American Sniper

by Chris Kyle

  There was a stretch where Jason had me doing crazy amounts of ab exercises and other things to my core muscles.

  “Do you understand it’s my knees that were operated on?” I asked him one day when I thought I’d reached my limit.

  He just laughed. He had a scientific explanation about how everything in the body depends on strong core muscles, but I think he just liked kicking my ass around the gym. I swear I heard a bullwhip crack over my head any time I started to slack.

  I always thought the best shape I was ever in was straight out of BUD/S. But I was in far better shape after spending five months with him. Not only were my knees okay, the rest of me was in top condition. When I came back to my platoon, they all asked if I had been taking steroids.

  ROUGH TIMES

  I’D PUSHED MY BODY AS FAR AS I COULD BEFORE GETTING THE operations. Now the thing that was deteriorating was even more important than my knees—my marriage.

  This was the roughest of a bunch of rough spots. A lot of resentment had built up between us. Ironically, we didn’t actually fight all that much, but there was always a lot of tension. Each of us would put in just enough effort to be able to say we were trying—and imply that the other person was not.

  After years of being in war zones and separated from my wife, I think in a way I’d just forgotten what it means to be in love—the responsibilities that come with it, like truly listening and sharing. That forgetting made it easier for me to push her away. At the same time, an old girlfriend happened to get in contact with me. She called the home phone first, and Taya passed the message along to me, assuming I wasn’t the type of guy she had to worry about straying.

  I laughed off the message at first, but curiosity got the best of me. Soon my old girlfriend and I were talking and texting regularly.

  Taya figured out that something was up. One night I came home and she sat me down and laid everything out, very calmly, very rationally—or at least as rational as you can be in that kind of situation.

  “We have to be able to trust each other,” she said at one point. “And in the direction we’re going, that’s not going to work. It just won’t.”

  We had a long, heartfelt talk about that. I think we both cried. I know I did. I loved my wife. I didn’t want to be separated from her. I wasn’t interested in getting divorced.

  I KNOW: IT SOUNDS CORNY AS SHIT. A FUCKING SEAL TALKING about love?

  I’d rather get choked out a hundred times than do that in public, let alone here for the whole world to see.

  But it was real. If I’m going to be honest, I have to put it out there.

  WE SET UP A FEW RULES THAT WE WOULD LIVE BY. AND WE both agreed to go to counseling.

  TAYA:

  Things just got to the point where I felt as if I was looking down into a deep pit. It wasn’t just arguments over the kids. We weren’t relating to each other. I could tell his mind had strayed from our marriage, from us.

  I remember talking to a girlfriend who’d been through an awful lot. I just unloaded.

  She said to me, “Well this is what you have to do. You have to lay it all on the line. You have to tell him that you love him, and you want him to stay, but if he wants to go, he is free to do so.”

  I took her advice. It was a hard, hard conversation.

  But I knew several things in my heart. First, I knew I loved Chris. And second, and this was very important to me, I knew that he was a good dad. I’d seen him with our son, and with our daughter. He had a strong sense of discipline and respect, and at the same time had so much fun with the kids that by the time they were done playing they all ached from laughing. Those two things really convinced me that I had to try to keep our marriage together.

  From my side, I hadn’t been the perfect wife, either. Yes, I loved him, truly, but I’d been a real bitch at times. I had pushed him away.

  So both of us had to want the marriage and we both had to come together to make it work.

  I’d like to say that things instantly got better from that point on. But life really isn’t like that. We did talk a lot more. I started to become more focused on the marriage—more focused on my responsibilities to my family.

  One issue that we didn’t completely resolve had to do with my enlistment, and how it would fit with our family’s long-term plans. My earlier reenlistment was going to be up in roughly two years; we had already begun discussing that.

  Taya made it clear that our family needed a father. My son was growing in leaps and bounds. Boys do need a strong male figure in their lives; there was no way I could disagree.

