American Sniper - Boekje Pienter

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performance can depend on the individual unit. Some are excellent,
filled with hoorah and first-class warriors. A few are absolutely horrible;
most are somewhere in between.
In my experience, Marines are gung ho no matter what. They will
all fight to the death. Every one of them just wants to get out there and
kill. They are bad-ass, hard-charging mothers.
We inserted into the desert in the middle of the night, with two threeseat
DPVs, driving off the back of a 53. The ground was firm enough
that no one got stuck.
We were behind the tip of the U.S. advance, and there were no enemy
units in the area. We drove up through the desert until we came
to an Army base camp. We rested a few hours with them, then took off
to scout for the Marines ahead of their advance.
The desert wasn’t entirely empty. While there were long stretches
of wilderness, there were also towns and very small settlements strung
out in the distance. We mostly skirted the towns, observing them from
the distance. Our job was to get an idea of where the enemy strongpoints
were, radioing them back so the Marines could decide whether
to attack or bypass them. Every so often we’d reach high ground, stop
for a while, and take a scan.
We had only one significant contact that day. We were skirting by
a city. We obviously got too close, because they started engaging us. I
fired the .50-cal, then swung around to the 60 as we hauled ass out of
there.
We must have traveled hundreds of miles that day. We lay up for a
while in late afternoon, got some rest, then took off again after nightfall.
When we started attracting fire that night, our orders were