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

by Mooney, Michael J.

  “I would ask him, ‘How much is enough? Where does your family fit in?’ ” she says. “But I understood.”

  When the book came out in early 2012, everyone wanted to interview him. He was on late-night talk shows, cable news, and radio. He did a number of reality TV shows related to shooting. (He rarely took much money from the appearances.) He always went on with a ball cap on his head and a wad of tobacco in his mouth.

  There are stories of people trying to put makeup on him backstage. A pleasant, sweet woman from the network would approach him with the case of cosmetics.

  “Nope,” he would say.

  “But everyone on TV wears it,” producers or offended makeup artists would reply.

  “Not gonna happen.”

  His favorite appearance—or at least his friends’ favorite—was on Conan O’Brien’s show. The comedian was in good form that night, and rarely did Kyle laugh so loudly or smile so much in public. The interview began with O’Brien complimenting the early success of the book. Then he asked about SEAL Team 6, the team made famous after the raid that killed Osama Bin Laden.

  “What’s the difference between SEAL Team 3 and SEAL Team 6?” the host asked.

  Kyle, wearing boots, jeans, a black collared shirt bearing the Craft logo, and a ball cap, answered in his slow Texas drawl. “Well,” he said. “Originally you had SEAL Team 1 and SEAL Team 2. And then they formed up a special unit that was called SEAL Team 6. Since then, so many guys have been coming in—we’ve been building up the forces—that they started filling in the rest of the numbers. To go from one of the other SEAL teams to 6, you basically have to go through another boot camp and tryout.”

  O’Brien asked if he’d wanted to be in SEAL Team 6.

  “At the time I did not,” Kyle said, earnest. “But looking back at it, yes, I wish I would have.”

  “You’ve got an amazing story,” O’Brien said. “You’ve got nothing to be ashamed of. But it might be fun to walk into a bar now and go ‘SEAL Team 6!’ ” The host pointed at himself with both thumbs, emphasizing his own smarminess. “I do that a lot.”

  Kyle might have been a bit nervous at first, but now he erupted with laughter. O’Brien rolled with it. “I tell people I was on that raid,” he said. “And no one believes it. Then I give details that just aren’t, you know—we got him in Baltimore!”

  The host asked about Kyle’s longest shot. “Twenty-one football fields away,” O’Brien said. “I can’t even understand making a shot from that distance.”

  Without missing a beat, Kyle chimed in, “I can’t either.” The audience howled with laughter.

  “It was an accident,” O’Brien joked. “You dropped your rifle.” The crowd kept the laughs coming.

  Then the host asked about the level of technology employed by modern snipers, and how different sniping was in the past.

  “I definitely cheated,” Kyle said. By now the two of them seemed to feed off each other. They shared real comedic timing. “I just use a ballistic computer that tells me everything to do. So I’m just a monkey on a gun.”

  “I wouldn’t go that far,” O’Brien said.

  Throughout the short interview, Kyle, the mannered Texan he was, kept calling O’Brien sir.

  “You don’t have to call me sir by the way,” O’Brien quipped. “I’m a talk show host.”

  Afterward, Kyle’s friends would note how comfortable he eventually seemed, how nice it was to have the world see him laugh like they had so many times.

  He also did appearances at churches. On Fourth of July weekend in 2012, he went to Fellowship Church in Grapevine, Texas, one of the largest mega-churches in the country. (There are five “campuses” spread between Texas and Florida, and the sermons are broadcast and streamed to tens of thousands more around the world.) The pastor, Ed Young, introduced him to the audience by explaining that while all too often “we forget what we should remember and remember what we forget,” a Christian should always keep in mind the sacrifices made by the people who secure our freedom with their blood. He called Kyle “a guest who is maybe the best we have ever had in the history of our church.”

