American Sniper: The Autobiography of the Most Lethal Sniper in U.S. Military History

by Chris Kyle

  Ryan left the service because of his injury, but we remained close. They say friendships forged in war are strong ones. Ours would prove that truism.

  PUNCHING OUT SCRUFF FACE

  After the funeral we went to a local bar for the wake proper.

  As always, there were a bunch of different things going on at our favorite nightspot, including a small party for some older SEALs and UDT members who were celebrating the anniversary of their graduation. Among them was a celebrity I’ll call Scruff Face.

  Scruff served in the military; most people seem to believe he was a SEAL. As far as I know, he was in the service during the Vietnam conflict but not actually in the war.

  I was sitting there with Ryan and told him that Scruff was holding court with some of his buddies.

  “I’d really like to meet him,” Ryan said.

  “Sure.” I got up and went over to Scruff and introduced myself. “Mr. Scruff Face, I have a young SEAL over here who’s just come back from Iraq. He’s been injured but he’d really like to meet you.”

  Well, Scruff kind of blew us off. Still, Ryan really wanted to meet him, so I brought him over. Scruff acted like he couldn’t be bothered.

  All right.

  We went back over to our side of the bar and had a few more drinks. In the meantime, Scruff started running his mouth about the war and everything and anything he could connect to it. President Bush was an asshole. We were only over there because Bush wanted to show up his father. We were doing the wrong thing, killing men and women and children and murdering.

  And on and on. Scruff said he hates America and that’s why he moved to Baja California. 9/11 was a conspiracy.

  And on and on some more.

  The guys were getting upset. Finally, I went over and tried to get him to cool it.

  “We’re all here in mourning,” I told him. “Can you just cool it? Keep it down.”

  “You deserve to lose a few,” he told me.

  Then he bowed up as if to belt me one.

  I was uncharacteristically level-headed at that moment.

  “Look,” I told him, “why don’t we just step away from each other and go on our way?”

  Scruff bowed up again. This time he swung.

  Being level-headed and calm can last only so long. I laid him out.

  Tables flew. Stuff happened. Scruff Face ended up on the floor.

  I left.

  Quickly.

  I have no way of knowing for sure, but rumor has it he showed up at the BUD/S graduation with a black eye.

  Fighting is a fact of life when you’re a SEAL. I’ve been in a few good ones.

  In April ’07, we were in Tennessee. We ended up across the state line in a city where there’d been a big UFC mixed-martial-arts fight earlier that evening. By coincidence, we happened into a bar where there were three fighters who were celebrating their first victories in the ring. We weren’t looking for trouble; in fact, I was in a quiet corner with a buddy where there was hardly anyone else around.

  For some reason, three or four guys came over and bumped into my friend. Words were said. Whatever they were, the wannabe UFC fighters didn’t like them, so they went after him.

  Naturally, I wasn’t going to let him fight alone. I jumped in. Together, we beat the shit out of them.

  This time, I didn’t follow Chief Primo’s advice. In fact, I was still pounding one of the fighters when the bouncers came to break us up. The cops came in and arrested me. I was charged with assault. (My friend had slipped out the back. No bad wishes on him; he was only following Primo’s second rule of fighting.)

  I got out on bail the next day. I had a lawyer come in and work out a plea bargain with the judge. The prosecutor agreed to drop the charges, but to make it all legal I had to get up there in front of the judge.

  “Mr. Kyle,” she said, in the slow drawl of justice, “just because you’re trained to kill, doesn’t mean you have to prove it in my city. Get out and don’t come back.”

  And so I did, and haven’t.

  That little mishap got me in a bit of trouble at home. No matter where I was during training, I would always give Taya a call before I went to sleep. But having spent the night in the drunk tank, there was no call home.

  I mean, I only had one call, and she couldn’t get me out, so I put it to good use.

  There might not have been a real problem, except that I was supposed to go home for one of the kids’ birthday parties. Because of the court appearance, I had to extend my stay in town.

  “Where are you?” asked Taya when I finally got a hold of her.

  “I got arrested.”

  “All right,” she snapped. “Whatever.”

  I can’t say I blamed her for being mad. It wasn’t the most responsible thing I’d ever done. Coming when it did, it was just one more irritant in a time filled with them—our relationship was rapidly going downhill.

  Taya:

  I didn’t fall in love with a frickin’ Navy SEAL, I fell in love with Chris.

  Being a SEAL is cool and everything, but that’s not what I loved about him.

  If I’d known what to expect, that would have been one thing. But you don’t know what to expect. No one does. Not really—not in real life. And not every SEAL does multiple back-to-back wartime deployments, either.

  As time went on, his job became more and more important to him. He didn’t need me for family, in a way—he had the guys.

