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

by Mooney, Michael J.

  When the war began, there were protesters and many who opposed the war in this country (though almost none from any branch of the federal government), and a lot of those people were considered unpatriotic. More people were glued to their televisions, watching the war on cable news in near real time. This was a period when national magazines ran cover stories about the political power of American evangelicals, and gay marriage was a wedge issue that helped conservatives, not liberals. Some people forget, George W. Bush was elected with a higher percentage of the vote in 2004 than he’d received in the previous election.

  But just a few years later, things seemed so different. It felt like there was less unity than ever. The expression “War on Terror” was all but retired. And while there were still active military campaigns in two theaters, most of the country’s attention was focused on the mushrooming financial crisis. There were more empty strip malls, more people looking for work, more Americans hurting.

  In place of conservative political pundits, many news outlets hired either moderates or outspoken liberals. The country elected a president with “Hussein” right in his name. Now there were debates over gay marriage, legalizing pot, and the topic that got Kyle the most heated: gun control. The American public, and the rest of the world for that matter, had been besieged by images and stories such as those from Abu Ghraib, and public opinion had been swayed by the rising numbers of American casualties. The war in Iraq in particular had become extremely unpopular.

  When Kyle wrote to his closest friends, he did talk about the one benefit of being out of the Navy. In all those years at war, he’d had almost no time with his two children. And in his time out, he discovered there was something he liked even more than being a cowboy or valiant sniper.

  “He loved being a dad,” Taya says. She noticed he could be rough and playful with their son and sweet and gentle with their daughter. “A lot of fathers play with their kids, but he was always on the floor with them, rolling around, making everyone giggle.”

  Kyle began to feel better. He got sick of feeling sorry for himself. He didn’t want a divorce. He started working out again—“Getting my mind right,” he called it.

  When he met other vets who were feeling down, he told them they should try working out more, too. But many of them, especially the wounded men with prominent burns or missing limbs, explained that people stared too much. Gyms made them uncomfortable. That’s how he got the idea to put gym equipment in the homes of veterans. When he approached FITCO—a company that provides exercise machines to gym facilities all over the country—and asked for any used equipment, they said no. Instead, they donated new equipment and helped fund a nonprofit dedicated to Kyle’s mission.

  This, more than anything, was what he wanted to show me, what he wanted people to read about. A lot of the men he met still struggled with the jarring trauma of their injuries. There was having to deal with injuries and missing appendages—in many cases, especially with wounds caused by IED attacks, men had what Kyle referred to as their “manhood” blown off—but there was also the abrupt disruption in their lives. As he described it, one minute they might be on a mission with their buddies, in the middle of combat somewhere in Iraq. The next thing they knew they were waking up in a hospital bed in Germany or Virginia, without certain body parts and without their closest friends. That detachment, the separation from their military brothers, was sometimes the worst part.

  Then there was the struggle of dealing with the VA. (Even Kyle, The Legend, a man involved in six different explosions, was denied a disability claim.) There were the problems the men faced at home, with parents and children who didn’t understand and spouses who weren’t prepared for life with a disabled person.

  But when Kyle would show up at a house with brand-new exercise equipment—and he liked to deliver it himself whenever he had the chance—he could see people begin to change. Working out helped these men set goals. They could literally watch themselves getting stronger. Kyle was adamant about the program’s effectiveness.

  “It makes a real difference in these guys’ lives,” he said.

  It wasn’t immediate, but his new life had begun to come together.

  “With helping people,” Taya says, “Chris found his new purpose.”

  She watched him use the same willpower that had carried him through SEAL training and all those impossible missions, but now he was trying to become a better man. He started coaching his son’s T-ball team and taking his daughter to dance practice. He’d always liked hunting, but he hated fishing. Still, when he learned that his son liked to fish, he dedicated himself to becoming a great fisherman so that they could bond the way he had with his own dad.