  But I also felt as if I had a duty to my country. I had been trained to kill; I was very good at it. I felt I had to protect my fellow SEALs, and my fellow Americans.

  And I liked doing it. A lot.

  But . . .

  I went back and forth. It was a very difficult decision.

  Incredibly difficult.

  In the end, I decided she was right: others could do my job protecting the country, but no one could truly take my place with my family. And I had given my country a fair share.

  I told her I would not reenlist when the time came.

  I still wonder sometimes if I made the right decision. In my mind, as long as I am fit and there is a war, my country needs me. Why would I send someone in my place? A part of me felt I was acting like a coward.

  Serving in the Teams is serving a greater good. As a civilian, I’d just be serving my own good. Being a SEAL wasn’t just what I did; it became who I was.

  A FOURTH DEPLOYMENT

  IF THINGS HAD WORKED ACCORDING TO “NORMAL” PROCEDURES, I would have been given a long break and a long stretch of shore duty after my second deployment. But for various reasons, that didn’t happen.

  The Team promised that I’d have a break after this deployment. But that didn’t work either. I wasn’t real happy about it. I lost my temper talking about it, as a matter of fact. I’d guess more than once.

  Now, I like war, and I love doing my job, but it rankled me that the Navy wasn’t keeping its word. With all the stress at home, an assignment that would have kept me near my family at that point would have been welcome. But I was told that the needs of the Navy came first. And fair or not, that’s the way it was.

  MY BLOOD PRESSURE WAS STILL ELEVATED.

  The doctors blamed it on coffee and dip. According to them, my blood pressure was as high as if I were drinking ten cups of coffee right before the test. I was drinking coffee, but not nearly that much. They strongly urged me to cut back, and to stop using dip.

  Of course I didn’t argue with them. I didn’t want to get kicked out of the SEALs, or go down a road that might lead to a medical discharge. I suppose, in retrospect, some might wonder why I didn’t do that, but it would have seemed like a cowardly thing to do. It would never have felt right.

  IN THE END, I WAS ALL RIGHT WITH BEING SCHEDULED FOR another deployment. I still loved war.

  DELTA PLATOON

  USUALLY, WHEN YOU COME HOME, A FEW GUYS WILL ROTATE out of the platoon. Officers will usually change out. A lot of times the chief leaves, the LPO—lead petty officer—becomes the chief, and then someone else becomes LPO. But other than that, you stay pretty tight-knit. In our case, most of the platoon had been together for many years.

  Until now.

  Trying to spread out the experience in the Team, command decided to break up Charlie/Cadillac Platoon and spread us out. I was assigned to Delta, and put in as LPO of the platoon. I worked directly with the new chief, who happened to be one of my BUD/S instructors.

  We worked out our personnel selections, making assignments and sending different people off to school. Now that I was LPO, I not only had more admin crap to deal with, but couldn’t be point man anymore.

  That hurt.

  I drew the line when they talked about taking my sniper rifle away. I was still a sniper, no matter what else I did in the platoon.

  Besides finding good point men, one of the toughest personnel decision
s I had to make involved choosing a breacher. The breacher is the person who, among other things, is in charge of the explosives, who sets them and blows them (if necessary) on the DA. Once the platoon is inside, the breacher is really running things. So the group is entirely in his hands.

  THERE ARE A NUMBER OF OTHER IMPORTANT TASKS AND schools I haven’t mentioned along the way, but which do deserve attention. Among them is the JTAC—that’s the guy who gets to call in air support. It’s a popular position in the Teams. First of all, the job is kind of fun: you get to watch things blow up. And secondly, you’re often called away for special missions, so you get a lot of action.

  Comms and navigation are a lot further down the list for most SEALs. But they’re necessary jobs. The worst school you can send someone to has to do with intel. People hate that. They joined the SEALs to kick down doors, not to gather intelligence. But everyone has a role.

  Of course, some people like to fall out of planes, and swim with the sharks.

  Sickos.

