The Life and Legend of Chris Kyle: American Sniper, Navy SEAL

by Mooney, Michael J.

  The hardest part of leaving the service? “Missing my boys. Missing being around them in the action. That’s your whole life, every day for years. I hate to say it, but when you’re back and you’re just walking around a mall or something, you feel like a pussy.” It nagged at him. “You hear someone whining about something at a stoplight, and it’s like, Man, three weeks ago I was getting shot at, and you’re complaining about—I don’t even care what.”

  There was also the struggle to readjust to his family life. “When I got out, I realized I barely knew my kids,” he said. “I barely knew my wife. In the three years before I got out, I spent a total of six months at home. It’s hard to go from God, Country, Family to God, Family, Country.”

  But three years after he left the SEALs, he had a job he liked. He could do (mildly) badass things: shoot big guns, detonate an occasional string of explosives, be around a lot of other former special-operations types. His marriage was finally back in a good place. He had a book on the bestseller list. And he had the chance to help veterans through a number of charities.

  “A lot of these guys just miss being around their boys, too,” he said. “They need guys who speak their speak. They don’t need to be treated like they’re special.”

  He’d often take vets out to the gun range. Being around people who understood what they’d been through, being able to relax and shoot off some rounds, it was a little like group therapy.

  With his family, and with training people, helping people, he had found a new purpose. Chris Kyle could do anything if he had a purpose. He’d been like that since he was a little boy.

  HE WAS THE SON OF A CHURCH DEACON and a Sunday-school teacher. His father’s job at Southwestern Bell had the family moving a lot, and though he was born in Odessa, he told people he grew up “all over Texas.” Both parents kept busy and worked hard: his father always maintained two jobs, and his mother went back to work as soon as the boys left the house. Kyle had two dreams as a little boy: he wanted to be a cowboy, and he wanted to be a Marine.

  Guns were part of life. When he was little, he played with BB guns: a Daisy pump rifle and a CO2-powered revolver designed to look like the 1860 model Colt Peacemaker. When he was eight years old, his father gave him his first real gun. About the same time he was learning to read, he was learning to shoot. Little Chris had a bolt-action .30-06 that he later admitted scared him a bit, and his younger brother, Jeff, had a Marlin .30-30 with a cowboy-style lever-action. They liked to go hunting with their father, but animals weren’t the only thing they hunted.

  For his birthday parties, Kyle liked to have BB-gun wars. It’s actually quite common in Texas. Boys descend on a neighborhood or a park and pretend to be enemies. He would perch on the roof of his parents’ house, waiting for his friends to dart across the yard. He wasn’t a great shot back then, but at least one friend is still walking around with one of Kyle’s BBs in his hand.

  Jeff was born four years after Chris. He always had a slightly smaller build, and his brown hair made the older brother’s strawberry-blond mop seem even lighter. The family has dozens of photos that show the young boys growing up together. If they shared a cupcake and Chris came away with frosting on his face, his brother did, too. As Jeff got older, he would ride a small bicycle designed to look like a police motorcycle. While Jeff gripped the handlebars, Chris would push him along, the older brother’s eyes fixed on the horizon, the sides of his little mouth curled just a bit.

  There’s a picture of Chris at around nine or ten years old, dressed in a number 33 Tony Dorsett Dallas Cowboys uniform, replete with a small white helmet and chinstrap. He’s looking out from the helmet grinning, baring his teeth. Beside him is Jeff, in an even smaller version of the same number 33 uniform, the too-big-by-far helmet askew on his young head.

  Their parents would let them box each other in the family living room. Chris didn’t go easy on the younger sibling, and standing there with one hand behind his back—because that was the rule—and one gloved fist up, he was ready to strike like a rattlesnake. Jeff wouldn’t back down either, flinging both of his tiny hands at his brother without fear. Later, he’d explain their dynamic to reporters like this: “We pulled each other’s chains all the time, and pushed each other’s buttons, definitely.”

