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

by Mooney, Michael J.

  Kyle served four tours of duty in Iraq, participating in every major campaign of the war. He was on the ground for the initial invasion in 2003. He was in Fallujah in 2004. He went back, to Ramadi in 2006, and then again, to Baghdad in 2008, where he was called in to secure the Green Zone by going into Sadr City.

  Most of his platoon was stationed in the Pacific before their 2004 deployment to Iraq. Kyle was sent early to assist Marines with clearing insurgents in Fallujah. Tales of his success in combat trickled back to his team. He was originally supposed to watch over the American forces while perched at a safe distance, but he thought he could provide more protection if he was on the street, going house to house with his boys. During one firefight, it was reported that Kyle ran through a hail of bullets to pull a wounded Marine to safety. It was then that his teammates, hearing these stories, started sarcastically referring to him as The Legend.

  Those tales of bravery in battle proliferated upon his third deployment. A younger SEAL was with Kyle at the top of a building in Ramadi when they came under heavy fire. The younger SEAL, who is still active in the teams and can’t be named, dropped to the ground and hid behind an interior wall. When he finally looked up, he saw Kyle standing there, glued to his weapon, covering his field of fire, calling out enemy positions as he engaged.

  When he was on the sniper rifle, Kyle was almost always in a defensive position. If he set up in an abandoned house, he’d have at least until he fired his first shot before his position was exposed. If he and his group had to take over an occupied house as a temporary home base, they’d have to feed the family and take them to the restroom, but they couldn’t let the family members leave the house. So when nobody came out in the morning, the neighbors always knew that Americans were there, and it would be a matter of time before the enemy knew, too.

  In the bulk of the war, snipers were used to make precision kills in the middle of the battlefield. They were an alternative to methods used in other wars, where resistance would have been countered largely by artillery, close-range machine guns, and other weapons that could destroy large swaths of a city and inevitably kill a large number of civilians. (For recent examples, look at the tactics employed by the Syrian government during the ongoing civil war there.) The strict rules of modern engagement essentially turned American soldiers into bait for the enemy. That was true for the snipers as well as the men on the ground they were supposed to protect. The enemy responded to the bait, and firefights ensued.

  Kyle said combat was the worst on his final deployment, to Sadr City in 2008. The enemy was better armed than before. Now it seemed as if every time there was an attack, there were rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs) and fights that went on for days. This was also the deployment that produced Kyle’s longest-distance confirmed kill.

  He was on the second floor of a house on the edge of a village. Using the scope of his .338 Lapua, he began to scan farther out into the distance, to the edge of the next village, a mile away. He saw a figure on the roof of a one-story building. The figure didn’t seem to be doing much, and at the moment he didn’t appear to have a weapon. But later that day, as an Army convoy approached, Kyle checked again and saw the man holding what looked like an RPG. At that distance, Kyle could only estimate his calculations.

  He pulled the trigger and watched through his scope as the Iraqi, 2,100 yards away, fell off the roof. It was the world’s eighth-longest confirmed kill by a sniper. Later, Kyle called it a “really, really lucky shot.”

  One of the things that surprised me most when I was interviewing him was just how much Kyle knew about American snipers of yesteryear. I had done some research into snipers of the past, including Carlos Hathcock. But as Kyle and I talked, it became clear that he knew Hathcock’s story down to the last detail. He had read at least two books that focused completely on the famed Vietnam-era sniper, and when I emailed him a long newspaper profile of Hathcock from the 1980s, he eagerly read that, too. As it turned out, Chris Kyle, the most publicized war hero in decades, had a hero of his own.

  Most of Hathcock’s kills came in jungles, from covered positions in the damp mulch and climbing ferns. His most famous strike—one that would later become lore, talked about in bars and American Legion halls, depicted in several movies and books and articles—came against a North Vietnamese sniper. They’d been hunting each other for days. Hathcock, lying still and silent, flat on his stomach in the mud, gnats digging at the corners of his eyes and the creases of his mouth, spotted a glint of light coming off some leaves across a clearing. He lined up his scope and fired—only later learning that the bullet went straight through the North Vietnamese soldier’s scope and into his eye.

