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

R
EADY TO
 G
O
I
had to wear a cast for a few weeks, but more and more I got into
the swing of things. The pace built up as we got ready to ship out.
There was only one down note: we had been assigned to a western
province in Iraq. From what we had heard, nothing was going on
there. We tried to get transferred to Afghanistan, but we couldn’t
get released by the area commander.
That didn’t sit too well with us, certainly not with me. If I was
going back to war, I wanted to be in the action, not twiddling my
(broken) fingers in the desert. Being a SEAL, you don’t want to sit
around with your thumb up your ass; you want to get in the action.
Still, it felt good to be getting back to war. I’d been burned out
when I came home, completely overwhelmed and emotionally
drained. But now I felt recharged and ready to go.
I was ready to kill some more bad guys.

---

13
Mortality
B
LIND
I
t seemed like every dog in Sadr City was barking.
I scanned the darkness through my night vision, tense as we
made our way down one of the nastiest streets in Sadr City. We
walked past a row of what might have been condos in a normal
city. Here they were little better than rat-infested slums. It was past
midnight in early April 2008, and, against all common sense but
under direct orders, we were walking into the center of an insurgent
hellhole.

---

Like a lot of the other drab-brown buildings on the street, the
house we were heading to had a metal grate in front of the door.
We lined up to breach it. Just then, someone appeared from behind
the grate at the door and said something in Arabic.
Our interpreter stepped over and told him to open up.
The man inside said he didn’t have a key.
One of the other SEALs told him to go get it. The man
disappeared, running up the stairs somewhere.
Shit!
“Go!” I yelled. “Break the grate the 
....
in.”
We rushed in and started clearing the house. The two bottom
levels were empty.
I raced up the stairs to the third floor and moved to the doorway
of a room facing the street, leaning back against the wall as the rest
of my guys stacked to follow. As I started to take a step, the whole
room blew up.
By some miracle, I hadn’t been hit, though I sure felt the force of
the blast.
“Who the 
....
just threw a frag!” I yelled.
Nobody. And the room itself was empty. Someone had just
fired an RPG into the house.
Gunfire followed. We regrouped. The Iraqi who’d been inside
had clearly escaped to alert the nearby insurgents where we were.
Worse, the walls in the house proved pretty flimsy, unable to stand
up to the rocket grenades that were being fired at us. If we stayed

---

here, we were going to get fried.
Out of the house!
 Now!
The last of my guys had just cleared out of the building
when the street shook with a huge force: the insurgents had set
off an IED down the street. The blast was so powerful it
knocked a few of us off our feet. Ears ringing, we ran to
another building nearby. But as we were fixing to enter it, all
hell broke loose. We got gunfire from every direction, including
above.
A shot flew into my helmet. The night went black. I was blind.
It was my first night in Sadr City, and it looked like it was soon
going to be my last on earth.