by Chris Kyle
CALLING HOME
ONE NIGHT, I WAS ON AN OVERWATCH AND THINGS WERE quiet. Nights were normally slow in Baghdad. Insurgents usually wouldn’t attack then, because they knew we had the advantage with our technology, including our night-vision gear and infrared sensors. So I thought I’d take a minute and call my wife back home, just to tell I was thinking of her.
I took our sat phone and dialed home. Most times, when I talked to Taya, I’d tell her I was back at base, even though I was really on an overwatch or in the field somewhere. I didn’t want to worry her.
This night, for some reason, I told her what I was doing.
“Is it all right to talk?” she asked.
“Oh yeah, it’s all good,” I said. “There’s nothing going on.”
Well, I got maybe another two or three sentences out of my mouth when someone started firing at the building from the street.
“What’s that?” she asked.
“Oh, nothing,” I said nonchalantly.
Of course, the gunfire stoked up real loud as the words came out of my mouth.
“Chris?”
“Well, I think I’m going to get going now,” I told her.
“Are you okay?”
“Oh yeah. It’s all good,” I lied. “Nothing happening. Talk to you later.”
Just then, an RPG hit the outside wall right near me. Some of the building smacked into my face, giving me a couple of beauty marks and temporary tattoos courtesy of the insurgency.
I dropped the phone and started returning fire. I spotted the guys down the street and popped one or two; the snipers who were with me downed a bunch more before the rest got the hell out of there.
Fight over, I grabbed up the phone. The batteries had run out, so I couldn’t call back.
Things got busy for a few days, and it wasn’t until two or three days later when I finally got a chance to call Taya and see how she was.
She started crying as soon as she answered the phone.
It turned out I hadn’t actually ended the call before I put down the phone. She’d heard the whole gunfight, complete with shots and curses, before the batteries had finally run out. Which, of course, happened all of a sudden, adding to the anxiety.
I tried to calm her down, but I doubt what I said really eased her mind.
She was always a good sport, always insisting that I didn’t have to hide things from her. She claimed her imagination was a lot worse than anything that really could happen to me.
I don’t know about that.
I MADE A FEW OTHER CALLS HOME DURING LULLS IN BATTLES during my deployments. The overall pace of the action was so intense and continuous that there weren’t many alternatives. Waiting until I got back to our camp might mean waiting for a week or more. And while I’d call then, too, if I could, it wasn’t always possible.
And I got used to the battles. Getting shot at was just part of the job. RPG round? Just another day at the office.
My dad has a story about hearing from me at work one day when I hadn’t had a chance to call in a while. He picked up the phone and was surprised to hear my voice.
He was even more surprised that I was whispering.
“Chris, why is your voice so hushed?” he asked.
“I’m on an op, Dad. I don’t want them to know where I’m at.”
“Oh,” he answered, a little shaken.
I doubt I was actually close enough for the enemy to hear anything, but my father swears that a few seconds later, there were gunshots in the background.
“Gotta go,” I said, before he had a chance to find out what the sound was. “I’ll get back to you.”
According to my father, I called back two days later to apologize for hanging up so abruptly. When he asked if he had overheard the start of a firefight, I changed the subject.
BUILDING MY REP
MY KNEES WERE STILL HURTING FROM BEING PINNED UNDER rubble back in Fallujah. I tried to get cortisone shots but couldn’t. I didn’t want to push too hard: I was afraid of getting pulled out because of my injury.
Every once in a while, I took some Motrin and iced them down; that was about it. In battle, of course, I was fine—when your adrenaline is pumped, you don’t feel anything.
Even with the pain, I loved what I was doing. Maybe war isn’t really fun, but I certainly was enjoying it. It suited me.
By this time, I had a bit of a reputation as a sniper. I’d had a lot of confirmed kills. It was now a very good number for such a short period—or any period, really.
Except for the Team guys, people didn’t really know my name and face. But there were rumors around, and my stay here added to my reputation, such as it was.
It seemed like everywhere I set up, I’d get a target. This started to piss off some of the other snipers, who could spend whole shifts and even days without seeing anybody, let alone an insurgent.
One day, Smurf, a fellow SEAL, started following me around as we went into an apartment.
“Where are you setting up?” he asked.
I looked around and found a place I thought looked good.
“Right there,” I told him.
“Good. Get the hell out of here. I’m taking this spot.”
“Hey, you take it,” I told him. I went off to find another spot—and promptly got a kill from there.
For a while, it didn’t seem to matter what I did, things would happen in front of me. I wasn’t inventing the incidents—I had witnesses for all my shots. Maybe I saw a little farther, maybe I anticipated trouble better than other people. Or, most likely, I was just lucky.
Assuming being a target for people who want to kill you can be considered luck.
One time, we were in a house on Haifa Street, where we had so many snipers that the only possible place to shoot from was a tiny window above a toilet. I had to actually stand up the whole time.
I still got two kills.
I was just one lucky motherfucker.
ONE DAY, WE GOT INTEL THAT THE INSURGENTS WERE USING A cemetery at the edge of town near Camp Independence at the airport to cache weapons and launch attacks. The only way I could get a view of the place was to climb up on this tall, tall crane. Once at the top, I then had to go out on a thin-mesh platform.
