American Sniper - Boekje Pienter

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“Yes, sir,” I mumbled. I pulled on a pair of shorts and my flip-flops
and went down the hall.
I thought I was in trouble, though I wasn’t sure what for. I’d been
on good behavior working with the Poles, no fights to speak of. I
searched my mind as I walked toward his office, trying to prepare a
defense. My mind was still fairly blank when I got there.
“Kyle, I’m going to need you to get your sniper rifle and pack up
all your gear,” the lieutenant commander told me. “You’re going to
Fallujah.”
He started telling me about some of the arrangements and threw
in some operational details. The Marines were planning a big push,
and they needed snipers to help out.
Man, this is going to be good, I thought. We are going to kill
massive amounts of bad guys. And I’m going to be in the middle of it.
AN ARMED CAMP
From a historical point of view, there were two battles for Fallujah.
The first took place in the spring, as I’ve mentioned before. Political
considerations, mostly driven by wildly distorted media reports and a
lot of Arab propaganda, caused the Marines to back off their offensive
soon after it was begun, and well before it achieved its aim of kicking
the insurgents out of the city. In place of the Marines, Iraqis loyal to
the interim government were supposed to take control and run the
city.
That didn’t work. Pretty much the moment the Marines pulled
back, the insurgents completely took over Fallujah. Civilians who were
not connected with the insurgency were killed, or fled the city. Anyone