  Kyle admired the skills required for one-on-one hunting, the adrenaline and thrill that must have come with that particular kind of targeting. He called Hathcock “the greatest sniper that ever lived.” He knew all about the various missions his hero had gone on, about the weapons he’d used. And he knew about the way Hathcock—along with so many other veterans from that time—was treated when he got home, how civilians and activists saw him as a ruthless, cold-blooded killer.

  Back then snipers were viewed as cowards by a lot of society. The idea was this: anyone who could look through a scope and see a person up close—the tiny hairs on a target’s neck, the flare of someone’s nostrils, the things that made you remember a person’s individuality—anyone who could see all that and still pull the trigger had to be soulless.

  Kyle would point out that snipers, especially in urban warfare, decrease the number of civilian casualties. Sniper teams are generally pinpoint strikers, their jobs the combat equivalent of a scalpel cut. Plus, he said, “I will reach out and get you however I can if you’re threatening American lives.”

  Many details of Kyle’s life story resembled Hathcock’s, actually. There was the obvious: Both men were known for extraordinarily high numbers of confirmed kills. (Hathcock had ninety-three by the military’s count, though it was likely much higher.) Both of them had nicknames—Hathcock was known as White Feather for the tiny bit of bravado he kept tucked into the band of his bush hat, Kyle as The Legend. And like Kyle, Hathcock told people that he didn’t feel like a hero. In the old newspaper story I had showed Kyle, Hathcock is quoted, saying, “It was just a job.”

  There were little details their stories had in common. Both had a war anecdote that involved a run-in with a snake, for example. And then there were deeper similarities: They both grew up hunting in the woods as boys. Hathcock was from Arkansas, not so unlike Texas in many ways. Both watched Westerns and war movies as kids and dreamed of serving in the military even before they could. Hathcock, too, volunteered for multiple tours, going back even when the war had become incredibly unpopular. Each talked about killing a woman while on the sniper rifle—for both it was with two shots—and Hathcock also told people that he didn’t regret any of his kills.

  Both men were bitter when they eventually had to leave the service. Both credited their wives with helping them get through the darkest times. Both later wrote books about their experiences as snipers, and because the American public has always found the topic fascinating, both became relatively well known for their service. But both also felt like the public would simply never be able to understand the stark, harsh realities of modern war.

  CHRIS KYLE DIDN’T FIT THE STEREOTYPE of the sullen, lone-wolf sniper. By all accounts, his cackling laugh was a staple during training missions, and sometimes during combat as well. In many ways, he was far from the model serviceman. While he always kept his weapons clean, the same was not true of his living space. The way some SEALs tell it, after one deployment his room was in such a disgusting condition that it took two days to clean. Around the bed there were six months’ worth of spent sunflower seed shells he had spit out.

  There are also tales of the nights when his platoon would return from a mission, and as everyone else went off to bed, Chris Kyle would choose instead to play video games, firing up his computer for an epic
session of Madden football. While the intensity of combat exhausted most of his teammates, he sometimes found it invigorating. He could stay up all night.

  He was seldom seen in anything remotely resembling a military uniform. His teammates remember him painting the Punisher skull on his body armor, helmets, and even his guns. He also cut the sleeves off his shirts. He wore civilian hunting shoes instead of combat boots. Eschewing the protection of Kevlar headgear, he wore his old Longhorns baseball cap. He told people he wore the hat so that the enemy knew Texas was represented, that “Texans shoot straight.”

