by Chris Kyle
Anyway, the pilot himself was a good guy. He didn’t act stuck up or high and mighty; you’d never know he was an officer. We all liked him and respected him. And just to show there were no hard feelings, we let him get on the rifle every so often and look around. He never got off any shots.
Besides the FAC, the Marines sent a heavy-weapons squad, more snipers, and then mortarmen. The mortarmen brought some white phosphorous shells with them, and they tried launching those in an attempt to burn down the brush. Unfortunately, the shells would only set small pieces of the marsh on fire—they’d burn a bit, then fizzle and go out because it was so wet.
Our next try was throwing thermite grenades. A thermite grenade is an incendiary device that burns at four thousand degrees Fahrenheit and can go through a quarter-inch of steel in a few seconds. We went down to the river and hauled them across.
That didn’t work, either, so we started making our own homegrown concoctions. Between the Marine sniper detail and the mortarmen, there was a great deal of creative brainpower focused on that marsh. Of all the plans, one of my personal favorites involved the creative use of the shaped “cheese” charges the mortarmen typically carried. (The cheese is used to propel mortar rounds. Distance can be adjusted by varying the amount of cheese used to fire the projectile.) We’d shove some cheese in a tube, add a bunch of det cord, some diesel, and add a time fuse. Then we’d heave the contraption across the river and see what happened.
We got some pretty flashes, but nothing we came up with worked real well.
If only we’d had a flamethrower . . .
THE MARSH REMAINED A “TARGET RICH ENVIRONMENT” filled with insurgents. I must have gotten eighteen or nineteen myself that week; the rest of the guys brought the total up to the area of thirty or more.
The river seemed to hold a special fascination for bad guys. While we were trying various ways to burn down the marsh, they were attempting all sorts of ways to get across.
The most bizarre involved beach balls.
BEACH BALLS AND LONG SHOTS
I WAS WATCHING FROM THE ROOF ONE AFTERNOON WHEN A group of roughly sixteen fully armed insurgents emerged from cover. They were wearing full body armor and were heavily geared. (We found out later that they were Tunisians, apparently recruited by one of the militant groups to fight against Americans in Iraq.)
Not unusual at all, except for the fact that they were also carrying four very large and colorful beach balls.
I couldn’t really believe what I was seeing—they split up into groups and got into the water, four men per beach ball. Then, using the beach balls to keep them afloat, they began paddling across.
It was my job not to let that happen, but that didn’t necessarily mean I had to shoot each one of them. Hell, I had to conserve ammo for future engagements.
I shot the first beach ball. The four men began flailing for the other three balls.
Snap.
I shot beach ball number two.
It was kind of fun.
Hell—it was a lot of fun. The insurgents were fighting among themselves, their ingenious plan to kill Americans now turned against them.
“Y’all gotta see this,” I told the Marines as I shot beach ball number three.
They came over to the side of the roof and watched as the insurgents fought among themselves for the last beach ball. The ones who couldn’t grab on promptly sank and drowned.
I watched them fight for a while longer, then shot the last ball. The Marines put the rest of the insurgents out of their misery.
THOSE WERE MY STRANGEST SHOTS. MY LONGEST CAME around the same time.
One day, a group of three insurgents appeared on the shore upriver, out of range at around 1,600 yards. (That’s just under a mile.) A few had tried that before, standing there, knowing that we wouldn’t shoot them, because they were so far away. Our ROEs allowed us to take them, but the distance was so great that it really didn’t make sense to take a shot. Apparently realizing they were safe, they began mocking us like a bunch of juvenile delinquents.
The FAC came over and started laughing at me as I eyed them through the scope.
“Chris, you ain’t never gonna reach them.”
Well, I didn’t say I was going to try, but his words made it seem like almost a challenge. Some of the other Marines came over and told me more or less the same thing.
Anytime someone tells me I can’t do something, it gets me thinking I can do it. But 1,600 yards was so far away that my scope wouldn’t even dial up the shooting solution. So I did a little mental calculation and adjusted my aim with the help of a tree behind one of the grinning insurgent idiots making fun of us.