  THE DISPERSAL OF TALENT MAY HAVE HELPED THE TEAM IN general, but as platoon LPO I was concerned about getting the best guys over to Delta with me.

  The master chief in charge of the personnel arrangements was working everything out on an organizational chart that had been set up on a big magnetic board. One afternoon, while he was out, I snuck into his office and rearranged things. Suddenly, everyone who was anyone in Charlie was now assigned to Delta.

  My changes had been a little too drastic, and as soon as the master chief got back, my ears started ringing even more than normal.

  “Don’t ever go into my office when I am not here,” he told me as soon as I reported to him. “Don’t touch my board. Ever.”

  Well, truth is, I did go back.

  I knew he’d catch anything drastic, so I made one little switch and got Dauber into my platoon. I needed a good sniper and corpsman. The master chief apparently never noticed it, or at least didn’t change it.

  I had my answer ready in case I was caught: “I did it for the good of the Navy.”

  Or at least Delta Platoon.

  STILL RECOVERING FROM KNEE SURGERY, I COULDN’T ACTUALLY take part in a lot of the training for the first few months the platoon was together. But I kept tabs on my guys, watching them when I could. I hobbled around the land warfare sessions, observing the new guys especially. I wanted to know who I was going to war with.

  I was just about back into shape when I got into a pair of fights, first the one in Tennessee I mentioned earlier, where I was arrested, and then another near Fort Campbell where, as my son put it, “some guy decided to break his face on my daddy’s hand.”

  “Some guy” also broke my hand in the process.

  My platoon chief was livid.

  “You’ve been out with knee surgery, we get you back, you get arrested, now you break your hand. What the fuck?”

  There may have been a few other choice words thrown in there as well. They may also have continued for quite a while.

  THINKING BACK, I DID SEEM TO GET INTO A NUMBER OF FIGHTS during this training period. In my mind, at least, they weren’t my fault—in that last case, I was on my way out when the idiot’s girlfriend tried picking a fight with my friend, a SEAL. Which was absolutely as ridiculous in real life as it must look on the printed page.

  But taken together, it was a bad pattern. It might even have been a disturbing trend. Unfortunately, I didn’t recognize it at the time.

  PUNCHED OUT

  THERE’S A POSTSCRIPT TO THE STORY ABOUT “SOME GUY” AND my broken hand.

  The incident happened while we were training in an Army town. I knew pretty much when I punched him that I’d broken my hand, but there was no way in hell that I was going to the base hospital; if I did, they’d realize I was (a) drunk and (b) fighting, and the MPs would be on my ass. Nothing makes an MP’s day like busting a SEAL.

  So I waited until the next day. Now sober, I reported to the hospital and claimed I had broken my fist by punching out my gun before I actually cleared the doorjamb. (Theoretically possible, if unlikely.)

  While I was getting treated, I saw a kid in the hospital with his jaw wired shut.

  Next thing I knew, some MPs came over and started questioning me.

  “This kid is claiming you broke his jaw,” said one of them.

  “What the hell is he talking about?” I said, rolling my eyes. “I just came in off a training exercise. I broke my damn hand. Ask the SF guys; we’re training with them.”

  Not so coincidentally, all of the bouncers at the bar where we’d been were Army SF; they would surely back me up if it came to that.

  It didn’t.

  “We thought so,” said the MPs, shaking their heads. They went back over to the idiot soldier and started bitching him out for lying and wasting their time.

  Serves him right for getting into a fight started by his girlfriend.

  I CAME BACK WEST WITH A SHATTERED BONE. THE GUYS ALL made fun of me for my weak genes. But the injury wasn’t all that funny for me, because the doctors couldn’t figure out whether they should operate or not. My finger set a little deeper in my hand, not quite where it should be.

  In San Diego, one of the doctors took a look and decided they might be able to fix it by pulling it and resetting it in the socket.

  I told him to give it a go.

  “You want some painkiller?” he asked.