  Kyle terrorized his enemies in true folk-hero fashion. In 2006, intelligence officers reported there was a $20,000 bounty on his head. Before long it went up to $80,000. He would explain later that the bounties were probably for any snipers, as the enemy would have no reliable way to differentiate individual American snipers—but that’s how legends work. Kyle knew that by making his name and face known, he was also standing in and representing all the warriors the public didn’t know. He knew that figure, $80,000, represented to people the real risks, dangers, and overlying pressures American troops felt. At one point he even joked that he was afraid to go home: “I was worried my wife might turn me in.”

  Taya has been asked often over the years how she reconciles the two Chris Kyles, the trained killer and the loving husband and father—the man who rolled around on the floor with his kids, planned vacations to historical sites, and called from wherever he could. Once, he thought his phone was off and Taya ended up overhearing a firefight. She always worried about him, but understanding how he could do what he did was never hard.

  “Chris was out there fighting for his brothers because he loved them,” she says. “He wanted to protect them and make sure they all got to go home to their families.”

  Nobody needed to ask him why he signed up for the military, why he decided to sign over everything up to and including the value of his life. There’s a quote from his book that made its way around the internet. It sums up his feelings: “I’ve lived the literal meaning of the ‘land of the free’ and the ‘home of the brave.’ It’s not corny for me. I feel it in my heart. I feel it in my chest. Even during a ball game, when someone talks during the anthem or doesn’t take off his hat, it pisses me off.” He added, with that Chris Kyle charm, “I’m not one to be quiet about it either.”

  But he noticed that the Iraqis the U.S. forces were training didn’t feel the same way. He couldn’t talk with me about exactly what kind of training he was involved with or witnessed, but he said he could see that the Iraqi troops just weren’t patriotic. They weren’t passionate about building a disciplined military, he’d say. What’s more, Kyle would tell people that he didn’t blame those troops either.

  “They don’t love their country,” he would explain.

  He never cared to talk much about the number of confirmed kills he had. By all accounts, it’s considerably higher than what the Pentagon has released publicly, but certain records could remain classified for decades. When he was eventually convinced to sit down and write a book, the number was discussed quite a bit. Jim DeFelice cowrote American Sniper with Kyle. He says this topic came up a lot early in the process.

  “There is an ‘official’ number of kills that is fairly well known inside the SEAL community,” DeFelice says. “It’s higher than what we use in the book. That figure was purposely ambiguous—the words ‘more than’ were specifically chosen to satisfy both the truth and objections from the military that using the real number would lead to revelations about classified information.”

  The author says they spent a lot of time going over how Kyle felt about using the number, and those discussions are detailed in the beginning of the book. “While his thoughts and feelings on the subject went back and forth,” DeFelice says, “I think in his heart of hearts he always preferred not using any number at all. The number really doesn’t express what his story was, though it did bring people to the story.”

  DeFelice explained how snipers keep track of such things. “We know the number because, very early on, his command began keeping extremely detailed reports on the battlefield,” he says. “There was literally someone taking notes not just on every kill, but every shot snipers took, even in the middle of combat.”

  But even the official number, DeFelice says, is almost certainly less than the actual total number of men Kyle killed in combat. “It doesn’t include combatants who died out of sight or couldn’t otherwise be confirmed as KIA [killed in action]—who were shot and retreated around a corner, only to die there,” he says. “The number also doesn’t include action during a number of missions that remain classified. None of those missions are described in the book, nor was there ever an intention to do so.”

  Of course, the mere discussion, the quantifying of death in such ways, feels macabre. The “number” has generated a lot of controversy. “I think a certain percentage of people are appalled by it,” DeFelice says. “I don’t blame them for being shocked by the reality of war. It sucks, and no one should deny that. But the numbers of KIA attributed not just to Chris but to other snipers, and in fact other men during the combat, is largely a result of strategies aimed at reducing collateral damage and civilian fatalities in urban combat. So the reaction has always seemed to me more than a little ironic.”

  Kyle was less nuanced when he talked about it. He told people he wished he could somehow calculate the number of people he had saved. “That’s the number I’d care about,” he said. “I’d put that everywhere.”