I took the shot.
The moon, Earth, and stars aligned. God blew on the bullet, and I gut-shot the jackass.
His two buddies hauled ass out of there.
“Get ’em, get ’em!” yelled the Marines. “Shoot ’em.”
I guess at that point they thought I could hit anything under the sun. But the truth is, I’d been lucky as hell to hit the one I was aiming at; there was no way I was taking a shot at people who were running.
That would turn out to be one of my longest confirmed kills in Iraq.
MISPERCEPTIONS
PEOPLE THINK THAT SNIPERS TAKE SUCH INCREDIBLY LONG shots all the time. While we do take longer shots than most guys on the battlefield, they’re probably a lot closer than most people think.
I never got all caught up in measuring how far I was shooting. The distance really depended on the situation. In the cities, where most of my kills came, you’re only going to be shooting anywhere from two hundred to four hundred yards anyway. That’s where your targets are, so that’s where your shots are.
Out in the countryside, it’s a different story. Typically, the shots out there would run from eight hundred to twelve hundred yards. That’s where the longer-range guns like the .338 would come in handy.
Someone once asked me if I had a favorite distance. My answer was easy: the closer the better.
AS I MENTIONED EARLIER, ANOTHER MISPERCEPTION PEOPLE have about snipers is that we always aim for the head. Personally, I almost never target the head, unless I’m absolutely sure I’m going to make the shot. And that’s rare on the battlefield.
I’d much rather aim center mass—shoot for the middle of the body. I’ve got plenty of room to play with. No matter where I hit him, he’s going down.
BACK TO BAGHDAD
AFTER A WEEK ON THE RIVER, I WAS PULLED OUT, SWAPPING places with another SEAL sniper, who’d been injured briefly earlier in the operation and was ready to get back into action. I’d had more than my fair share of kills as a sniper; it was time to let someone else have a go.
Command sent me back to Camp Fallujah for a few days. It was one of the few breaks in the war that I actually welcomed. After the pace of the battle in the city, I was definitely ready for a brief vacation. The hot meals and showers felt pretty damn good.
After chilling out for a few days, I was ordered back to Baghdad to work with GROM again.
We were on the way to Baghdad when our Hummer was hit by a buried IED. The improvised explosive blew up just behind us; everybody in the vehicles freaked—except me and another guy who’d been at Fallujah since the start of the assault. We looked at each other, winked, then closed our eyes and went back to sleep. Compared to the month’s worth of explosions and shit we’d just lived through, this was nothing.
WHILE I’D BEEN IN IRAQ, MY PLATOON WAS SENT TO THE Philippines on a mission to train up the local military to fight radical terrorists. It wasn’t exactly the most exciting assignment. Finally, with that mission complete, they were sent to Baghdad.
I went out with some other SEALs to the airport to greet them.
I was expecting a big welcome—here my family was finally coming in.
They came off the plane cussin’ me.
“Hey asshole.”
And much worse than that. Like everything else they do, SEALs excel at foul language
.
Jealousy, thy name is SEAL.
I’d wondered why I hadn’t heard anything from them over the past few months. In fact, I was wondering why they were jealous—as far as I knew, they hadn’t heard about anything I’d been doing.
Come to find out, my chief had been regaling them with the after-action reports of my sniping in Fallujah. They’d been sitting around hand-holding the Filipinos and hating life, while I’d been having all the fun.
They got over it. Eventually, they even asked me to do a little presentation on what I’d done, complete with pointers and stuff. One more chance to use PowerPoint.
FUN WITH THE BIG SHOTS
NOW THAT THEY WERE HERE, I JOINED THEM AND STARTED doing some DAs. Intel would find an IED-maker or maybe a financer, give us the intel, and we’d go in and snag him. We’d hit them very early in the morning—blow his door down, rush inside, and take him before he even had a chance to get out of bed.
