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

T
RAINING
W
e were put on immediate standby, but it would turn out that we
weren’t needed in Afghanistan or anywhere else at that moment.

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My platoon would have to wait roughly a year before we got into
action, and when we did, it would be against Saddam Hussein, not
Osama bin Laden.
There’s a lot of confusion in the civilian world about SEALs and
our mission. Most people think we’re strictly sea-based
commandos, meaning that we always operate off ships, and hit
targets on the water or the immediate coastline.
Admittedly, a fair amount of our work involves things at
sea
��
we are in the Navy, after all. And from a historical
perspective, as briefly mentioned earlier, SEALs trace their origins
to the Navy’s Underwater Demolition Teams, or UDTs.
Established during World War II, UDT frogmen were responsible
for reconning beaches before they were hit, and they trained for a
variety of other waterborne tasks, such as infiltrating harbors and
planting limpet mines on enemy ships. They were the mean, bad-ass
combat divers of World War II and the postwar era, and SEALs
are proud to carry on in their wake.
But as the UDT mission expanded, the Navy recognized that the
need for special operations didn’t end at the beach line. As new
units called SEALs were formed and trained for this expanded
mission, they came to replace the older UDT units.
While “land” may be the final word in the SEAL acronym, it’s
hardly the last thing we do. Every special operations unit in the U.S.
military has its own specialty. There’s a lot of overlap in our training,
and the range of our missions is similar in many respects. But each

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branch has its own expertise. Army Special Forces—also known as
SF—does an excellent job training foreign forces, both in
conventional and unconventional warfare. Army Rangers are a big
assault force—if you want a large target, say an airfield, taken
down, that’s their thing. Air Force special operators—parajumpers
—excel at pulling people out of the shit.
Among our specialties are DAs.
DA stands for “direct action.” A direct-action mission is a very
short, quick strike against a small but high-value target. You might
think of it as a surgical strike against the enemy. In a practical sense,
it could range from anything like an attack on a key bridge behind
enemy lines to a raid on a terrorist hideout to arrest a bomb maker
—a “snatch and grab,” as some call it. While those are very
different missions, the idea is the same: strike hard and fast before
the enemy knows what’s going on.
After 9/11, SEALs began training to deal with the places Islamic
terrorists were most likely to be located—Afghanistan number one,
and then the Middle East and Africa. We still did all the things a
SEAL is supposed to do—diving, jumping out of planes, taking
down ships, etc. But there was more emphasis on land warfare
during our workup than there traditionally had been in the past.
There was debate about this shift far above my pay grade. Some
people wanted to limit SEALs to ten miles inland. Nobody asked
my opinion, but as far as I’m concerned, there shouldn’t be any
limits. Personally, I’m just as happy to stay out of the water, but

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that’s beside the point. Let me do what I’m trained to do wherever
it needs to be done.
The training, most of it anyway, was fun, even when it was a
kick in the balls. We dove, we went into the desert, we worked in
the mountains. We even got water-boarded and gassed.
Everybody gets water-boarded during training. The idea is to
prepare you in case you’re captured. The instructors tortured us as
hard as they could, tying us up and pounding on us, just short of
permanently damaging us. They say each of us has a breaking point,
and that prisoners eventually give in. But I would have done my best
to make them kill me before I gave up secrets.
Gas training was another kick. Basically, you get hit with CS gas
and have to fight through it. CS gas is “captor spray” or tear gas—
the active ingredient is 2-chlorobenzalmalononitrile, for all of you
chemistry majors. We thought of it as “cough and spit,” because
that’s the best way to deal with it. You learn during training to let
your eyes run; the worst thing to do is rub them. You’re going to get
snotty and you’re going to be coughing and crying, but you can still
shoot your weapon and fight through it. That’s the point of the
exercise.
We went up to Kodiak, Alaska, where we did a land navigation
course. It wasn’t the height of winter, but there was still so much
snow on the ground that we had to put on snowshoes. We started
with basic instruction on keeping warm—layering up, etc.—and
learned about things like snow shelters. One of the important points

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of this training, which applied everywhere, was learning how to
conserve weight in the field. You have to figure out whether it’s
more important to be lighter and more mobile, or to have more
ammunition and body armor.
I prefer lightness and speed. I count ounces when we go out, not
pounds. The lighter you are, the more mobile you become. The little
bastards out there are faster than hell; you need every advantage
you can get on them.
The training was pretty competitive. We found out at one point
that the best platoon in the Team would be shipped out to
Afghanistan. Training picked up from that point on. It was a fierce
competition, and not just out on the training range. The officers
were backstabbing each other. They’d go to the CO and dime each
other out:
Did you see what those guys did on the range? They’re no
good. . .
The competition came down to us and one other platoon. We
came in second. They went to war; we stayed home.
That’s about the worst fate a SEAL can imagine.
W
ith the conflict in Iraq looming on the horizon, our emphasis
shifted. We practiced fighting in the desert; we practiced fighting in
cities. We worked hard, but there were always lighter moments.
I remember one time when we were on a RUT (real urban
training). Our command would find a municipality that was willing to

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have us come in and take down an actual building—an empty
warehouse, say, or a house—something a little more authentic than
you would find on a base. On this one exercise, we were working
at a house. Everything had been carefully arranged with the local
police department. A few “actors” had been recruited to play parts
during the exercise.
My role was to pull security outside. I blocked out traffic,
waving vehicles away as some of the local cops watched from the
sidelines.
While I was standing there, gun out, not looking particularly
friendly, this guy walked down the block toward me.
I started going through the drill. First I waved him off; he kept
coming. Then I shined my light on him; he kept coming. I put my
laser dot on him; he kept coming.
Of course, the closer he got, the more convinced I was that he
was a role-player, sent to test me. I mentally reviewed my ROEs
(“rules of engagement”), which covered how I was supposed to act.
“What are you, the popo?” he asked, sticking his face out
toward mine.
“Popo” (a thug’s term for police) wasn’t in the ROEs, but I
figured he was ad-libbing. The next thing on my list was to throw
him down. So I did. He started to resist, and reached under his
jacket for what I assumed was a weapon, which is exactly what a
SEAL playing a bad guy would do. So I reacted in kind, giving a
good SEAL response as I wrestled him into the dirt and busted him

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up a bit.
Whatever was under his jacket broke and liquid went
everywhere. He was cussing and carrying on, but I didn’t take the
time to think about all that just then. As the fight ran out of him, I
cuffed him and looked around.
The cops, seated in their patrol car nearby, were just about
doubled over laughing. I went over to see what was up.
“That’s so-and-so,” they told me. “One of the biggest drug
dealers in the city. We wish we could have beat him like you just
did.”
Apparently, Mr. Popo ignored all the signs and wandered into
the training exercise figuring he’d carry on business as usual. There
are idiots everywhere—but I guess that explains how he got into
that line of work in the first place.