American Sniper - Boekje Pienter

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Not only did we get the terrorists’ attention—we got everyone’s attention.
We showed we were the force to be reckoned with.
That’s where the so-called Great Awakening came. It wasn’t from
kissing up to the Iraqis. It was from kicking butt.
The tribal leaders saw that we were bad-asses, and they’d better
get their act together, work together, and stop accommodating the insurgents.
Force moved that battle. We killed the bad guys and brought
the leaders to the peace table.
That is how the world works.
KNEE SURGERY
I’d first hurt my knees in Fallujah when the wall fell on me. Cortisone
shots helped for a while, but the pain kept coming back and getting
worse. The docs told me I needed to have my legs operated on, but doing
that would have meant I would have to take time off and miss the
war.
So I kept putting it off. I settled into a routine where I’d go to the
doc, get a shot, go back to work. The time between shots became
shorter and shorter. It got down to every two months, then every
month.
I made it through Ramadi, but just barely. My knees started locking
and it was difficult to get down the stairs. I no longer had a choice,
so, soon after I got home in 2007, I went under the knife.
The surgeons cut my tendons to relieve pressure so my kneecaps
would slide back over. They had to shave down my kneecaps because I
had worn grooves in them. They injected synthetic cartilage material