American Sniper - Boekje Pienter

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You think about getting the most firepower you possibly can into
the battle. And you start trying to think of new and inventive ways to
eliminate your enemy.
We had so many targets out in Viet Ram we started asking
ourselves, what weapons have we not used to kill them
No pistol kill yet You have to get at least one.
We’d use different weapons for the experience, to learn the
weapon’s capabilities in combat. But at times it was a game—when
you’re in a firefight every day, you start looking for a little variety. No
matter what, there were plenty of insurgents, and plenty of firefights.
The Gustav turned out to be one of our most effective weapons when
we came up against insurgents shooting from buildings. We had LAW
rockets, which were lighter and easier to carry. But too many of them
turned out to be duds. And once you fired a LAW, you were done; it
wasn’t a reloadable weapon. The Carl Gustav was always a big
hit—pun intended.
Another weapon we used quite a bit was the 40-mm grenade
launcher. The launcher comes in two varieties, one that attaches under
your rifle and another that is a stand-alone weapon. We had both.
Our standard grenade was a “frag”—a grenade that exploded and
sprayed an area with shrapnel or fragments. This is a traditional antipersonnel
weapon, tried and true.
While we were on this deployment, we received a new type of projectile
using a thermobaric explosive. Those had a lot more “boom”—a
single grenade launched at an enemy sniper in a small structure could
bring the whole building down because of the over-pressure created by
the explosion. Most times, of course, we were firing at a larger