This went on for about a month. By now, DAs were pretty much an old routine; they were a hell of a lot less dangerous in Baghdad than in Fallujah.
We were living out near BIAP—Baghdad International Airport—and working from there. One day, my chief came over and gave me a chiefly grin.
“You’ve got to have some fun, Chris,” he told me. “You need to do a little PSD.”
He was using SEAL sarcasm. PSD stands for “personal security detail”—bodyguard duty. The platoon had been assigned to provide security for high-ranking Iraqi officials. The insurgents had started kidnapping them, trying to disrupt the government. It was a pretty thankless job. So far, I’d been able to avoid it, but it seemed my ninja smoke had run out. I left and went over to the other side of the city and the Green Zone. (The Green Zone was a section of central Baghdad that was created as a safe area for the allies and the new Iraqi government. It was physically cut off from the rest of the city by cement walls and barbed wire. There were only a few ways in and out, and these were under strict control. The U.S. and other allied embassies were located there, as were Iraqi government buildings.)
I lasted an entire week.
The Iraqi officials, so-called, were notorious for not telling their escorts what their schedules were or giving details on who was supposed to be traveling with them. Given the level of security in the Green Zone, that was a significant problem.
I acted as “advance.” That meant I would go ahead of an official convoy, make sure the route was safe, and then stand at the security checkpoint and ID the convoy vehicles as they came through. This way the Iraqi vehicles could move through the checkpoints quickly without becoming targets.
One day, I was advance for a convoy that included the Iraqi vice president. I’d already checked the route and arrived at a Marine checkpoint outside the airport.
Baghdad International was on the other side of the city from the Green Zone. While the grounds themselves were secure, the area around it and the highway leading to the gate still came under occasional fire. It was a prime terror target, since the insurgents could pretty much figure that anyone going in or out was related to the Americans or the new Iraqi government in some way.
I was on radio coms with one of my boys in the convoy. He gave me the details on who was in the group, how many vehicles we had, and the like. He also told me that we had an Army Hummer in the front and an Army Hummer in the back—simple markers I could pass along to the guards.
The convoy came flying up, Hummer in the lead. We counted off the vehicles and lo, there was the last Hummer taking up the rear.
All good.
All of a sudden, two more vehicles appeared behind them in hot pursuit.
The Marines looked at me.
“Those two are not mine,” I told them.
“What do you want us to do?”
“Pull your Hummer out and train that .50 on them,” I yelled, pulling up my M-4.
I jumped out in the roadway, gun raised, hoping that would get their attention.
They didn’t stop.
Behind me, the Hummer had pulled up, and the gunner was locked and loaded. Still unsure whether I was dealing with a kidnapping or just some stray vehicles, I fired a warning shot.
The cars veered off and hauled ass the other way.
Thwarted kidnapping? Suicide bombers who’d lost their nerve?
No. Come to find out, these were two friends of the vice president. He’d forgotten to tell us about them.
He wasn’t too pleased. My command wasn’t too pleased, either. I got fired from my PSD job, which wouldn’t have been all that bad except that I then had to spend the next week sitting in the Green Zone doing nothing.
My platoon leadership tried to get me back for some DAs. But the head shed had decided to stick it to me a bit, and kept me twiddling my thumbs. That is the worst possible torture for a SEAL—missing out on the action.
Luckily, they didn’t hang on to me for too long.
HAIFA STREET
IN DECEMBER 2005, IRAQ GEARED UP FOR NATIONAL ELECTIONS, its first since the fall of Saddam—and the first free and fair ones the country had ever held. The insurgency was doing everything it could to stop them. Election officials were being kidnapped left and right. Others were executed in the streets.
Talk about your negative campaigning.
Haifa Street in Baghdad was a particularly dangerous place. After three election officials were killed there, the Army put together a plan to protect officials in the area.
The strategy called for snipers to do overwatches.
I was a sniper. I was available. I didn’t even have to raise my hand.
I joined an Army unit from the Arkansas National Guard, a great bunch of good ol’ boys, warriors all.