I don’t know how high I went. I don’t want to know. Heights are not my favorite thing—it makes my balls go in my throat just thinking about it.
The crane did give me a decent view of the cemetery, which was about eight hundred yards away.
I never took a shot from there. I never saw anything aside from mourners and funerals. But it was worth a try.
BESIDES LOOKING FOR PEOPLE WITH IEDS, WE HAD TO WATCH out for the bombs themselves. They were everywhere—occasionally, even in the apartment buildings. One team narrowly escaped one afternoon, the explosives going off just after they collapsed down and left the building.
The Guard was using Bradleys to get around. The Bradley looks a bit like a tank, since it has a turret and gun on top, but it’s actually a personnel carrier and scout vehicle, depending on its configuration.
I believe it’s made to fit six people inside. We would try and cram eight or ten in. It was hot, muggy, and claustrophobic. Unless you were sitting by the ramp, you couldn’t see anything. You kind of sucked it up and waited to get wherever it was you were going.
One day, the Bradleys picked us up from a sniper op. We had just turned off Haifa onto one of the side streets, and all of a sudden—buh-lam. We’d been hit by a massive IED. The back of the vehicle lifted up and slammed back down. The inside filled with smoke.
I could see the guy across from me moving his mouth, but I couldn’t hear a word: the blast had blown out my ears.
The next thing I knew, the Bradley started moving again. That was one tough vehicle. Back at the base, the commander kind of shrugged it off.
“Didn’t even knock the tracks off,” he said. He almost sounded disappointed.
IT’S A CLICHÉ, BUT IT’S TRUE: YOU FORM TIGHT FRIENDSHIPS in war.
And then suddenly circumstances change. I became close friends with two guys in the Guard unit, real good friends; I trusted them with my life.
Today I couldn’t tell you their names if my life depended on it. And I’m not even sure that I can describe them in a way that would show you why they were special.
Me and the boys from Arkansas seemed to get along real well together, maybe because we were all just country boys.
Well, they were hillbillies. You’ve got your regular redneck like me, then you got your hillbilly who’s a whole sight different animal.
ONWARD
THE ELECTIONS CAME AND WENT.
The media back in the States made a big thing of the Iraqi government elections, but it was a nonevent for me. I wasn’t even out that day; I caught it on TV.
I never really believed the Iraqis would turn the country into a truly functioning democracy, but I thought at one point that there was a chance. I don’t know that I believe that now. It’s a pretty corrupt place.
But I didn’t risk my life to bring democracy to Iraq. I risked my life for my buddies, to protect my friends and fellow countrymen. I went to war for my country, not Iraq. My country sent me out there so that bullshit wouldn’t make its way back to our shores.
I never once fought for the Iraqis. I could give a flying fuck about them.
A SHORT WHILE AFTER THE ELECTION, I WAS SENT BACK TO MY SEAL platoon. Our time in Iraq was growing short, and I was starting to look forward to going home.
Being at camp in Baghdad meant I had my own little room. My personal gear filled four or five cruise boxes, two big Stanley roller boxes, and assorted rucks. (Cruise boxes are the modern equivalent of footlockers; they’re waterproof and roughly three feet long.) On deployment, we pack heavy.
I also had a TV set. All the latest movies were on pirated DVDs selling at Baghdad street stands for five bucks. I bought a box set of James Bond movies, some Clint Eastwood, John Wayne—I love John Wayne. I love his cowboy movies especially, which makes sense I guess. Rio Bravo may be my favorite.
Besides movies, I spent a bit of time playing computer games—Command and Conquer became a personal favorite. Smurf had a PlayStation, and we started getting into playing Tiger Woods.
I kicked his butt.
DAS, HELOS, AND HEIGHTS
WITH BAGHDAD SETTLING DOWN, AT LEAST FOR THE MOMENT, the head shed decided they wanted to open up a SEAL base in Habbaniyah.
Habbaniyah is twelve miles to the east of Fallujah, in Anabar Province. It wasn’t quite the hotbed of the insurgency that Fallujah had been, but it wasn’t San Diego, either. This is the area where before the First Gulf War, Saddam built chemical plants devoted to manufacturing weapons of mass destruction, such as nerve gas and other chemical agents. There weren’t a lot of America supporters out there.
There was a U.S. Army base though, run by the famous 506th Regiment—the Band of Brothers. They’d just come over from Korea and, to be polite, had no fucking clue what Iraq was all about. I suppose everybody’s gotta learn the hard way.
Habbaniyah turned out to be a real pain in the ass. We’d been given an abandoned building, but it was nowhere near adequate for what we needed. We had to build a TOC—a tactical operations command—to house all the computers and com gear that helped support us during our missions.
Our morale sunk. We weren’t doing anything useful for the war; we were working as carpenters. It’s an honorable profession, but it’s not ours.
TAYA:
It was on this deployment that the medical doctors did a test and, for some reason, thought Chris had TB. The doctors told him he would eventually die of the disease.
I remember talking to him right after he got the news. He was fatalistic about it. He’d already accepted that he was going to die, and he wanted to do it there, not at home from a disease he couldn’t fight with a gun or his fists.