  That’s the way the big brother liked it. He was ceaselessly competitive, but he never wanted his younger brother to quit. Being strong, being rugged, was a virtue in the Kyle household from very early on. Developing internal strength was as important as developing muscles, a lesson reinforced every time they watched an old Western or a war movie, when the family sat around the dinner table, and every weekend at church.

  The brothers were inseparable for years. “His brother was his best friend,” Taya says. They would go target shooting together in the woods. As they grew up, they worked on ranches together, competed in rodeos together, and would eventually join the military around the same time. Jeff went into the Marines the way the older brother had always talked about.

  During high school in Midlothian, Kyle played football and baseball. He showed cows with the FFA. He and his buddies cruised for girls in nearby Waxahachie. Bryan Rury was a close friend of Kyle’s in high school. Rury was much smaller, but it seemed they were always standing next to each other. “I think Chris liked looking like a giant,” Rury says.

  Kyle certainly had a devilish streak, but he was also, generally, a good kid. One time he found Rury smoking a cigarette. “He threatened to tell my mother,” Rury says. “He just kept saying, ‘Do you know how stupid that is? Do you? Why would you do something stupid like that?’ ”

  Once when he was a senior, in the halls during a class period for some reason, he saw a younger kid, a freshman, crying against the wall. When the younger student saw the senior—a big, popular kid at the top of the high school social hierarchy—the freshman tried to mask his tears. But Kyle still stopped. He turned to the kid, looked him in the eye, and said, simply, “Hey, I cry sometimes, too.”

  If that doesn’t sound like a lot, you’ve never been a freshman who felt lonely. It’s the kind of story his friends would recount when trying to describe how he could be simultaneously gruff and genuinely sweet. The same person who would stop and help a kid he didn’t know pick up a pile of dropped schoolbooks would be on the playground fighting later that day.

  He liked to fight. Or rather, the way his friends describe it, he was just really, really good at it. Once someone gave a solid shove or threw a punch, Kyle would be all over him. He could turn so fast and hit so hard, fights rarely lasted beyond the first few seconds.

  “When you’re a kid, and you’re really good at something, you just like doing it,” Rury says. “And nobody was as good at anything as Chris was at fighting.”

  His father warned him never to start a fight. Kyle said he lived by that code “most of the time.” He found that if he was sticking up for his friends, or for kids who couldn’t defend themselves, he got to fight and he got to be the good guy at the same time. Once he felt like he was standing up for something right, he would never back down.

  One time, there was a new kid in school who was trying to make a name for himself by picking on Rury. Kyle came into class one day to find Rury quiet, upset. “He asked me what was wrong, and I wouldn’t tell him,” Rury says. “But he figured it out on his own pretty fast.”

  Kyle went over to the new kid’s desk and, in his not-so-subtle Chris Kyle way, told him he better leave his friend alone. Or else. The kid stood up from his desk and they went at it. While Kyle almost never started the fight, his friends say, he always ended it. “As they were taking him off to the principal’s office, I just remember him flashing me that giant smile of his,” Rury says.

  That grin could mean many things. It might mean he was having fun, like when he was with horses or guns. It might mean he was happy to be with his friends or family, hanging out and cracking jokes. If it was that mischievous, devilish smile, it meant someone was about to be on the receiving
end of a practical joke—or about to get choked unconscious.

  After high school, Rury says, they didn’t talk that often. But more than fifteen years later, when Kyle eventually quit the Navy and moved back to Texas, they picked up right where they’d left off.

  “It was like we didn’t miss a day,” Rury says. “He would just call me up some afternoons and ask if I wanted to stop by the house and hang out.” They’d get together for beers and sit and talk. “He was that same person,” Rury says. “No matter how big or famous he got. He was the same friend from when I was ten. He’d be totally honest when you needed to hear it. Sometimes if I was complaining or feeling uptight he’d just say, ‘Brian, I love you, but you’re being a little bitch right now.’ Then we’d be totally fine. That’s a true friend.”

