American Sniper - Boekje Pienter

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In the end, I was all right with being scheduled for another deployment.
I still loved war.
DELTA PLATOON
Usually, when you come home, a few guys will rotate out of the platoon.
Officers will usually change out. A lot of times the chief leaves,
the LPO—lead petty officer—becomes the chief, and then someone else
becomes LPO. But other than that, you stay pretty tight-knit. In our
case, most of the platoon had been together for many years.
Until now.
Trying to spread out the experience in the Team, command decided
to break up Charlie/Cadillac Platoon and spread us out. I was assigned
to Delta, and put in as LPO of the platoon. I worked directly
with the new chief, who happened to be one of my BUD/S instructors.
We worked out our personnel selections, making assignments and
sending different people off to school. Now that I was LPO, I not only
had more admin crap to deal with, but couldn’t be point man
anymore.
That hurt.
I drew the line when they talked about taking my sniper rifle
away. I was still a sniper, no matter what else I did in the platoon.
Besides finding good point men, one of the toughest personnel decisions
I had to make involved choosing a breacher. The breacher is
the person who, among other things, is in charge of the explosives,
who sets them and blows them (if necessary) on the DA. Once the platoon
is inside, the breacher is really running things. So the group is entirely
in his hands.