“It doesn’t matter,” he told me. “I’ll die and you’ll find someone else. People die out here all the time. Their wives go on and find someone else.”
I tried to explain to him that he was irreplaceable to me. When that didn’t seem to faze him, I tried another equally valid point. “But you’ve got our son,” I told him.
“So what? You’ll find someone else and that guy will raise him.”
I think he was seeing death so often that he started to believe people were replaceable.
It broke my heart. He truly believed that. I still hate to think that.
He thought dying on the battlefield was the greatest. I tried to tell him differently, but he didn’t believe it.
They redid the tests, and Chris was cleared. But his attitude about death stayed.
Once the camp was settled, we started doing DAs. We’d be given the name and location of a suspected insurgent, hit his house at night, then come back and deposit him and whatever evidence we gathered at the DIF—Detention and Interrogation Facility, your basic jail.
We’d take pictures along the way. We weren’t sightseeing; we were covering our butts, and, more important, those of our commanders. The pictures proved we hadn’t beaten the crap out of him.
Most of these ops were routine, without much trouble and almost never any resistance. One night, though, one of our guys went into a house where a rather portly Iraqi decided he didn’t want to come along nicely. He started to tussle.
Now, from our perspective, our brother SEAL was getting the shit kicked out of him. According to the SEAL in question, he had actually slipped and was in no need of assistance.
I guess you can interpret it any way you want. We all rushed in and grabbed the fatso before he could do much harm. Our friend got ribbed about his “fall” for a while.
ON MOST OF THESE MISSIONS, WE HAD PHOTOS OF THE PERSON we were supposed to get. In that case, the rest of the intelligence tended to be pretty accurate. The guy was almost always where he was supposed to be, and things pretty much followed the outline we had drawn up.
But some cases didn’t go so smoothly. We began realizing that if we didn’t have a photo, the intelligence was suspect. Knowing that the Americans would bring a suspect in, people were using tips to settle grievances or feuds. They’d talk to the Army or some other authority, making claims about a person helping the insurgency or committing some other crime.
It sucked for the person we arrested, but I didn’t get all that worked up about it. It was just one more example of how screwed up the country was.
SECOND-GUESSED
ONE DAY, THE ARMY ASKED FOR A SNIPER OVERWATCH FOR A 506th convoy that was coming into base.
I went out with a small team and we took down a three- or four-story building. I set up in the top floor and started watching the area. Pretty soon the convoy headed down the road. As I was watching the area, a man came out of a building near the road and began maneuvering in the direction the convoy was going to take. He had an AK.
I shot him. He went down.
The convoy continued through. A bunch of other Iraqis came out and gathered around the guy I’d shot, but nobody that I could see made any threatening motions toward the convoy or looked to be in a position to attack it, so I didn’t fire.
A few minutes later, I heard on the radio that the Army is sending a unit out to investigate why I shot him.
Huh?
I had already told the Army command on the radio what had happened, but I got back on the radio and repeated it. I was surprised—they didn’t believe me.
A tank commander came out and interviewed the dead man’s wife. She told them her husband was on his way to the mosque carrying a Koran.
Uh-huh. The story was ridiculous, but the officer—whom, I’m guessing, hadn’t been in Iraq very long—didn’t believe me. The soldiers began to look around for the rifle, but by that time so many people had been in the area that it was long gone.
The tank commander pointed out my position. “Did it come from there?”
“Yes, yes,” said the woman, who, of course, had no idea where the shot had c
ome from, since she hadn’t been anywhere nearby. “I know he’s Army, because he’s wearing an Army uniform.”
Now, I was two rooms deep, with a screen in front of me, wearing a gray jacket over my SEAL camis. Maybe she hallucinated in her grief, or maybe she just said whatever she thought would give me grief.
We were recalled to base and the entire platoon put on stand-down. I was told I was not “operationally available”—I was confined to base while the 506th investigated the incident further.
The colonel wanted to interview me. My officer came with me.
We were all pissed. The ROEs had been followed; I had plenty of witnesses. It was the Army “investigators” who had screwed up.
I had trouble holding my tongue. At one point, I told the Army colonel, “I don’t shoot people with Korans—I’d like to, but I don’t.” I guess I was a little hot.
Well, after three days and God only knows how much other “investigation,” he finally realized that it had been a good kill and dropped the matter. But when the regiment asked for more overwatches, we told them to fuck off.
“Any time I shoot someone, you’re just going to try and have me executed,” I said. “No way.”
We were heading home in two weeks anyway. Aside from a few more DAs, I spent most of that time playing video games, watching porn, and working out.
I FINISHED THAT DEPLOYMENT WITH A SUBSTANTIAL NUMBER of confirmed sniper kills. Most happened in Fallujah.
Carlos Norman Hathcock II, the most famous member of the sniping profession, a true legend and a man whom I look up to, tallied ninety-three confirmed kills during his three years of tours in the Vietnam War.
I’m not saying I was in his class—in my mind, he was and always will be the greatest sniper ever—but in sheer numbers, at least, I was close enough for people to start thinking I’d done a hell of a job.