  Kyle came out on stage wearing his jeans, boots, T-shirt, and hat, but this time he was sans tobacco. Though he sometimes complained about how he didn’t enjoy church as a boy, he also told people what a proud Christian he’d been his entire life. His duty to God, he explained, was the only thing that came before his responsibilities to his country and family. He was comfortable in church. He sat relaxed in a plush white chair across from the pastor. Young, an author of many books himself, explained that he hadn’t read American Sniper yet because “I didn’t want the book to taint what we were going to talk about.”

  “I’m glad you didn’t read it, either,” Kyle said, grinning. “There’s bad words in there.”

  They talked about how he became a SEAL, how in training SEALs treated everyone, both officers and enlisted, as equals, as teammates working toward a goal. They talked about the values of giving your life to pay for the freedom of others, self-sacrifice in the name of strangers. “If you want to go protest,” Kyle said, “it’s been paid for you to go do that.”

  Young pointed out that there were parallels between the way people “trample over the blood” of both Jesus and military personnel.

  “But in no way are we like Jesus,” Kyle said. The audience snickered. “Don’t compare me too much to him.”

  They talked about how important it is to submit to and respect authority—“even the people you don’t like,” Kyle said. “If it’s someone in some certain position, you don’t have to respect the person, but you will respect that position. And you will show respect. The only way you get it is by earning it, and that’s by showing it.”

  Kyle had 1,200 people at his first public book signing. It was similar in every town. He preferred to stand for the length of the book signings. “If y’all are standing, I can stand,” he said. He would wait until he signed every book he was asked to, even if it took hours. It often did, because he wanted to take a moment to talk with each person. He tried to personalize each book. He’d pose for photos, one after another.

  As he became more famous, more people wanted to spend time with him. More politicians wanted to go shooting with him. At one point, he was at a range with Governor Rick Perry. Perry was about to shoot the sniper rifle and asked Kyle if he had an extra pad to put on the cement before he lay down. Kyle replied with a mock-serious tone. “You know, Governor,” he said, “Ann Richards was out here not too far back, and she didn’t need a pad at all.”

  A good friend once introduced him to the movie star Natalie Portman. He asked her what she did for a living. And, as the story goes, she liked him even more after that.

  Then there is this story: Kyle had been invited to a luxury suite at a University of Texas football game and decided to take a heartbroken buddy of his, a Dallas police officer who had recently caught his girlfriend making out with another guy. They were in the suite for a few hours, talking and drinking, when a former Texas football star happened to walk in. At some point Kyle realized that this former star was also the guy who had kissed his friend’s girlfriend.

  Kyle’s friend knew what was coming. He begged him not to, but it was in vain.

  “It’s man law,” Kyle said.

  Sure enough, Kyle approached the former star and gave him a “hug” right there in the suite. As women were shrieking and wondering if the former football great was dead, Kyle kept the hold for just a little longer than usual, causing the man to lose control of his bowels as he passed out.

  It wasn’t just his friends he took care of. People wrote to him from all over the world, asking for favors or for his time, especially after he started appearing on TV. He did his best to accommodate every request he could, even when Taya was worried he was spreading himself too thin.

  “He was so trusting,” she says. “He didn’t let himself worry about much.”

  IN MANY WAYS, EDDIE RAY ROUTH was an exact foil
for Chris Kyle. Routh was thirteen years younger than Kyle, but they both graduated from high school in Midlothian. While Kyle was broad-chested and rugged, with eyes that literally twinkled (especially on camera), Routh was stringy and scraggly with dark hair and dark eyes. Both of them dreamed of joining the Marines from early in life. In Routh’s senior yearbook, there is a photo of him having a conversation with a Marine recruiter. At that moment, Routh was eager. From the look on his clean-shaven young face, it’s clear he was trying to play it cool to impress the recruiter, but that he was excited. The yearbook staff asked him why he planned to join the Marines. Routh is quoted, saying, “I want to be one of the few and the proud.” Their lives had been on relatively similar paths until they each turned eighteen.