  Little by little, I realized I wasn’t the most important thing in his life. The words were there, but he didn’t mean it.

  FIGHTS AND MORE FIGHTS

  I am by no means a bad-ass, or even an extremely skilled fighter, but several instances have presented themselves. I would rather get my ass beat than look like a pussy in front of my boys.

  I have had other run-ins with fighters. I like to think I’ve held my own.

  While I was serving with my very first platoon, the whole SEAL team went to Fort Irwin in San Bernardino out in the Mojave Desert. After our training sessions, we headed into town and found a bar there, called the Library.

  Inside, a few off-duty police officers and firemen were having a party. A few of the women turned their attention to our guys. When that happened, the locals got all jealous and started a fight.

  Which really showed some truly poor judgment, because there had to be close to a hundred of us in that little bar. A hundred SEALs is a force to be reckoned with, and we did the reckoning that day. Then we went outside and flipped over a couple of cars.

  Somewhere around there, the cops came. They arrested twenty-five of us.

  You’ve probably heard of captain’s mast—that’s where the commanding officer listens to what you’ve done and hands out what is called a nonjudicial punishment if he thinks it’s warranted. The punishments are prescribed by military law and can be anything from a stern “tsk, tsk, don’t do that again” to an actual reduction in grade and even “correctional custody,” which pretty much means what you think it means.

  There are similar hearings with less critical consequences, heard by officers below the CO. In our case, we had to go before the XO (executive officer, the officer just below the commander) and listen while he told us in extremely eloquent language how truly fucked up we were. In the process, he read off all the legal charges, all the destruction—I forget how many people got hurt and how much money’s worth of damage we caused, but it took a while for him to catalog. He finished by telling us how ashamed he was.

  “All right,” he said, lecture over. “Don’t let it happen again. Get the hell out of here.”

  We all left, duly chastised, his words ringing in our ears for . . . a good five seconds or so.

  But the story doesn’t end there.

  Another unit heard of our little adventure, and they decided that they should visit the bar and see if history would repeat itself.

  It did.

  They won that fight, but from what I understand the conditions were a little more difficult. The out
come wasn’t quite so lopsided.

  A little after that, yet another military group soon had to train in the same area. By now, there was a competition. The only problem was that the folks who lived there knew there would be a competition. And they prepared for it.

  They got their collective asses kicked.

  From then on, the entire town was placed off limits for SEALs.

  You might think it’d be tough to get into a drunken brawl in Kuwait, since there really aren’t any bars where you can drink alcohol. But it just so happened that there was a restaurant where we liked to eat, and where, not so coincidentally, it was easy to sneak in alcohol.

  We were there one night and started to get a little loud. Some of the locals objected; there was an argument, which led to a fight. Four of us, including myself, were detained.

  The rest of my boys came over and asked the police to release us.

  “No way,” said the police. “They’re going to jail and stand trial.”

  They emphasized their position. My boys emphasized theirs.

  If you’ve read this far, you’ve caught on that SEALs can be very persuasive. The Kuwaitis finally saw it their way and released us.

  I was arrested in Steamboat Springs, Colorado, though I think in that case the circumstances may speak well of me. I was sitting in the bar when a waitress passed with a pitcher of beer. A guy at a table nearby pushed his chair back and bumped into her, not knowing she was there; a little bit of beer spilled on him.

  He got up and slapped her.

  I went over and defended her honor the only way I know how. That got me arrested. Those granolas are tough when it comes to fighting with women.

  Those charges, like all the others, were dismissed.

  THE SHERIFF OF RAMADI

  The Ramadi offensive would eventually be considered an important milestone and turning point in the war, one of the key events that helped Iraq emerge from utter chaos. Because of that, there was a good deal of attention on the fighters who were there. And some of that attention eventually came to focus on our Team.

  As I hope I’ve made clear, I don’t feel SEALs should be singled out publicly as a force. We don’t need the publicity. We are silent professionals, every one of us; the quieter we are, the better able we are to do our job.

  Unfortunately, that’s not the world we live in. If it were, I wouldn’t have felt it necessary to write this book.

  Let me say for the record that I believe the credit in Ramadi and in all of Iraq should go to the Army and Marine warriors who fought there as well as the SEALs. It should be fairly proportioned out. Yes, SEALs did a good job, and gave their blood. But as we told the Army and Marine officers and enlisted men we fought beside, we’re no better than those men when it comes to courage and worth.

  But being in the modern world, people were interested in knowing about SEALs. After we got back, command called us together for a briefing so we could tell a famous author and former SEAL what had happened in battle. The author was Dick Couch.

  The funny thing was, he started out not by listening but by talking.

  Not even talking. Mr. Couch came and lectured us about how wrong-headed we were.

