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

T
O THE 
A
PARTMENTS
“A
ll right,” said our radio guy finally. “They want us inside.”
I ran from the trees to the apartment complex, where a SEAL
lieutenant was organizing the overwatches. He had a map of the city
and showed us where the assault was going to take place the next
day.
“We need to cover this area here, here, and here,” he said.
“Y’all go find a room to do it.”
He gave us a building and off we went. I’d been paired with a
sniper I’d met during BUD/S, Ray. (I’ve used the name to protect
his identity.)
Ray is a big-time gun nut. Loves guns, and knows ’em real well.
I’m not sure how good a shot he is, but he’s probably forgotten
more than I know about rifles.
We hadn’t seen each other for years, but from what I
remembered from BUD/S I figured we’d get along all right. You
want to feel confident the guy you’re working with is someone you
can rely on—after all, you are literally trusting him with your life.
A Ranger we called Ranger Molloy had been shepherding our

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rifles and some gear with us in a Hummer. He came up and gave me
my .300 Win Mag. The rifle’s extra distance over the Mk-11 would
be handy once I found a good hide to shoot from.
Running up the stairs, I sorted the situation out in my head. I
knew what side of the building I wanted to be on, and roughly
where I wanted to be. When I reached the top—I’d decided I
wanted to shoot from a room rather than the roof—I started
walking through the hall, scanning for an apartment that had the right
view. Going inside, I looked for one with furniture I could use to set
up.
To me, the home I was in was just another part of the battlefield.
The apartments and everything in them were just things to be used
to accomplish our goal—clearing the city.
Snipers need to either lie down or sit for a long period of time,
so I needed to find furniture that would let me do that as
comfortably as possible. You also need something to rest your rifle
on. In this case, I was going to be shooting out of the windows, so I
needed to be elevated. As I searched through the apartment, I
found a room that had a baby crib in it. It was a rare find, and one I
could put to good use.
Ray and I took it and flipped it over. That gave us a base. Then
we pulled the door of the room off its hinges and put it on top. We
now had a stable platform to work on.
Most Iraqis don’t sleep on beds; they use bedrolls, thick mats,
or blankets that are put directly on the floor. We found a few of

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them and laid them out on the door. That made a semi-comfortable,
elevated bed to lie on while working the gun. A rolled mat gave us a
place to rest the end of our guns on.
We opened the window and were ready to shoot.
We decided we’d work three hours on, three hours off, rotating
back and forth. Ray took the first watch.
I started rummaging through the complex to see if I could find
any cool shit—money, guns, explosives. The only thing I found
worth acquisitioning was a handheld Tiger Woods golf game.
Not that I was authorized to take it, or even did take it, officially.
If I 
had
taken it, I would have played it the rest of the deployment.
If I’d done that, it might explain why I am actually pretty good at the
game now.
If I had taken it.
I
got on the .300 Win Mag in late afternoon. The city I was looking
out at was brownish-yellow and gray, almost as if everything was
shaded the light sepia of an old photograph. Many, though not all,
of the buildings were made of bricks or covered with stucco in this
same color. The stones and roadways were gray. A fine mist of
desert dust seemed to hover over the houses. There were trees and
other vegetation, but the overall landscape looked like a collection
of dully painted boxes in the desert.
Most of the buildings were squat houses, two stories high,
occasionally three or four. Minarets or prayer towers poked out of

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the grayness at irregular intervals. There were mosque domes
scattered around—here a green egg flanked by a dozen smaller
eggs, there a white turnip glinting white in the sinking sun.
The buildings were packed in tight, the streets almost
geometrical in their grid pattern. There were walls everywhere. The
city had already been at war for some time, and there was plenty of
rubble not only around the edges but in the main thoroughfares.
Dead ahead of me but out of view was the infamous bridge where
the insurgents had desecrated the bodies of the Blackwater
contractors half a year earlier. The bridge spanned the Euphrates,
which flowed in an inverted V just south of my position.
My immediate concern was a set of railroad tracks about eight
hundred yards from the building. There was a berm and a train
trestle over the highway south of me. To the east, on my left as I
looked out the window, the train line ran to a switching yard and
station outside the main part of the city.
The Marine assault would sweep across the tracks, driving
down and into an area from the Euphrates to a highway at the
eastern end of the city, marked by a cloverleaf. This was an area
roughly three and one-third miles wide; the plan was to move about
a mile and a half deep to Iraqi Route 10 by November 10, a little
less than three days. That might not seem like a lot—most Marines
can probably walk that far in a half hour—but the path lay through a
rat’s nest of booby-trapped streets and past heavily armed houses.
Not only did the Marines expect to be fighting literally house to

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house and block to block, but they also realized that things would
probably get worse as they went. You push the rats from one hole
and they congregate in the next. Sooner or later, they run out of
places to run.
Looking out the window, I was anxious for the battle to start. I
wanted a target. I wanted to shoot someone.
I didn’t have to wait all that long.
F
rom the building, I had a prime view across to the railroad tracks
and the berm, and then beyond that into the city.
I started getting kills soon after I got on the gun. Most were
back in the area near the city. Insurgents would move into that area,
trying to get into position to attack or maybe spy on the Marines.
They were about eight hundred meters away, across the railroad
tracks and below the berm, so probably, in their mind, they couldn’t
be seen and were safe.
They were badly mistaken.
I’ve already described what it felt like to take my first sniper
shot; there may have been some hesitation in the back of my mind,
an almost unconscious question: 
Can I kill this person?
But the rules of engagement were clear, and there was no doubt
the man in my scope was an enemy. It wasn’t just the fact he was
armed and maneuvering toward the Marines’ positions, though
those were the important points for the ROEs. Civilians had been
warned not to stay in the city, and while obviously not everyone had

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been able to escape, only small handfuls of innocents remained. The
males of fighting age and sound minds within the city limits were
almost all bad guys. They thought they were going to kick us out,
just as they supposedly had kicked out the Marines in April.
After the first kill, the others come easy. I don’t have to psych
myself up, or do anything special mentally—I look through the
scope, get my target in the crosshairs, and kill my enemy before he
kills one of my people.
I got three that day; Ray got two.
I would keep both eyes open while I was on the scope. With
right eye looking through the scope, my left eye could still see the
rest of the city. It gave me better situational awareness.