  Kyle took the family to football games at Cowboys Stadium. (Once, when he had an extra ticket, he gave it to one of the building security guards at Craft and sat next to him through the whole game. “That’s the kind of guy he was,” Taya says.) He took them to church. Unless he was hanging out of a helicopter with a gun doing overwatch, he hated heights. But when his kids wanted to go, he took them to Six Flags to ride the roller coasters and to the State Fair for the Ferris wheel. His black truck became a familiar sight driving around Midlothian, where the family had settled.

  He started collecting replicas of Old West guns, like the ones the cowboys used in movies he watched as a boy. Taya would find him practicing his quick draw and gun-twirling skills. Sometimes they would sit on the couch, watching TV, and he would twirl an unloaded six-shooter around his finger. If she saw someone on the screen that she didn’t like, she would jokingly ask, “Can you shoot that guy?”

  He’d point the pistol at the TV and pretend to fire.

  “Got him, babe.”

  Taya always knew how special he was. Looking back, she’s grateful for at least one particular moment not long before his death: They were in the living room. He was on the couch and she was closing the blinds. Suddenly she stopped and stared at him. He looked up, confused.

  “You know, I’m proud of you,” she said. She told him she was proud of everything, of who he was as a person. “You’re really incredible.”

  He began to turn the compliment around, to deflect as he always did. “Oh no, babe, you’re the—”

  She stopped him. “Just take it,” she said. “I’m proud.”

  He looked at her, his bright eyes fixed on hers.

  “Thanks, babe.”

  J. KYLE BASS IS A HEDGE FUND MANAGER in Dallas, the founder of Hayman Capital Management. He was featured prominently in the Michael Lewis book Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World, which documented both Bass’s keen financial mind and his fantastically opulent lifestyle. A few years ago, Bass was feeling overweight and out of shape. A former college athlete, he wanted something intense to get him back to his former self, so he found a Navy SEAL reserve commander in California, a man who gets prospective SEALs prepared for BUD/S training, and asked if he could tailor a short program for him. The commander obliged, and Bass found that he really liked hanging out with the future and active SEALs. He said if they knew any SEALs coming back to Texas, he’d love to meet them.

  That’s how Bass met Chris Kyle. Bass was building a new house at the time, and he offered to fly Kyle in and pay him for some security consulting.

  “I was just trying to come up with anything to help the guy out,” Bass says. “I was looking for ways to try and help him make this transition back into the real world.”

  Bass invited Kyle to live at his house with him while Taya finished selling their place in San Diego. He introduced Kyle to as many “big money” people as he could. And the wealthy men were enthralled by Chris Kyle. They loved being around The Legend. They loved hearing his stories and invited him to lunch at expensive restaurants. Bass would hold an economic summit every year at his ranch in East Texas. He would kick off the festivities by introducing his sniper friends.

  “I’d have Chris and other SEALs come out and do exhibition shoots,” Bass says. “They would take six-hundred-ya
rd shots at binary explosives, so when they hit them it’s this giant explosion that shakes the ground.” He smiles as he tells the story. “For all the people that manage money all over the world and on Wall Street to come to Texas and see a Navy SEAL sniper shoot a bomb, it’s about as cool as it gets.”

  Bass and some business associates also helped start Craft International, and they brought Kyle on board as president. They put the Craft offices on the same floor as Hayman, so the finance folks and the defense contractors often crossed paths. Despite working in a plush office building in downtown Dallas, Kyle didn’t change much. He’d walk through the doors in his jeans, boots, and ball cap. Even if he saw an important meeting, it wouldn’t stop him from grinning and flicking off the entire room of people. Once, Kyle walked into a coworker’s office and announced he was giving the man a raise. Then he slapped his big hand down on the man’s desk and lifted it up to reveal a shiny new penny. Kyle grinned at his own joke.

  He also brought with him his affinity for doling out his special “hugs.” One time, late at night during a company retreat, Kyle was playing poker with the guys. One of the in-house attorneys who had a bit too much to drink that night thought it would be funny to mess with Kyle. When Kyle’s little boy would do something to elicit a reaction, Taya used to call it “poking the bear.” This night, during the poker game, the attorney was most certainly poking the bear.