  I have a lot of respect for Mr. Couch’s service during the Vietnam War, where he served with Navy Underwater Demolition and SEAL Teams. I honor and respect him greatly for that. But a few of the things he said that day didn’t sit all that well with me.

  He got up in front of the room and started telling us that we were doing things all wrong. He told us we should be winning their hearts and minds instead of killing them.

  “SEALs should be more SF-like,” he claimed, referring (I guess) to one of Special Forces’ traditional missions of training indigenous people.

  Last time I checked, they think it’s okay to shoot people who shoot at you, but maybe that’s beside the point.

  I was sitting there getting furious. So was the entire team, though they all kept their mouths shut. He finally asked for comments.

  My hand shot up.

  I made a few disparaging remarks about what I thought we might do to the country, then I got serious.

  “They only started coming to the peace table after we killed enough of the savages out there,” I told him. “That was the key.”

  I may have used some other colorful phrases as I discussed what was really going on out there. We had a bit of a back-and-forth before my head shed signaled that I ought to leave the room. I was glad to comply.

  Afterward, my CO and command chief were furious with me. But they couldn’t do too much, because they knew I was right.

  Mr. Couch wanted to interview me later on. I was reluctant. Command wanted me to answer his questions. Even my chief sat me down and talked to me.

  So I did. Yup, nope. That was the interview.

  In fairness, from what I’ve heard his book is not quite as negative as I understood his lecture to be. So maybe a few of my fellow SEALs did have some influence on him.

  You know how Ramadi was won?

  We went in and killed all the bad people we could find.

  When we started, the decent (or potentially decent) Iraqis didn’t fear the United States; they did fear the terrorists. The U.S. told them, “We’ll make it better for you.”

  The terrorists said, “We’ll cut your head off.”

  Who would you fear? Who would you listen to?

  When we went into Ramadi, we told the terrorists, “We’ll cut your head off. We will do whatever we have to and eliminate you.”

  Not only did we get the terrorists’ attention—we got everyone’s attention. We showed we were the force to be reckoned with.

  That’s where the so-called Great Awakening came. It wasn’t from kissing up to the Iraqis. It was from kicking butt.

  The tribal leaders saw that we were bad-asses, and they’d better get their act together, work together, and stop accommodating the insurgents. Force moved that battle. We killed the bad guys and brought the leaders to the peace table.

  That is how the world works.

  KNEE SURGERY

  I’d first hurt my knees in Fallujah when the wall fell on me. Cortisone shots helped for a while, but the pain kept coming back and getting worse. The docs told me I needed to have my legs operated on, but doing that would have meant I would have to take time off and miss the war.

  So I kept putting it off. I settled into a routine where I’d go to the doc, get a shot, go back to work. The time between shots became shorter and shorter. It got down to every two months, then every month.

  I made it through Ramadi, but just barely. My knees started locking and it was difficult to get down the stairs. I no longer had a choice, so, soon after I got home in 2007, I went under the knife.

  The surgeons cut my tendons to relieve pressure so my kneecaps would slide back over. They had to shave down my kneecaps because I had worn grooves in them. They injected synthetic cartilage material and shaved the meniscus. Somewhere along the way they also repaired an ACL.

  I was like a racing car, being repaired from the ground up.

  When they were done, they sent me to see Jason, a physical therapist who specializes in working with SEALs. He’d been a trainer for the Pittsburgh Pirates. After 9/11, he decided to devote himself to helping the country. He chose to do that by working with the military. He took a massive pay cut to help put us back together.

  I didn’t know all that the first day we met. All I wanted to hear was how long it was going to take to rehab.

  He gave me a pensive look.

  “This surgery—civilians need a year to get back,” he said finally. “Football players, they’re out eight months. SEALs—it’s hard to say. You hate being out of action and will punish yourselves to get back.”

  He finally predicted six months. I think we did it in five. But I thought I would surely die along the way.

  Jason put me into a machine that would stretch my knee. Every day I had to see how much further I could adjust it. I would sweat up a
storm as it bent my knee. I finally got it to ninety degrees.

  “That’s outstanding,” he told me. “Now get more.”

  “More?”

  “More!”

  He also had a machine that sent a shock to my muscle through electrodes. Depending on the muscle, I would have to stretch and point my toes up and down. It doesn’t sound like much, but it is clearly a form of torture that should be outlawed by the Geneva Convention, even for use on SEALs.

  Naturally, Jason kept upping the voltage.

  But the worst of all was the simplest: the exercise. I had to do more, more, more. I remember calling Taya many times and telling her I was sure I was going to puke if not die before the day was out. She seemed sympathetic but, come to think of it in retrospect, she and Jason may have been in on it together.

  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.