Chris Kyle - American Sniper

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.

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.

Ididn’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.

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.