American Sniper - Boekje Pienter

325/439
I checked for holes a few dozen times, but there were none.
All good.
IEDs were much more common in Ramadi than they had been in Fallujah.
The insurgents had learned a lot about setting them since the
beginning of the war, and they tended to be pretty powerful—strong
enough to lift a Bradley off the ground, as I’d found out earlier in
Baghdad.
The EOD guys who worked with us were not SEALs, but we came
to trust them as much as if they were. We’d stick them on the back of
the train when we went into a building, then call them forward if we
saw something suspicious. At that point, their job was to identify the
booby-trap; if it was a bomb, and we were in a house, we would have
gotten the hell out of there fast.
That never happened to us, but there was one time when we were
in a house and some insurgents managed to plant an IED right outside
the front door. They had stacked two 105-mm shells, waiting for us to
come out. Fortunately, our EOD guy spotted it before we moved out.
We were able to sledgehammer our way out through a second-story
wall and escape across a low roof.
A WANTED MAN
All Americans were wanted men in Ramadi, snipers most of all. Reportedly,
the insurgents put out a bounty on my head.
They also gave me a name: al-Shaitan Ramadi—“the Devil of
Ramadi.”
It made me feel proud.