American Sniper - Boekje Pienter

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REPLACEMENTS
We’d been in that war for four years, through countless hairy situations,
and no SEAL had ever died. It had looked like the action in Ramadi,
and all Iraq, was starting to wind down, and now we’d been hit
terribly hard.
We thought we would be shut down, even though our deployment
still had a couple of months to run. We all knew the politics—my first
two commanders had been ultra-cautious pussies, who got ahead because
of it. So we were afraid that the war was over for us.
Plus, we were seven men short, cut nearly in half. Marc was dead.
Brad and Ryan were out because of their wounds. Four guys had gone
home to escort Marc’s body home.
A week after losing our guys, the CO came around to talk to us. We
gathered in the chow hall at Shark Base and listened as he talked. It
wasn’t a long speech.
“It’s up to you,” he said. “If you want to take it easy now, I understand.
But if you want to go out, you have my blessing.”
“Fuck yeah,” we all said. “We want to go out.”
I sure did.
Half of a platoon joined us from a quieter area to help fill us out. We
also got some guys who had graduated training but hadn’t been assigned
to a platoon yet. Real new guys. The idea was to give them a
little exposure to the war, a little taste of what they were getting into
before they trained up for the main event. We were pretty careful with
them—we didn’t allow them to go out on ops.