  Taya always saw him as kind and loving, but “very principled.” He would hold a door open for you, but if you didn’t say thank you, he might slam it on you. “Chris, what if he just forgot to say thank you?” Taya would ask. “Well, I bet he won’t forget next time,” he’d say back. He would also wave to all of his neighbors. Most would wave back, except one man near their house in San Diego. “Where I’m from, neighbors wave,” Kyle would say. Eventually he stopped waving to the man every time he saw him, and started flicking him off. “One way or the other, my hand is going up,” he’d say.

  Because of his firm principles, his strong black-and-white views of the world, the idea of war itself left him conflicted. He would often espouse the axiom “War is hell.” But he also loved war. He didn’t want to leave it. He would often say that staying home during a war is “a SEAL’s worst nightmare.”

  While there were hundreds, probably thousands, of individuals he saved, the men who stayed most prominently in his memory long after the battles ended were the men he couldn’t save. Losing his friends devastated him. When fellow Team 3 Charlie platoon member Marc Lee died in August of 2006—the first SEAL to die in the Iraq War—Kyle was inconsolable. All of Lee’s teammates prepared remarks for a memorial service in Ramadi. Kyle wrote out a speech, but when it came time to give it, he couldn’t talk. Every time he tried, he broke down, sobbing.

  “He came up and hugged me afterward,” an active SEAL says. “He apologized. He said, ‘I’m sorry. I wanted to, but I just couldn’t do it.’ ”

  It was at a similar event later that year—a wake for fallen SEAL Michael Monsoor, who was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor for throwing himself on a grenade to save the lives of fellow SEALs—when Kyle reported having had his now-infamous confrontation with former Minnesota governor Jesse Ventura.

  Kyle’s story was in character: They were in a bar popular among SEALs in Coronado, California. Ventura, a former SEAL himself, was in town for an unrelated event and stopped by the wake. Ventura disrespected the troops, saying something to the effect of, “You guys deserve to lose a few.” That was enough. Kyle punched him and left the bar.

  Ventura denied the entire incident and filed a lawsuit against Kyle, in which he has reportedly submitted sworn statements from several people saying that the incident never happened. Two other SEALs, friends of Kyle’s, told me they were there that night and that it all happened just the way Kyle said it did.

  One forme
r SEAL, Andrew Paul, specifically asked to be on record saying, “This would be an excellent time for Mr. Ventura to do the right thing and drop his lawsuit.”

  BY 2009 THE LIFE WAS TAKING ITS TOLL ON TAYA. She told Kyle that, because he was gone so much, she would see him just as often if she lived somewhere else. He took that as an ultimatum. As Kyle pointed out in his book and in interviews, the divorce rate among Navy SEALs is over 90 percent. He knew he wouldn’t be able to do both anymore, to be a SEAL and a husband. So he left his promising career, the dream job for which he felt exceptionally well suited, the purpose that had kept him so motivated for ten years.

  “When I first got out, I had a lot of resentment,” he said. “I felt like she knew who I was when she met me. She knew I was a warrior. That was all I’d ever wanted to do.” He started drinking a lot. He stopped working out. He didn’t want to leave the house or make his usual jokes. He missed the rush of combat, the way being at war sets your priorities straight. He missed knowing that what he was doing mattered. More than anything, though, he missed his brothers in the SEALs. He wrote to them and called them. He told people it felt like a daze.

  The country was so much different in 2009 than it had been when the war began in 2003. He had been home during leave and between tours, but he was never back long enough to think about the cultural shifts. When he left for Iraq in 2003, it was still less than a year and a half after the attacks of September 11, 2001. The phrase “War on Terror” was ubiquitous, as were flag pins. Even Michael Moore was telling college students that they had to maintain respect for the troops. It seemed like every gas station sold those ribbon-shaped magnets meant to remind us to keep the military in our thoughts. There were giant American flags unrolled at so many football games, and patriotic songs filling huge chunks of the radio dial.