Chris Kyle - American Sniper

“Why?” I asked.

“Well, you were saying about how you never would date a SEAL or go out with one.”

“Oh no, I said I would never marry one. I didn’t say I wouldn’t go out with one.”

His face lit up.

“In that case,” he said, with that sly little smile he has, “I guess I’ll get your phone number.”

He hung around. I hung around. We were still there at last call. As I got up with the crowd to go, I was pushed against him. He was all hard and muscle-y and smelled good, so I gave him a little kiss on his neck. We went out and he walked us to the parking lot… and I started puking my brains out from all the Scotch on the rocks I’d been drinking.

How can you not love a girl who loses it the first time you meet? I knew from the start that this was someone I wanted to spend a lot of time with. But at first, it was impossible to do that. I called her the morning after we met to make sure she was okay. We talked and laughed a bit. After that, I’d call her and leave messages. She didn’t call back.

The other guys on the Team started ribbing me about it. They were betting about whether she’d ever call me on her own. You see, we talked a few times, when she would actually answer the phone—maybe thinking it was someone else. After a while, it was obvious even to me that she never initiated.

Then, something changed. I remember the first time she called me. We were on the East Coast, training.

When we were done talking, I ran inside and started jumping on my teammates’ beds. I took the call as a sign she was really interested. I was happy to share that fact with all the naysayers.

Taya:

Chris was always very aware of my feelings. He is extremely observant in general and it is the same with his awareness of my emotions. He doesn’t have to say much. A simple question or easy way of bringing something to light reveals that he is 100 percent aware of my feelings. He doesn’t necessarily enjoy talking about feelings, but he has a sense of when it is appropriate or necessary to bring things out that I may have been intent on keeping in.

I noticed it early on in our relationship. We would be talking on the phone and he was very caring.

We are, in many ways, opposites. Still, we seemed to click. One day on the phone he was asking what I thought made us compatible. I decided to tell him some of the things that drew me to him.

“I think you’re a really good guy,” I told him, “really nice. And sensitive.”

“Sensitive?!?” He was shocked, and sounded offended. “What do you mean?”

“You don’t know what sensitive means?”

“You mean like I go around crying at movies and stuff?”

I laughed. I explained that I meant that he seemed to pick up on how I was feeling, sometimes before I did. And he let me express that emotion, and, importantly, gave me space.

I don’t think that’s the image most people have of SEALs, but it was and is accurate, at least of this one.

As our relationship got closer and closer, Taya and I started spending more time with each other. Finally, we’d spend nights at each other’s apartment, either in Long Beach or San Diego.

I woke up one morning to her yelling. “Chris! Chris! Wake up! You’ve got to see this!”

I stumbled into the living room. Taya had turned on the television and jacked the volume. I saw smoke pouring out of the World Trade Center in New York.

I didn’t understand what-all was happening. Part of me was still sleeping.

Then as we watched, an airplane flew right into the side of the second tower.

“Motherfuckers!” I muttered.

I stared at the screen, angry and confused, not entirely sure it was real.

Suddenly I remembered that I left my cell phone off. I grabbed it, and saw I’d missed a bunch of messages. The sum total of them was this:

Kyle, get your ass back to base. Now!

I grabbed Taya’s SUV—it had plenty of gas and my truck didn’t—and hauled down to base. I don’t know exactly how fast I was going—it might have been three digits—but it was certainly a high rate of speed.

Down around San Juan Capistrano, I glanced in the rearview mirror and saw a set of red lights flashing.

I pulled over. The cop who came up to the truck was pissed.

“Is there any reason you’re going so fast?” he demanded.

“Yes, sir,” I told him. “I apologize. I’m in the military and I just got recalled. I understand you got to write me a ticket. I know I was in the wrong but with all due respect can you just hurry and give me the ticket so I can get back to base?”

“What branch are you in?”

Motherfucker, I thought. I just told you I have to report. Can’t you just give me the damn ticket? But I kept my cool.

“I’m in the Navy,” I told him.

“What do you do in the Navy?” he asked.

By now I was pretty annoyed. “I’m a SEAL.”

He closed his ticket book.

“I’ll take you to the city line,” he told me. “Go get some fuckin’ payback.”

He put his lights on and pulled in front of me. We went a bit slower than I’d been going when he nabbed me, but it was still well past the limit. He took me as far as his jurisdiction went, maybe a little farther, then waved me on.

We were put on immediate standby, but it would turn out that we weren’t needed in Afghanistan or anywhere else at that moment. My platoon would have to wait roughly a year before we got into action, and when we did, it would be against Saddam Hussein, not Osama bin Laden.

There’s a lot of confusion in the civilian world about SEALs and our mission. Most people think we’re strictly sea-based commandos, meaning that we always operate off ships, and hit targets on the water or the immediate coastline.

Admittedly, a fair amount of our work involves things at sea��we are in the Navy, after all. And from a historical perspective, as briefly mentioned earlier, SEALs trace their origins to the Navy’s Underwater Demolition Teams, or UDTs. Established during World War II, UDT frogmen were responsible for reconning beaches before they were hit, and they trained for a variety of other waterborne tasks, such as infiltrating harbors and planting limpet mines on enemy ships. They were the mean, bad-ass combat divers of World War II and the postwar era, and SEALs are proud to carry on in their wake.

But as the UDT mission expanded, the Navy recognized that the need for special operations didn’t end at the beach line. As new units called SEALs were formed and trained for this expanded mission, they came to replace the older UDT units.

While “land” may be the final word in the SEAL acronym, it’s hardly the last thing we do. Every special operations unit in the U.S. military has its own specialty. There’s a lot of overlap in our training, and the range of our missions is similar in many respects. But each branch has its own expertise. Army Special Forces—also known as SF—does an excellent job training foreign forces, both in conventional and unconventional warfare. Army Rangers are a big assault force—if you want a large target, say an airfield, taken down, that’s their thing. Air Force special operators—parajumpers—excel at pulling people out of the shit.

Among our specialties are DAs.

DA stands for “direct action.” A direct-action mission is a very short, quick strike against a small but high-value target. You might think of it as a surgical strike against the enemy. In a practical sense, it could range from anything like an attack on a key bridge behind enemy lines to a raid on a terrorist hideout to arrest a bomb maker—a “snatch and grab,” as some call it. While those are very different missions, the idea is the same: strike hard and fast before the enemy knows what’s going on.