American Sniper - Boekje Pienter

89/439
The Iraqis had set up a defensive perimeter outside the refinery.
Their only problem was that we had landed inside. We were now
between them and the refinery—in other words, behind their
positions.
They didn’t like that all that much. They turned around and started
firing at us.
As soon as I realized that we weren’t getting gassed, I threw off my
gas mask. Returning fire with the 60, I had plenty of targets—too
many, in fact. We were heavily outnumbered. But that was not a real
problem. We began calling in air support. Within minutes, all sorts of
aircraft were overhead: F/A-18s, F-16s, A-10As, even an AC-130
gunship.
The Air Force A-10s, better known as Warthogs, were awesome.
They’re slow-moving jets, but that’s intentional—they’re designed to
fly low and slow so they can put a maximum amount of gunfire on
ground targets. Besides bombs and missiles, they’re equipped with a
30-mm Gatling cannon. Those Gatlings chewed the hell out of the enemy
that night. The Iraqis rolled armor out of the city to get us, but
they never got close. It got to the point where the Iraqis realized they
were fucked and tried to flee.
Big mistake. That just made them easier to see. The planes kept
coming, nailing them. They had them zeroed in, and zeroed them out.
You’d hear the rounds coming past you in the air—errrrrrrrrr—then
you’d hear the echo—erhrhrrhrh, followed closely by secondary explosions
and whatever other havoc the bullets caused.
Fuck, I thought to myself, this is great. I fucking love this. It’s
nerve-wracking and exciting and I fucking love it.