Chris Kyle - American Sniper

But while we talked a lot about it, in the end I didn’t feel there was much of a question about what to do. I was a SEAL. I was trained for war. I was made for it. My country was at war and it needed me.

And I missed it. I missed the excitement and the thrill. I loved killing bad guys.

“If you die, it will wreck all our lives,” Taya told me. “It pisses me off that you would not only willingly risk your life, but risk ours, too.”

For the moment, we agreed to disagree.

As it came up to the time to deploy, our relationship became more distant. Taya would push me away emotionally, as if she were putting on armor for the coming months. I may have done the same thing.

“It’s not intentional,” she told me, in one of the rare moments when we both could realize what was happening and actually talk about it.

We still loved each other. It may sound strange—we were close and not close, needing each other and yet needing distance between us. Needing to do other things. At least in my case.

I was anticipating leaving. I was excited about doing my job again.

Afew days before we were scheduled to deploy, I went to the doctor to see about getting a cyst in my neck removed. Inside his examining room, he numbed the area around it with a local anesthesia, then they stuck a needle in my neck to suction the material out.

I think. I don’t actually know, because as soon as the needle went in, I passed out with a seizure. When I came to, I was out flat on the examining table, my feet where my head should have been.

I had no other ill effects, not from the seizure or the procedure. No one really could figure out why I’d reacted the way I did. As far as anyone could tell, I was fine.

But there was a problem—a seizure is grounds for being medically discharged from the Navy. Luckily, there was a corpsman whom I’d served with in the room. He persuaded the doctor not to include the seizure in his report, or to write what happened in a way that wouldn’t affect my deployment or my career. (I’m not sure which.) I never heard anything about it again.

But what the seizure did do was keep me from getting to Taya. While I’d been passing out, she had been having a routine pregnancy checkup. It was about three weeks before our daughter was due and days before I was supposed to deploy. The checkup included an ultrasound, and when the technician looked away from the screen, my wife realized something was wrong.

“I have a feeling you’re having this baby right away,” was the most the technician would say before getting up and fetching the doctor.

The baby had her umbilical cord around her neck. She was also breached and the amount of amniotic fluid—liquid that nourishes and protects the developing infant—was low.

“We’ll do a C-section,” said the doc. “Don’t worry. We’ll get this baby out tomorrow. You’ll be fine.”

Taya had called me several times. By the time I came to, she was already at the hospital.

We spent a nervous night together. The next morning, the doctors performed a C-section. As they were working, they hit some kind of artery and splashed blood all over the place. I was deathly afraid for my wife. I felt real fear. Worse.

Maybe it was a touch of what she’d gone through every moment of my deployment. It was a terrible hopelessness and despair.

A hard thing to admit, let alone stomach.

Our daughter was fine. I took her and held her. I’d been as distant toward her as I had been toward our son before he was born; now, holding her, I started to feel real warmth and love.

Taya looked at me strangely when I tried to hand her the baby.

“Don’t you want to hold her?” I asked.

“No,” she said.

God, I thought, she’s rejecting our daughter. I have to leave and she’s not even bonding.

A few moments later, Taya reached out and took her.

Thank God.

Two days later, I deployed.

You would think an army planning a major offensive would have a way to get its warriors right to the battle area.

You would think wrong.

Because of the medical situation with the cyst and then my daughter’s birth, I ended up leaving the States about a week behind the rest of my platoon. By the time I landed in Baghdad in April 2006, my platoon had been sent west to the area of Ramadi. No one in Baghdad seemed to know how to get me out there. It was up to me to get over to my boys.

A direct flight to Ramadi was impossible—things were too hot there. So I had to cobble together my own solution. I came across an Army Ranger who was also heading for Ramadi. We hooked up, pooling our creative resources as we looked for a ride at Baghdad International Airport.

At some point, I overheard an officer talking about problems the Army was having with some insurgent mortarmen at a base to the west. By coincidence, we heard about a flight heading to that same base; the Ranger and I headed over to try to get onto the helicopter.

A colonel stopped as we were about to board.

“Helicopter’s full,” he barked at the Ranger. “Why do you need to be on it?”

“Well, sir, we’re the snipers coming to take care of your mortar problem,” I told him, holding up my gun case.

“Oh yes!” the colonel yelled to the crew. “These boys need to be on the very next flight. Get them right on.”

We hopped aboard, bumping two of his guys in the process.

By the time we got to the base, the mortars had been taken care of. We still had a problem, though—there were no flights heading for Ramadi, and the prospects of a convoy were slimmer than the chance of seeing snow in Dallas in July.

But I had an idea. I led the Ranger to the base hospital, and found a corpsman. I’ve worked with a number as a SEAL, and in my experience, the Navy medics always know their way around problems.

I took a SEAL challenge coin out of my pocket and slipped it into my hand, exchanging it when we shook. (Challenge coins are special tokens that are created to honor members of a unit for bravery or other special achievements. A SEAL challenge coin is especially valued, both for its rarity and symbolism. Slipping it to someone in the Navy is like giving him a secret handshake.)

“Listen,” I told the corpsman. “I need a serious favor. I’m a SEAL, a sniper. My unit is in Ramadi. I got to get there, and he’s coming with me.” I gestured to the Ranger.

“Okay,” said the corpsman, his voice almost a whisper. “Come into my office.”

We went into his office. He took out a rubber stamp, inked our hands, then wrote something next to the mark.

It was a triage code.

The corpsman medevac’d us into Ramadi. We were the first, and probably only, people to be medevac’d into a battle rather than out of it.

And I thought only SEALs could be that creative.

I have no idea why that worked, but it did. No one on the chopper we were hustled into questioned the direction of our flight, let alone the nature of our “wounds.”

Ramadi was in al-Anbar, the same province as Fallujah, about thirty miles farther west. Many of the insurgents who’d been run out of Fallujah were said to have holed up there. There was plenty of evidence: attacks had ratcheted up ever since Fallujah had been pacified. By 2006, Ramadi was considered the most dangerous city in Iraq—a hell of a distinction.

My platoon had been sent to Camp Ramadi, a U.S. base along the Euphrates River outside the city. Our compound, named Shark Base, had been set up by an earlier task unit and was just outside the wire of Camp Ramadi.