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

W
e never found out what the insurgents who slipped past were up
to. It was just another mystery of war.
T
HE 
E
LITE 
E
LITE
I
think all SEALs highly respect our brothers in the elite anti-terror
unit you’ve read so much about at home. They are an elite group
within an elite group.
We didn’t interact with them in Iraq much. The only other time I
had much to do with them came a few weeks later, after we got into
Ramadi proper. They had heard we were out there slaying a huge
number of savages, and so they sent one of their snipers over to see

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what we were doing. I guess they wanted to find out what we were
doing that worked.
Looking back, I regret not having tried to join. At the time, they
weren’t using snipers as heavily as the other teams were. The
assaulters were doing the majority of the work, and I didn’t want to
be an assaulter. I was loving what I was doing. I wanted to be a
sniper. I was getting to use my rifle, and killing enemies. Why give it
up, move to the East Coast, and become a new guy all over again?
And that’s not even considering the BUD/S-like school you have to
get through to prove you belong.
I would have had to spend a number of years as an assaulter
before working my way up to be a sniper again. Why do that when
I was already sniping, and loving it?
But now that I’ve heard about their ops and what they
accomplished, I think I should have gone for it.
The guys have a reputation for being arrogant and more than a
little full of themselves. That’s plain wrong. I had the opportunity to
meet a few after the war when they came out to a training facility I
run. They were extremely down-to-earth, very humble about their
achievements. I absolutely wished I was going back out with them.