PEOPLE WHO ARE USED TO THE TRADITIONAL SEPARATION BETWEEN the different military branches may think it’s unusual for a SEAL to be working with the Army, or even the Marines for that matter. But the forces were often well-integrated during my time in Iraq.
Any unit could put in an RFF (Request for Forces). That request would then get filled by whatever service was available. So if a unit needed snipers, as they did in this case, whatever branch had available snipers would ship them over.
There’s always back-and-forth between sailors, soldiers, and Marines. But I saw a lot of respect between the different branches, at least during the fighting. I certainly found most of the Marines and soldiers I worked with to be top-notch. You had your exceptions—but then you have your exceptions in the Navy, too.
THE FIRST DAY I REPORTED FOR MY NEW ASSIGNMENT, I thought I’d need an interpreter. Some people like to harass me about my Texas twang, but these hillbillies—holy shit. The important information came from the senior enlisted and the officers, who spoke regular English. But the privates and junior guys straight out of the backwoods could have been talking Chinese, for all I knew.
We started working on Haifa Street right near where the three election officials had been killed. The National Guard would secure an apartment building to use as a hide. Then I’d go in, pick out an apartment, and set up.
Haifa Street was not exactly Hollywood Boulevard, though it was the place to be if you were a bad guy. The street ran about two miles, from Assassin’s Gate at the end of the Green Zone and up to the northwest. It was the scene of numerous firefights and gun battles, all sorts of IED attacks, kidnappings, assassinations—you name it and it happened on Haifa. American soldiers dubbed it Purple Heart Boulevard.
The buildings we used for overwatches were fifteen to sixteen stories tall, and had a commanding view of the road. We moved around to the extent that we could, shifting locations to keep the insurgents off-balance. There were an untold number of hideouts in the squat buildings beyond the immediate highway, all up and down the street. The bad guys didn’t have much of a commute to get to work.
The insurgents here were a real mix; some were mujahedeen, former Baath or Iraqi Army guys. Others were loyal to al-Qaeda in Iraq or Sadr or some of the other whackadoos out there. At the star
t, they’d wear black or sometimes these green sashes, but once they realized that set them apart, they resorted to wearing regular civilian clothes just like everyone else. They wanted to mix with civilians to make it more difficult for us to figure out who they were. They were cowards, who not only would hide behind women and children, but probably hoped we’d kill the women and children, since in their minds it helped their cause by making us look bad.
One afternoon, I watched a young teenage kid waiting for the bus below me. When the bus pulled up, a group of older teenagers and young adults got off. All of a sudden, the kid I was watching turned and started walking very quickly in the opposite direction.
The group caught up quickly. One of them pulled out a pistol and put his arm around the kid’s neck.
As soon as he did that, I started shooting. The kid I was protecting took off. I got two or three of his would-be kidnappers; the others got away.
The sons of the election officials were a favorite target. The insurgents would use the families to put pressure on the officials to drop out. Or else they’d just kill the family members as a warning to others not to help the government hold the elections or even vote.
THE SALACIOUS AND THE SURREAL
ONE EVENING, WE TOOK OVER WHAT WE THOUGHT WAS AN abandoned apartment, since it was empty when we arrived. I was rotating with another sniper, and while I was off, I went hunting around to see if there was something I might use to make the hide more comfortable.
In an open drawer of a bureau, I saw all this sexy lingerie. Crotchless panties, nightgowns—very suggestive stuff.
Not my size, though.
There was often an odd, almost surreal mix of things inside the buildings, items that would seem out of place under the best circumstances. Like the car tires we found on the roof in Fallujah, or the goat we found in the bathroom of a Haifa Street apartment.
I’d see something, then spend the rest of the day wondering what the story was. After a while, the bizarre came to seem natural.
Not quite surprising were the TVs and satellite dishes. They were everywhere. Even in the desert. Many times we’d come upon a little nomad settlement with tents for houses and nothing but a couple animals and open land around them. Still, they were bristling with satellite dishes.