  Unlike Kyle, Routh didn’t put off entering the military. He skipped college altogether and started boot camp in 2006, less than two weeks after his high school graduation. While Kyle’s military career was bright, full of decorations and promotions, Routh didn’t aspire to the highest levels of specialized training and instead was in Iraq by September 2007. As tales of Kyle’s battlefield heroics spread to every branch of the service, it’s not clear exactly how much combat Routh saw. Still, his family would later report to the media that he came back a profoundly changed man.

  And it didn’t get any better after he was sent to Haiti for earthquake relief in 2010, just before being discharged. In under four years he’d risen to the rank of corporal, but he appeared to struggle with what his family and lawyer have said is post-traumatic stress disorder.

  Before he went off to war, Routh was “one of the best guys ever,” his cousin Adam, one year younger, would later tell the NBC affiliate in Dallas. “If it was a job to be done, he was there, knuckles deep into it, because he was a good man.” But when he returned, he wasn’t the same.

  “He was still a good guy, but there was an emptiness,” Adam explained. “There was an emptiness there in his eyes. Thinking back, and looking back into it, he was more of an aggressive person.”

  After their military careers, their lives continued to head in different directions. Kyle became a model of outward stability, of how someone can work toward assimilating back into civilian life, of how someone can apply the discipline of a warrior toward healthy relationships. He became a devoted family man. Routh was, more and more, a loner. As Kyle became the reluctant war hero, the author, the businessman, the public speaker who used the platforms he was given to help his military brethren and tell people about the things he believed in, it appears Routh’s life descended into chaos. The younger man’s family grew increasingly concerned for—and scared of—the person he was turning into.

  Eight months before Routh’s name would make the news, his mother called the police in her hometown of Lancaster, Texas—not far from Midlothian—to say she believed that her son had stolen nine pill bottles from her medicine cabinets. A few months after that, when his parents told Routh they wanted to get rid of his gun—they were scared, they would later tell authorities—the ensuing argument led to another call to the police and Routh threatening suicide. In yet another incident a few months later, police officers reported finding Routh stumbling around town, inebriated and furious.

  On two separate occasions in January 2013, his family checked him into Green Oaks Hospital, a psychiatric treatment center in Dallas, and the local VA Medical Center. Both times he was released a few days later, against the wishes of his parents.

  JODI ROUTH REACHED OUT TO KYLE because she knew his history of caring for veterans and thought he might be able to help her son. Kyle told people he and his friend Chad Littlefield were going to take the kid out to blow off some steam.

  Littlefield was a buddy Kyle had come to count on over the past few years. They met as dads on the T-ball field. Littlefield would come over at 5:00 a.m. sometimes to work out with his friend. Often they could sit for hours and never talk, totally comfortable in silence. It became a joke between Taya and her husband.

  “Well, Chad and I were real chatty this morning,” Kyle would say, and Taya would laugh. “Oh yeah?” she would say back. “Ya’ll say one sentence, or two?”

  Littlefield had come over a few nights earlier to have Kyle adjust the scope of his rifle. Littlefield brought a bag from Sonic and two tall drinks. As he stood there that night, with Kyle working on the gun, Littlefield looked up at Taya, smiling.

  That night Kyle invited Littlefield to come with him to Rough Creek. They were going to take Jodi Routh’s son shooting. Littlefield had accompanied Kyle on similar trips dozens of times.

  They were in Kyle’s big black truck when they showed up in the Dallas suburb of Lancaster, at the home Eddie Ray Routh shared with his parents. The Rouths hoped time with a war hero, a legend like Chris Kyle, might help their son.

  It was a little after lunchtime on Saturday, February 2, when they picked up Routh and headed west on Route 67. Kyle drove right past the exit for his own house, past the waving Texas flags along the highway. The threesome went through one small town after another, past high schools and police stations and any number of gas stations. The drive took about an hour and a half. They got to Rough Creek Lodge around 3:15 p.m. They turned up a snaking three-mile road toward the lodge and let a Rough Creek employee know they were heading to the range, another mile and a half down a rocky, unpaved road.