  GROWING UP ON SMALL RANCHES meant that working with animals was part of life. On weekends the boys fed the horses, moved cattle, and inspected the fence lines. Kyle would tell stories about punching cows in the head out of frustration and, by his record, twice breaking his hand. By contrast, he said he would never hit a horse. He felt like they were smarter than cattle, that it was more of a cooperative interaction. This, he would later explain, is what gave him the patience he needed as a sniper.

  He also rode bulls in small local rodeo competitions. He essentially taught himself, and he didn’t win much, though he enjoyed the lifestyle: the traveling and partying, the manly exertion and the occasional “buckle bunny.” It all made him feel like a real cowboy.

  After high school, he went to Tarleton State University, mostly to postpone the responsibilities of adulthood, and he continued to enter riding competitions—broncos or bulls—anytime he had the chance. But during his freshman year, his rodeo career came to an end. He was in a starting chute in Rendon, Texas, on top of a bronco when it bucked and flipped on him, knocking him out. The way Kyle told it, the horse had come down on him awkwardly, and the cowboys had to essentially roll the animal back over him to open the chute. When it was over, Kyle had a dislocated shoulder, a broken rib, a bruised lung and kidney, and a set of pins in both of his wrists.

  In his book, he would talk about how a few weeks later he was on a date with a girl he liked when the screws sticking out of either side of both wrists—he compared them to the neck bolts of Frankenstein’s monster—started bothering him. So he broke one of them off at the base with his bare hands.

  “I don’t guess she was too impressed with that,” he wrote. “The date ended early.”

  When he told me the story, he lifted his giant hands up to show me the spot, as close to supplicating as he ever got.

  “Right here,” he said, pointing at the side of his right wrist.

  In college, he spent more time drinking than studying, and soon he decided he’d rather be working on a ranch full time and considered trying to work his way up to the job of ranch manager one day. He loved the work, sweating in the sobering sun, feeling that special blend of accomplishment and exhaustion at the end of the day. But he knew his future was in the military—in the Marines, he thought—and he figured he shouldn’t waste any more time.

  The Marine recruiting office is right next to the Army, Navy, and Air Force offices. As luck would have it, the day Kyle showed up to enlist, the Marine recruiter was out of the office for lunch. But the other recruiters were there—waiting, inviting. He compared the recruiters to snipers themselves, picking off targets as they walked down the hall.

  The first recruiter to get to him was from the Army. Kyle heard all about the Army’s Special Forces. He heard about the Rangers, and about jumping from planes and small-arms training. Then came the Navy, where he heard about the SEALs, and how competitive and challenging their preliminary school would be.

  He was more than intrigued. He said that at that moment, he wanted to be a SEAL more than anything. So much so that when the recruiter told him he would have a better chance of making the teams if he rejected his signing bonus—something Kyle realized later probably made the recruiter look pretty good to his bosses—he didn’t think twice and declined the money.

  With just a small twist of fate, a slight variance in the lunch scheduling of a stranger, the arc of his life could have been completely different. If he had become a Marine, who knows where it would have taken him, or how well-suited he would have been to the challenges. Who knows how many people would have ever known the name Chris Kyle. Perhaps his will to win and his ability to fight and to thrive under pressure would have driven him in the same way. Maybe he would have decided it wasn’t for him and dropped it early on.

  I asked him if he ever thought about how his life could have been so different. If he ever wondered how it might have played out if maybe the Marine recruiter had brought his lunch to work that day.

  Kyle said he rarely considered it. After that day in the Navy recruiter’s office, it didn’t matter. He didn’t want to be a Marine anymore. Now, he wanted to be a SEAL.

  There was a problem, though. Kyle still had pins in his arm from the rodeo accident, and when he took the physical required at the beginning of BUD/S (Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL) training, he was told he’d be disqualified, that he would never even have a chance to compete.

  So he quit school for good and focused on being a full-time rancher in Colorado. After working in the cold for months—and missing the heat of Texas—he was arranging to move back when he got a call from a Navy recruiter, asking if he still wanted to be a SEAL. Within days, he was ready to go. He had been a cowboy, was done with it. It was time for the other half of his dream to begin.

