual reality to test what sorts of effects battle has on your body. In my case, specifically, they monitored my blood pressure, or at least that was the one measurement that really interested me. I wore a headpiece and special gloves while viewing a simulation. It was basically a video game, but it was still pretty cool.

Well, in the simulations, my blood pressure and heart rate would start out steady. Then, once we got into a firefight, they would drop. I would just sit there and do everything I had to do, real comfortable.

As soon as it was over and things were peaceful, my heart rate would just zoom.

Interesting.

The scientists and doctors running the experiment believe that during the heat of the battle, my training would take over and would somehow relax me. They were really intrigued, because apparently they hadn’t seen that before.

Of course, I’d lived it every day in Iraq.

T
here was one simulation that left a deep impression on me. In this one, a Marine was shot and he went down screaming. He’d been gut-shot. As I watched that scene, my blood pressure spiked even higher than it had been.

I didn’t need a scientist or a doctor to tell me what that was about. I could just about feel that kid dying on my chest in Fallujah again.

P
eople tell me I saved hundreds and hundreds of people. But I have to tell you: it’s not the people you saved that you remember. It’s the ones you couldn’t save.

Those are the ones you talk about. Those are the faces and situations that stay with you forever.

I
N OR
O
UT?

M
y enlistment was coming to an end. The Navy kept trying to entice me to stay, making different offers: handle training, work in England, anything I wanted just so I would stay in the Navy.

Even though I had told Taya I wouldn’t reenlist, I wasn’t ready to quit.

I wanted to go back to the war. I felt I’d been cheated on my last deployment. I struggled, trying to decide what to do. Some days, I was through with the Navy; other days, I was ready to tell my wife the hell with it, and reenlist.

We talked about it a lot.

Taya:

I told Chris that both our kids needed him, especially, at that particular time, our son. If he wasn’t going to be there, then I would move closer to my father so that at least he would grow up with a strong grandfather very close to him.

I didn’t want to do that at all.

And Chris really loved us all. He really wanted to have and nurture a strong family.

Part of it came down to the conflict we’d always had—where were our priorities: God, family, country (my version), or God, country, family (Chris’s)?

To my mind, Chris had already given his country so much, a tremendous amount. The previous ten years had been filled with constant war. Heavy combat deployments were combined with extensive training workups that kept him away from home. It was more heavy action—and absence—than any other SEAL I knew of. It was time to give his family some of himself.

But as always, I couldn’t make the decision for him.

The Navy suggested that they could send me to Texas as recruiter. That sounded pretty good, since the job would allow me to have regular hours and come home at night. It looked to me like a possible compromise.

“You have to give me a little time to work this out,” said the master chief I was dealing with. “This isn’t the sort of thing that we can do overnight.”

I agreed to extend my enlistment a month while he worked on it.

I waited and waited. No orders came in.

“It’s coming, it’s coming,” he said. “You have to extend again.”

So I did.

A few more weeks passed—we were almost through October by now—and no orders came through. So I called him up and asked what the hell was going on.

“It’s a Catch-22,” he explained. “They want to give it to you, but it’s a three-year billet. You don’t have any time.”

In other words, they wanted me to enlist first, then they would give me the job. But there were no guarantees, no contract.

I’d been there before. I finally told them thanks, but no thanks—
I’m getting out
.

Taya:

He always says, “I feel like a quitter.” I think he’s done his job, but I know that’s how he feels. He thinks if there are people out there fighting, it should be him. And a lot of other SEALs feel that way about themselves, as well. But I believe not one of them would blame him for getting out.

R
YAN
G
ETS
M
ARRIED

R
yan and I remained close after he returned to the States; in fact, our friendship grew even stronger, which I wouldn’t have thought possible. I felt drawn to him by his tremendous spirit. He’d been a warrior in combat. Now he was an even greater warrior in life. You never completely forgot that he was blind, but you also never, ever got the impression that his disability defined him.

He had to get a prosthetic eye made, because of his wounds. According to LT, who went with him to pick it up, he actually had two—one was a “regular” eye; the other had a golden SEAL trident where the iris ordinarily would be.

Once a SEAL,
always
a SEAL.

I’d been with Ryan a lot before he got hurt. A lot of the guys on the team had a wicked sense of humor, but Ryan was in a class by himself. He’d get you in stitches.

He wasn’t any different after he got shot. He just had a very dry sense of humor. One day a young girl came up to him, looked at his face, and asked, “What happened to you?”

He bent down and said, in a very serious voice, “Never run with scissors.”

