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

S
HOT IN THE
 B
ACK
T
hey were wrong.
There I was, shot in the head and blind. Blood streamed down
my face. I reached up to my scalp. I was surprised—not only was
my head still there, but it was intact. But I knew I’d been shot.
Somehow I realized that my helmet, which hadn’t been
strapped, had been pushed back. I pulled it forward. Suddenly I
could see again. A bullet had struck the helmet, but with incredible
luck had ricocheted off my night vision, slamming the helmet

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backward but otherwise not harming me. When I pulled it forward,
I brought the scope back down in front of my eyes, and could see
again. I hadn’t been rendered blind at all, but in the confusion I
couldn’t tell what was going on.
A few seconds later, I got hit in the back with a heavy round.
The bullet pushed me straight to the ground. Fortunately, the round
hit one of the plates in my body armor.
Still, it left me dazed. Meanwhile, we were surrounded. We
called to each other and organized a retreat to a marketplace we’d
passed on the way in. We started laying down fire and moving
together.
By this time, the blocks around us looked like the worst scenes
in 
Black Hawk Down
. It seemed like every insurgent, maybe every
occupant, wanted a piece of the idiot Americans who’d foolishly
blundered into Sadr City.
We couldn’t get into the building we retreated to. By now we’d
called for QRF—a quick response force, a fancy name for the
cavalry. We needed backup and extraction—“HELP” in capital
letters.
A group of Army Strykers came in. Strykers are heavily armed
personnel carriers, and they were firing everything they had. There
were plenty of targets—upward of a hundred insurgents lined the
roofs on the surrounding streets, trying to get us. When they saw the
Strykers, they changed their aim, trying to take out the Army’s big
personnel carriers. There they were overmatched. It started looking

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like a video game—guys were falling off the rooftops.
“
....
, thank you,” I said aloud when the vehicles
reached 
our building. I swear I could hear a cavalry horn
somewhere in the background.
They dropped their ramps and we ran inside.
“Did you see how many 
....
were up there?” said one
of the 
crewmen as the vehicle sped back to the base.
“No,” I answered. “I was too busy shooting.”
“They were all over the place.” The kid was stoked. “We were
dropping them and that wasn’t even half of them. We 
were just
laying it down. We thought y’all were
....
’ done.”
That made more than two of us.
T
hat night scared the shit out of me. That’s when I came to the
realization that I’m not superhuman. I can die.
All through everything else, there had been points where I
thought, 
I’m going to die.
But I never did die. Those thoughts were fleeting. They
evaporated.
After a while, I started thinking, they can’t kill me. They 
can’t kill
us. We’re 
....
undefeatable.
I have a guardian angel and I’m a SEAL and I’m lucky and
whatever the hell it is: 
I cannot die.
Then, all of a sudden, within two minutes I was nailed 
twice.
....
, my number is up.

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