American Sniper: The Autobiography of the Most Lethal Sniper in U.S. Military History by Chris Kyle Read Free Book Online Page B

had turned on the television and jacked the volume. I saw smoke pouring out of the World Trade Center in New York.
    I didn’t understand what-all was happening. Part of me was still sleeping.
    Then as we watched, an airplane flew right into the side of the second tower.
    “Motherfuckers!” I muttered.
    I stared at the screen, angry and confused, not entirely sure it was real.
    Suddenly I remembered that I left my cell phone off. I grabbed it, and saw I’d missed a bunch of messages. The sum total of them was this:
    Kyle, get your ass back to base. Now!
    I grabbed Taya’s SUV—it had plenty of gas and my truck didn’t—and hauled down to base. I don’t know exactly how fast I was going—it might have been three digits—but it was certainly a high rate of speed.
    Down around San Juan Capistrano, I glanced in the rearview mirror and saw a set of red lights flashing.
    I pulled over. The cop who came up to the truck was pissed.
    “Is there any reason you’re going so fast?” he demanded.
    “Yes, sir,” I told him. “I apologize. I’m in the military and I just got recalled. I understand you got to write me a ticket. I know I was in the wrong but with all due respect can you just hurry and give me the ticket so I can get back to base?”
    “What branch are you in?”
    Motherfucker, I thought. I just told you I have to report. Can’t you just give me the damn ticket? But I kept my cool.
    “I’m in the Navy,” I told him.
    “What do you do in the Navy?” he asked.
    By now I was pretty annoyed. “I’m a SEAL.”
    He closed his ticket book.
    “I’ll take you to the city line,” he told me. “Go get some fuckin’ payback.”
    He put his lights on and pulled in front of me. We went a bit slower than I’d been going when he nabbed me, but it was still well past the limit. He took me as far as his jurisdiction went, maybe a little farther, then waved me on.
    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. 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 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.”