  Bass recalls the attorney walked by Kyle and playfully flipped the cap off of the sniper’s head. Everyone laughed and there were several “ohhhh” reactions from surprised onlookers. Kyle only smiled, though, and continued playing. He was nearly twice the lawyer’s size, and the guy was drunk. He let it slide. But when it happened again, Kyle jumped up, grinning, and chased the man down. Within seconds he caught him and was putting him gently to sleep on the floor.

  As one friend puts it, “It was funny, unless it was happening to you.”

  The business concept behind Craft was to market Kyle’s other skills. His credentials when it came to things like close-combat proficiency, marksmanship, and heavy-artillery training were as good as they come. He would be able to help train troops (a lot of military training is done by third-party contractors), police officers, and wealthy businessmen who would pay top dollar for hands-on instruction from an elite warrior such as Chris Kyle. It was fun, but more important to him, he felt that by training police officers and defense contractors working in America’s interests, he was still contributing something to the fight. If he couldn’t be in the middle of the action himself, he figured, he could make sure the people who were had the best preparation possible.

  He did a lot of his training at Rough Creek Lodge in Glen Rose, a luxury resort with an extended shooting range. It’s the same place he would take buddies and wounded vets when they were feeling down and needed to unwind. He said a lot of people didn’t understand, but when you’re on your stomach, aiming at targets hundreds of yards away, it’s actually a little peaceful. You have to be still. You have to control your breathing and block out any thoughts that don’t pertain to the goal at hand. In some ways, it’s as close as someone like Chris Kyle came to meditating.

  WHEN CARLOS HATHCOCK WAS IN VIETNAM, someone gave him a scrap of paper with something scribbled on it. By the time he got out of the Marines, he didn’t carry the piece of paper with him anymore because he had the words memorized. It was a quote attributed to Ernest Hemingway: “There is no hunting like the hunting of a man, and those who have hunted armed men long enough and liked it, never care for anything else thereafter.”

  Chris Kyle didn’t feel that way at all. From the time he was a boy, he had loved going out into nature, hunting with friends or family. Once he was back from the war, he rarely turned down an invitation to a deer lease. (On a lease, a hunter pays a landowner with a deer crossing on his or her property for the right to hunt there. These are common in Texas.) Many of the wealthy businessmen who befriended him also invited him to their ranches.

  One year, after Kyle Bass’s economic summit, one of Bass’s longtime friends, a man who also invests with Hayman Capital, invited the legendary sniper to go hunting with a small group of finance guys on his ranch. This investor friend is, in the crude parlance of Texas businessmen, a “deer queer”—someone who breeds deer and thinks of the animals a little like pets. Throughout his property, there are several large binders full of pictures of deer. There’s one in the living room of the main house, and there are binders in each of the deer blinds set up around the ranch. Each binder has large full-color photos of all the deer on the property. And there are two lists, some deer you can shoot, and some deer you can’t.

  Kyle was out in one of the deer blinds around dusk when he saw something move on the horizon. He saw a tall, heavy rack in the distance. He started flipping through the binder of deer, trying to match what he could see to one of the photos so he knew which list the deer was on.

  Because it was getting dark, Kyle was having a hard time seeing. He also didn’t want to have his nose in the binder while the animal wandered off. Finally he found a picture of the deer, and it was on the “OK to shoot” list—or so he thought. It was getting late, so Kyle lined up his rifle and—boom. He dropped the deer in one shot.

  As the shots echoed around the property, the host put a call out over the radio. Which deer had been shot?

  Kyle took another look at the animal in the distance, and another look at the binder, and he concluded he had killed a deer named 8 Ball. He said so over the radio.