Dry, droll, and a heart of gold. You couldn’t help but love him.

W
e were all prepared to hate his girlfriend. We were sure she would leave him after he was torn up. But she stood by him. He finally proposed, and we were all happy about it. She is one awesome lady.

If there is a poster child for overcoming disabilities, Ryan was it. After the injury, he went to college, graduated with honors, and had an excellent job waiting for him. He climbed Mount Hood, Mount Rainer, and a bunch of other mountains; he went hunting and shot a prize trophy elk with the help of a spotter and a gun with some bad-ass technology; he competed in a triathlon. I remember one night Ryan said that he was glad it was he who got shot instead of any of the other guys. Sure he was angry at first, but he felt he was at peace and living a full life. He felt he could handle it and be happy no matter what. He was right.

When I think about the patriotism that drives SEALs, I am reminded of Ryan recovering in a hospital in Bethesda, Maryland. There he was, freshly wounded, almost fatally, and blind for life. Many reconstructive surgeries to his face loomed ahead. You know what he asked for? He asked for someone to wheel him to a flag and give him some time.

He sat in his wheelchair for close to a half-hour saluting as the American flag whipped in the wind.

That’s Ryan: a true patriot.

A genuine warrior, with a heart of gold.

Of course we all gave him shit and told him somebody probably wheeled him in front of a Dumpster and just told him it was a flag. Being Ryan, he dished out as many blind jokes as he took and had us all rolling every time we talked.

When he moved away, we would chat on the phone and get together whenever we could. In 2010, I found out he and his wife were expecting their first child.

Meanwhile, the injuries he’d had in Iraq required further surgeries. He went into the hospital one morning; later that afternoon I got a call from Marcus Luttrell, asking if I had heard about Ryan.

“Yeah. I just talked to him yesterday,” I told him. “He and his wife are having a baby. Isn’t it great?”

“He died just a little while ago,” said Marcus, his voice quiet.

Something had gone wrong at the hospital. It was a tragic end to a heroic life. I’m not sure any of us who knew him have gotten over it. I don’t think I ever will.

The baby was a beautiful girl. I’m sure her father’s spirit lives on in her.

M
IGHTY
W
ARRIORS

A
fter her son’s death, Marc Lee’s mom, Debbie, became almost a surrogate mother to the other members of our platoon. A very courageous woman, she has dedicated herself to helping other warriors as they have made the transition from the battlefield. She’s now president of America’s Mighty Warriors (www.AmericasMightyWarriors.org) and has done a lot personally for veterans through what she calls “random acts of kindness” inspired by Marc’s life and a letter he wrote to her before he passed away.

There’s nothing random about Debbie; she’s a dedicated and hardworking woman, as devoted to her cause as Marc was to his.

Before he died, Marc wrote an incredible letter home. Available at the site, it told a moving story about some of the things he saw in Iraq—a terrible hospital, ignorant and despicable people. But it was also an extremely positive letter, full of hope and encouraging all of us to do some small part for others.

To my mind, though, whatever he wrote home doesn’t adequately describe the Marc we all knew. There was a lot more to him. He was a real tough guy with a great sense of humor. He was a gung-ho warrior and a great friend. He had unshakable faith in God and loved his wife with might. Heaven is surely a better place because he’s there, but earth has lost one of its best.

C
RAFT

D
eciding to leave the Navy was hard enough. But now I was going to be out of a job. It was time to figure out what to do with the rest of my life.

I had a number of options and possibilities. I’d been talking with a friend of mine named Mark Spicer about starting a sniper school in the States. After twenty-five years in the British Army, Mark retired as a sergeant major. He was one of the foremost snipers in their army, and had served over twenty years as a sniper and sniper platoon commander. Mark has written three books on sniping and is one of the world’s leading experts on the subject.

We both realized there was and is a need for certain types of very specific training for military and police units. No one was providing the sort of hands-on instruction that would help prepare their personnel for the different situations they might find. With our experience, we knew we could tailor courses and provide enough range time to make a difference.

The problem was getting everything together to do it.

Money, of course, was a pretty big consideration. Then, partly by chance, I happened to meet someone who realized the company could be a good investment, and who also had faith in me: J. Kyle Bass.

Kyle had made a lot of money investing, and when we met, he was looking for a bodyguard. I guess he figured, “Who better than a SEAL?” But when we got talking and he asked where I saw myself in a few years, I told him about the school. He was intrigued, and rather than hiring me as his bodyguard, he helped provide the financing for our company. And just like that, Craft International was born.