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

T
HE 
M
ARSH
O
ur real problem was with the insurgents using the marsh across
the river as cover. The river coast was dotted with countless little
islands with trees and brush. Here and there an old foundation or a
pile of dredged dirt and rock poked up between the bushes.
Insurgents would pop up from the vegetation, take their shots,
then squirrel back into the brush where you couldn’t see them. The
vegetation was so thick they could get pretty close not just to the
river but to us—often within a hundred yards without being seen.
Even the Iraqis could hit something from that distance.
Making things even more complicated, a herd of water buffalo
lived in the swamp, and they’d tromp through every so often. You’d

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hear something or see the grass move and not know whether it was
an insurgent or an animal.
We tried getting creative, requesting a napalm hit on the marsh to
burn down the vegetation.
That idea was vetoed.
As the nights went on, I realized the number of insurgents was
growing. It became obvious that I was being probed. Eventually,
the insurgents might be able to get enough men together that I
couldn’t kill them all.
Not that I wouldn’t have had fun trying.
T
he Marines brought in a FAC (forward air controller), to call in
air support against the insurgents. The fellow they sent over was a
Marine aviator, a pilot, working on a ground rotation. He tried a
few times to vector in air attacks, but the requests were always
denied higher up the chain of command.
At the time, I was told that there had been so much devastation
in the city that they didn’t want any more collateral damage. I don’t
see how blowing up a bunch of weeds and muck would make
Fallujah look any worse than it already did, but then I’m just a
SEAL and obviously don’t understand those sorts of complicated
issues.
Anyway, the pilot himself was a good guy. He didn’t act stuck
up or high and mighty; you’d never know he was an officer. We all
liked him and respected him. And just to show there were no hard

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feelings, we let him get on the rifle every so often and look around.
He never got off any shots.
Besides the FAC, the Marines sent a heavy-weapons squad,
more snipers, and then mortarmen. The mortarmen brought some
white phosphorous shells with them, and they tried launching those
in an attempt to burn down the brush. Unfortunately, the shells
would only set small pieces of the marsh on fire—they’d burn a bit,
then fizzle and go out because it was so wet.
Our next try was throwing thermite grenades. A thermite
grenade is an incendiary device that burns at four thousand degrees
Fahrenheit and can go through a quarter-inch of steel in a few
seconds. We went down to the river and hauled them across.
That didn’t work, either, so we started making our own
homegrown concoctions. Between the Marine sniper detail and the
mortarmen, there was a great deal of creative brainpower focused
on that marsh. Of all the plans, one of my personal favorites
involved the creative use of the shaped “cheese” charges the
mortarmen typically carried. (The cheese is used to propel mortar
rounds. Distance can be adjusted by varying the amount of cheese
used to fire the projectile.) We’d shove some cheese in a tube, add
a bunch of det cord, some diesel, and add a time fuse. Then we’d
heave the contraption across the river and see what happened.
We got some pretty flashes, but nothing we came up with
worked real well.
If only we’d had a flamethrower . . .

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T
he marsh remained a “target rich environment” filled with
insurgents. I must have gotten eighteen or nineteen myself that
week; the rest of the guys brought the total up to the area of thirty
or more.
The river seemed to hold a special fascination for bad guys.
While we were trying various ways to burn down the marsh, they
were attempting all sorts of ways to get across.
The most bizarre involved beach balls.