American Sniper - Boekje Pienter

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You are bad. We are badder. We are bad-ass.
Our sister platoon wanted to use the template we used to mark
our gear, but we wouldn’t let them. We told them we were the Punishers.
They had to get their own symbol.
We went a bit light with our Hummers. They were named, mostly, for
G.I. Joe characters, like Duke and Snake Eyes. Just because war is hell
doesn’t mean you can’t have a little fun.
We had a good team that deployment, starting at the top. Decent officers,
and a really excellent chief named Tony.
Tony had trained as a sniper. He was not only a bad-ass, he was an
old bad-ass, at least for a SEAL—rumor has it he was forty that
deployment.
SEALs usually do not make it to forty and stay out in the field.
We’re too beat-up. But Tony somehow managed it. He was a hard-core
son of a bitch, and we would have followed him to hell and back.
I was the point man—snipers usually are—when we went on
patrols. Tony was almost always right behind me. Generally, the chief
will be toward the rear of the formation, covering everybody else’s ass,
but in this case our LT reasoned that having two snipers at the head of
the platoon was more effective.
One night soon after the entire platoon had gotten back together, we
traveled about seventeen kilometers east of Ramadi. The area was
green and fertile—so much so that it looked to us like the Vietnamese
jungle, compared to the desert we’d been operating in. We called it
Viet Ram.