  So the host, a powerful businessman, drove his buggy over to that part of the ranch. He stopped at the deer, lying right where Kyle had killed it. The host got out of the vehicle and walked over to the animal. Without saying a single word, the man got back into the buggy, drove to his car, and drove to Dallas.

  As it turned out, Kyle hadn’t killed 8 Ball. He had killed the man’s prize breeding buck, worth tens of thousands of dollars. The deer was named En Fuego because his wide rack had the rare colorings of a blazing campfire.

  Soon Bass got wind of what had happened on the ranch. He’s been friends with this man since college, and as college buddies tend to do, they’ve often teased each other over the years. So Bass couldn’t resist the opportunity. He called his friend.

  “I just said, ‘Hey, I heard Chris was en fuego at your ranch this weekend,’ ” Bass says. “He gave me an eff you and hung up the phone and didn’t talk to anyone for a couple of weeks.”

  When Kyle realized what he’d done, he felt bad. In an effort to make things right, he offered the man his .338 rifle, the gun he had carried in-theater, a weapon that will almost certainly end up in a museum one day. The businessman was overwhelmed by the gesture. More than touched, he declined the offer. Instead, the man is having a bronze statue of the deer made, to stand in that spot. There will be a small placard that will read “Shaitan.”

  “Now,” says Bass, “it’s folklore.”

  KYLE INSISTED THAT HE NEVER HAD ANY INTENTION of writing a book. But Scott McEwen, an attorney in San Diego, had heard many of the legendary tales involving Kyle and thought they needed to be collected in one place. Soon he was put in touch with HarperCollins publishers and the New York writer Jim DeFelice. Kyle figured if it was going to happen regardless, he might as well participate. He wanted to give credit where he felt it was due. Ultimately, he decided that the book would provide an opportunity to tell the stories of his SEAL brothers.

  “If it was going to be done anyway,” he said, “it might as well be done right.”

  Technically, he started the process before he officially agreed to put his name on the book. He and Taya were flown to New York in the middle of winter to meet DeFelice and begin pouring out their story. It was supposed to work a little like an oral history: DeFelice would ask questions, and all Kyle would have to do was answer them. Then the writer would record the stories as best he could in Kyle’s voice and words. But the interviews were exhausting.

  “He was not naturally loqu
acious,” DeFelice says. “Nor did he particularly like to talk about himself. When we first started working together, telling me what happened in the war put an enormous strain on him. He was reliving battles in great detail for the first time since he’d gotten out of the service. He could have been killed in any number of the situations he’d been in. That’s a reality that can be difficult to comprehend at the time, and even harder to understand later on.”

  Kyle did find time at one point for a snowball fight with DeFelice’s thirteen-year-old son. The war hero claimed he’d had plenty of experience in snow, but on this day, the boy got the better of him. Kyle came running in and grabbed a beer.

  “Okay, kid,” Kyle told him. “Now you can say you beat a Navy SEAL in a snowball fight.”

  The writing process seemed to wear on the war hero. “His dad told me later that Chris looked like he’d been through hell after the first long weekend we worked together,” DeFelice says. “I can’t recall his exact words, but it was clear that the work had taken a huge amount out of him.”

  DeFelice noticed that, gradually, talking about his experiences became easier for Kyle.

  “Hopefully, telling the story put the pressure of the war into some sort of manageable perspective,” he says. “I think he got more comfortable talking about things. He eventually reached a point where he could see his war experiences as an important part of his life, but not as everything in his life. I think the danger he’d been in started, not necessarily to fade, but to become more manageable and objective.”

  DeFelice adds, “I think Taya, the family, and his close friends were all a big part of that. I think it helped, too, that he came to see the book as a way to help not just the families of the two men who’d died next to him, but all service people in general. Not help in a big way, just help them by telling other people what they’d been through.”

  Kyle decided not to take a dime from American Sniper. As it became a bestseller, his share amounted to more than $1.5 million. He gave two-thirds to the families of fallen teammates and the rest to a charity that helped wounded veterans. It was something he and Taya discussed a lot.