  KYLE BREEZED THROUGH THE NAVY’S BASIC TRAINING. He only made it through BUD/S training by way of sheer resolve. He told stories about lying there on the beach, his arms linked with his friends’, their heads hovering above the frigid rising tide. He knew if he got up and rang the bell—if he quit—he could get hot coffee and a doughnut. The uncontrollable shivering—they called it “jackhammering”—lasted for hours, but he never wanted to stop. He joked that he was only lazy, that if the bell had been a little closer, maybe his entire life would have been different. But the truth is, nothing could have kept him from his dream.

  “He had more willpower than anyone I’ve ever met,” Taya says. “If he cared about something, he just wouldn’t ever quit. You can’t fail at something if you just never quit.”

  Taya met Kyle in a bar just after he finished BUD/S training. She lived in Long Beach at the time and was going through a dark patch of life in a new town when a friend invited her to San Diego for a night out somewhere different. She resisted at first—San Diego was 90 minutes away—and then again when the bar her friend liked had a cover charge. But she went in anyway and was standing with her friend when this short-haired, muscle-bound Texan approached her. When she asked what he did—she suspected from the physique and the swagger that he was in the military—he initially told her he drove an ice cream truck. (He’d told other women he was a “dolphin waxer.”) She figured he’d be arrogant but was surprised to find him idealistic instead. But she was still skeptical. Taya’s sister had divorced a guy who was trying to become a SEAL, and Taya had specifically stated she could never marry someone like that.

  They stayed and talked for hours, she remembers, both of them mostly ignoring their respective friends. Finally Taya gave in and passed him her phone number. Then, after last call, they walked out to the parking lot—and Taya promptly vomited up the scotch she’d been drinking all night.

  Taya grew up in Oregon, the youngest daughter of a small-town mayor. She’s petite, with soft brunette hair and dark eyes that can turn fierce in a split second. She’s hard, cynical, and very protective of her two children. (Before agreeing to an interview with me, she sent her friend, a member of the Dallas SWAT unit, to feel me out and make sure I was who I claimed to be.) She had to be independent and strong, especially to be with a Navy SEAL.

  Kyle turned out to be quite sensitive. He was able to read her better than anyone she’d known. Even when sh
e thought she was keeping something hidden behind a good facade, he could always see through it. That kept them from needing to talk about their emotions or constantly reassess their relationship. They didn’t need to get, as Taya would put it later, “all feely and dramatic,” and that suited her. When they were together, life felt easier for both of them, she says. They got married shortly before he shipped out to Iraq for the first time.

  IT TAKES YEARS TO EARN ENOUGH TRUST to be a SEAL sniper. Even after sniper school, Kyle had to prove himself again and again in the field, under the pressure of battle. He served other missions before going to Afghanistan and Iraq, in places he couldn’t discuss because the operations were classified.

  As he would eventually describe in American Sniper, his first kill on the rifle came in late March 2003, in Nasiriyah, Iraq. It wasn’t long after the initial invasion, and his platoon—“Charlie” of SEAL Team 3—had taken a building earlier that day so they could provide overwatch for a unit of Marines thundering down the road. He was holding a bolt-action .300 Winchester Magnum that belonged to his platoon chief. He saw a woman about fifty yards away. As the Marines got closer, the woman pulled a grenade. Hollywood might have you believe that snipers aim for the head—“one shot, one kill”—but effective snipers aim for the middle of the chest, for center mass.

  Kyle pulled the trigger twice.

  “The public is soft,” he used to say. “They have no idea.” Because of that softness, he had to have that story, and others, cleared by the Department of Defense before he could include them in his book.

  He wanted outsiders to know exactly what kind of evil the troops have to deal with. But he understood why the Pentagon wouldn’t want to give America’s enemies any new propaganda. He knew the public didn’t want to hear about the brutal realities of war.