  This was a place Kyle loved. He had given many lessons here over the past three years. He’d spend hours working with anyone who showed an interest in shooting. This is where he would take his boys when they needed to get away. In the right light, the dry, blanched hills and cliffs looked a little like the places he’d been to in Iraq. When a group of vets went out there, away from the rest of the world, they could relax and enjoy the camaraderie so many of them missed.

  We may never know exactly what happened next. They weren’t there long, police suspect, before Routh turned his semiautomatic pistol on Kyle and Littlefield. He took Kyle’s truck, left Rough Creek, and headed east on 67. Later he would tell his sister that he “traded his soul for a new truck.” Less than two hours after they first pulled through the lodge’s front gate, a hunting guide from the lodge spotted two bodies covered in blood, both shot multiple times.

  Routh drove to a friend’s house in Alvarado and called his sister. Then he drove to her house where, his sister told police, he was “out of his mind.” He told her he’d murdered two people, that he’d shot them “before they could kill him.” He said “people were sucking his soul” and that he could “smell the pigs.” She told him he needed to turn himself in.

  From there, Routh drove home to Lancaster, where the police were waiting for him. When they tried to talk him out of the truck, he sped off. With the massive grille guard, he ripped through the front of a squad car. They chased Routh through Lancaster and into Dallas. He was headed north on I-35 when the motor of Kyle’s truck finally burned out, near Wheatland Road. Routh was arrested and charged with two counts of murder.

  THE MEMORIAL WAS HELD a little more than a week after the murders. Marcus Luttrell and his wife, Melanie, along with a number of Kyle’s family friends, coordinated the events. There were no buildings in Midlothian that could accommodate the thousands of people who wanted to be there. Jerry Jones offered up Cowboys Stadium, an arena Kyle had marveled over before his death. There would be a small, private service for friends and family, then a larger one open to the public.

  Messages spread through social media. Press releases went out to local outfits. Several national outlets, including the New York Times and Time magazine, sent reporters. Nobody knew exactly how many people to expect.

  There were no vendors in the parking lot that day. There was nobody selling parking. A few TV news vans parked at various entry points, where the cameras could pick up the streams of mourners or packs of police motorcycles.

  Celebrities came, including Jerry Jones, Troy Aikman, and Sarah Palin. Hundreds of motorcycle riders lined the outside of the field. Bagpipe players and dru
mmers came from all over the state. A military choir stood at the ready the entire time.

  A stage was set up in the middle of the football field. On the stage was a podium, a few microphone stands, some speakers. At the front of the stage, amid a mound of flowers, were Kyle’s gun, his boots, his body armor, and his helmet.

  The funeral programs were printed in color. On the front, imposed over a waving American flag, was a picture of Kyle standing next to a pickup truck, grinning. In the photo, he’s wearing a cowboy hat and sunglasses. He also has a pistol tucked into his belt and two bandoliers strapped across his chest. On the back of the program was a picture of Kyle and Taya on their wedding day and a picture of Kyle’s rifle. Below that there were handwritten notes from each of his children.

  “Daddy,” the first one read. “I love you, Dad. You are the best dad ever. I never wanted you to die. I will miss your heart. I will love you even if you died. Love you forever, Baby Girl.”

  The second one, from his son, read, “I miss you a lot. One of the best things that has happened to me is you. I love you, Dad. I always will. Love, Bubba.”

  Photos from Kyle’s life scrolled by on the gigantic screen overhead. There he was as a boy, getting a shotgun for Christmas. There he was as a young cowboy, riding a horse. Then, as a newly inducted SEAL, clean shaven and bright eyed. In combat, scanning for targets. In the desert, flying a Texas flag. With his platoon, a fearsome image of American might. At home, hugging Taya, kissing the foot of his baby girl, holding the hand of his little boy.

  Even before the ceremony started, there were a few damp eyes. Chris Kyle inspired people. The stories of his life transcended things like age, race, and political affiliation. For these people, he stood for something important. He was an icon who exemplified the times he lived in.