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

B
UFFALO-PISS 
V
ODKA
W
e went on DAs for another two and a half weeks, but there was
only one where we had anything like real trouble. A guy wanted to
fight as we were going in. Unfortunately for him, all he had were his
bare fists. Here he’s facing a squad of soldiers, each heavily armed
and protected by body armor. He was either stupid or courageous,
or maybe both.
The GROM took care of him quickly. One less asshole on the
wanted list.

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We picked up a pretty wide variety of suspects—financiers for
al-Qaeda, bomb-makers, insurgents, foreign insurgents—one time
we picked up a truckload of them.
The GROM were a lot like SEALs: extremely professional at
work, and very hard-core partiers after hours. They all had Polish
vodka, and they especially loved this one brand named Zubrówka.
Zubrówka has been around for hundreds of years, though I’ve
never seen it in America. There’s a blade of buffalo grass in each
bottle; each blade comes from the same field in Poland. Buffalo
grass is supposed to have medicinal properties, but the story related
to me from my GROM friends was a lot more colorful—or maybe
off-color. According to them, European bison known as wisent
roam on this field and piss on the grass. The distillers put the blades
in for an extra kick. (Actually, during the process, certain
ingredients of the buffalo grass are safely neutralized, so just the
flavor remains. But my friends didn’t tell me that—maybe it was too
hard to translate.)
I was a little dubious, but the vodka proved to be as smooth as it
was potent. It definitely supported their argument that the Russians
don’t know anything about vodka and that Poles make it better.
B
eing an American, officially I wasn’t supposed to be drinking.
(And 
officially,
I didn’t.)
That asinine rule only applied to U.S. servicemen. We couldn’t
even buy a beer. Every other member of the coalition, be they

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Polish or whatever, could.
Fortunately, the GROM liked to share. They would also go to
the duty-free shop at Baghdad airport and buy beer or whiskey or
whatever the Americans working with them wanted.
I
formed a friendship with one of their snipers named Matthew
(they all took fake names, as part of their general security). We
spent a lot of time talking about different rifles and scenarios. We
compared notes on how they did things, the weapons they would
use. Later on, I arranged to run some drills with them and gave
them a bit of background on how SEALs operate. I taught them
how we build our hides inside homes and showed them a few
different drills to use to take home and train. We worked a lot with
“snaps”—targets that pop up—and “movers”—targets that move
left to right and vice versa.
What always seemed interesting to me was how well we
communicated without using words, even on an op. They’d turn
around and wave me up or back, whatever. If you’re a
professional, you don’t need to be told what to do. You read off of
each other and react.