  “Nah,” I said. They’d done the same thing at the Army hospital back East, and it hadn’t really hurt.

  Maybe Navy doctors pull harder. The next thing I knew I was lying flat back on a table in the cast room. I’d passed out and pissed myself from the pain.

  But at least I got away without surgery.

  And for the record, I’ve since changed my fighting style to accommodate my weaker hand.

  READY TO GO

  I HAD TO WEAR A CAST FOR A FEW WEEKS, BUT MORE AND more I got into the swing of things. The pace built up as we got ready to ship out. There was only one down note: we had been assigned to a western province in Iraq. From what we had heard, nothing was going on there. We tried to get transferred to Afghanistan, but we couldn’t get released by the area commander.

  That didn’t sit too well with us, certainly not with me. If I was going back to war, I wanted to be in the action, not twiddling my (broken) fingers in the desert. Being a SEAL, you don’t want to sit around with your thumb up your ass; you want to get in the action.

  Still, it felt good to be getting back to war. I’d been burned out when I came home, completely overwhelmed and emotionally drained. But now I felt recharged and ready to go.

  I was ready to kill some more bad guys.

  13

  MORTALITY

  BLIND

  IT SEEMED LIKE EVERY DOG IN SADR CITY WAS BARKING.

  I scanned the darkness through my night vision, tense as we made our way down one of the nastiest streets in Sadr City. We walked past a row of what might have been condos in a normal city. Here they were little better than rat-infested slums. It was past midnight in early April 2008, and, against all common sense but under direct orders, we were walking into the center of an insurgent hellhole.

  Like a lot of the other drab-brown buildings on the street, the house we were heading to had a metal grate in front of the door. We lined up to breach it. Just then, someone appeared from behind the grate at the door and said something in Arabic.

  Our interpreter stepped over and told him to open up.

  The man inside said he didn’t have a key.

  One of the other SEALs told him to go get it. The man disappeared, running up the stairs somewhere.

  Shit!

  “Go!” I yelled. “Break the grate the fuck in.”

  We rushed in and started clearing the house. The two bottom levels were empty.

  I raced up the stairs to the third floor and moved to the doorway of a room facing the street, leaning back against the wall as the rest of my guys stacked to follow. As I started to take a step,
the whole room blew up.

  By some miracle, I hadn’t been hit, though I sure felt the force of the blast.

  “Who the fuck just threw a frag!” I yelled.

  Nobody. And the room itself was empty. Someone had just fired an RPG into the house.

  Gunfire followed. We regrouped. The Iraqi who’d been inside had clearly escaped to alert the nearby insurgents where we were. Worse, the walls in the house proved pretty flimsy, unable to stand up to the rocket grenades that were being fired at us. If we stayed here, we were going to get fried.

  Out of the house! Now!

  The last of my guys had just cleared out of the building when the street shook with a huge force: the insurgents had set off an IED down the street. The blast was so powerful it knocked a few of us off our feet. Ears ringing, we ran to another building nearby. But as we were fixing to enter it, all hell broke loose. We got gunfire from every direction, including above.

  A shot flew into my helmet. The night went black. I was blind.

  It was my first night in Sadr City, and it looked like it was soon going to be my last on earth.

  OUT WEST

  UNTIL THAT POINT, I HAD SPENT AN UNEVENTFUL, EVEN BORING fourth deployment in Iraq.

  Delta Platoon had arrived roughly a month before, traveling out to al-Qa’im in western Iraq, near the Syrian border. Our mission was supposed to involve long-range desert patrols, but we’d spent our time building a base camp with the help of a few Seabees. Not only was there no action to speak of, but the Marines who owned the base were in the process of shutting it down, meaning that we’d have to move out soon after we set it up. I have no idea what the logic was.

  Morale had hit rock bottom when my chief risked his life early one morning—by that I mean he entered my room and shook me awake.

  “What the hell?” I yelled, jumping up.

  “Easy,” said my chief. “You need to get dressed and come with me.”