American Sniper - Boekje Pienter

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things would slack off around midday. Then, around three or four in
the afternoon, you’d have another. If the stakes weren’t life and death,
it would have been funny.
And at the time, it was funny, in a perverse kind of way.
You didn’t know which direction they’d attack from, but the tactics
were almost always the same. The insurgents would start out with
automatic fire, pop off a bit here, pop off there. Then you’d get the
RPGs, a flurry of fire; finally, they’d scatter and try to get away.
One day, we took out a group of insurgents a short distance from the
hospital. We didn’t realize it at the time, but Army intel passed the
word later on that the insurgent command had made a cell phone call
to someone, asking for more mortarmen, because the team that had
been hitting the hospital had just been killed.
Their replacements never showed up.
Shame. We would have killed them, too.
Everyone knows by now about Predators, the UAVs that supplied a lot
of intelligence to American forces during the war. But what many
don’t know is that we had our own backpack UAVs—small, manlaunched
aircraft about the size of an RC aircraft kids of all ages play
with in the States.
They fit in a backpack. I never got to operate one, but they did
seem kind of cool. The trickiest part—at least from what I could
see—was the launch. You had to throw it pretty hard to get it airborne.
The operator would rev the engine, then fling it into the air; it took a
certain amount of skill.