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

B
EATEN BY 
D
OLPHINS, 
E
ATEN BY 
S
HARKS
A
fter spending the entire summer at sniper school, I returned to my
platoon and got busy with the rest of our workup, going through the
different training sessions as we prepared to deploy in a year. As
usual, I had some of my hardest times in the water.
E
veryone gets all warm and fuzzy about marine animals, but I’ve
had close and personal encounters that were anything but.
While the Navy was testing a program using dolphins for harbor
defense, they used us as targets, in a few cases without warning.
The dolphins would come out and beat the shit out of us. They were
trained to hit in the sides, and they could crack ribs. And if you
hadn’t been warned in advance of the exercise, you didn’t know
what was going on—your first reaction, or at least mine, was to
think you were being attacked by sharks.

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One time we were out and the dolphins were taking it to us.
Getting beaten bad, I headed toward shore to dodge the bastards.
Spotting some piers, I ducked underneath—I knew they wouldn’t
follow me.
Safe.
All of a sudden, something clamped hard on my leg. Hard.
It was a sea lion. They were being trained to guard the piers.
I went back out into open water. I’d rather be beaten by a
dolphin than eaten by a sea lion.
B
ut sharks were, by far, the worst.
One evening, we were supposed to swim across the bay off San
Diego, in the dark, and plant a limpet mine on a particular ship.
Simple, standard SEAL operation.
Not every SEAL hates the water like I do. In fact, a lot of them
like it so much they’ll swim around and play tricks on the others in
the exercise. You might have a guy plant his mine, then sink to the
bottom and wsait for the next guy to come over with his. There’s
usually enough light from above that the second diver is silhouetted
and easy to see. So when the victim—I mean, diver—comes to
plant his mine, the first diver comes up, grabs his fin, and jerks it.
That scares the shit out of the second diver. Usually he thinks
there’s a shark in the water and screws up the rest of the exercise.
And his gear may need a special cleaning.
On this particular day, I was beneath the ship and had just

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planted my mine when something grabbed my fin.
SHARK!!!
Then I put my heart back in my chest, remembering all the
stories and warnings about my brethren SEALs.
Just one of the guys messing with my head,
I told myself. I
turned around to flip him off.
And found myself giving the finger to a shark who’d taken a