Chris Kyle: American Sniper

I’m not suggesting we give vets handouts; what people need are hand-ups—a little opportunity and strategic help.

One of the wounded vets I met at the ranch retreats has an idea to help homeless vets by helping build or renovate housing. I think it’s a great idea. Maybe this house won’t be where they live forever, but it’ll get them going.

Jobs, training—there’s an enormous amount that we can do.

I know some people will say that you’ll have a bunch just taking advantage. But you deal with that. You don’t let it ruin things for everyone.

There’s no reason someone who has fought for their country should be homeless or jobless.

It’s taken a while, but I have gotten to a point where being a SEAL no longer defines me. I need to be a husband and a father. Those things, now, are my first calling.

Being a SEAL has been a huge part of me. I still feel the pull. I certainly would have preferred having the best of both worlds—the job and the family. But at least in my case, the job wouldn’t allow it.

I’m not sure I would have either. In a sense, I had to step away from the job to become the fuller man my family needed me to be.

I don’t know where or when the change came. It didn’t happen until I got out. I had to get through that resentment at first. I had to move through the good things and the bad things to reach a point where I could really move ahead.

Now I want to be a good dad and a good husband. Now I’ve rediscovered a real love for my wife. I genuinely miss her when I’m on a business trip. I want to be able to hug her and sleep next to her.

Taya:

What I loved about Chris in the beginning was the way he unabashedly wore his heart on his sleeve. He didn’t play games with my heart or my head. He was a straight shooter who seemed to back up his feelings in actions: spending an hour and a half to drive up to see me, then leaving in time for work at five a.m.; communicating; putting up with my moods.

His sense of fun balanced out my serious side and brought out the youthful side of me. He was up for anything and completely supportive of anything I wanted or dreamed of. He got along famously with my family and I did with his.

When our marriage reached a crisis, I said I wouldn’t love him the same if he reenlisted again. It wasn’t that I didn’t love him, but I felt that his decision would confirm what I thought was becoming increasingly evident. In the beginning, I believed he loved me more than anything. Slowly the Teams started to become his first love. He continued to say the words and tell me what he felt I needed to hear and what he had always said in the past to express his love. The difference is, the words and actions were no longer meshing. He still loved me but it was different. He was consumed by the Teams.

When he was away, he would tell me things like “I would do anything to be home with you,” and “I miss you,” and “You are the most important thing in the world to me.” I knew if he joined up again that all of what he had been telling me over the past years were mostly words or feelings in theory, rather than feelings expressed in actions.

How could I love with the same reckless abandon if I knew I was not what he said I was? I was second fiddle at best.

He would die for strangers and country. My challenges and pain seemed to be mine alone. He wanted to live his life and have a happy wife to come home to.

At the time, it meant everything I loved in the beginning was changing and I would have to love him differently. I thought it might be less, but it turns out it was just different.

Just like in any relationship, things changed. We changed. We both made mistakes and we both learned a lot. We may love each other differently, but maybe that is a good thing. Maybe it is more forgiving and more mature, or maybe it is just different.

It is still really good. We still have each other’s backs and we’ve learned that even through the tough times, we don’t want to lose each other or the family we’ve built.

The more time that goes by the more we are each able to show each other love in ways the other one understands and feels.

I feel like my love for my wife has gotten deeper over the past few years. Taya bought me a new wedding ring made of tungsten steel—I don’t think it’s a coincidence that it’s the hardest metal she could find.

It has crusader crosses on it, too. She jokes that it’s because marriage is like a crusade.

Maybe for us it has been.

Taya:

I feel something coming from him that I hadn’t felt before.

He’s definitely not the person he was before the war, but there are a lot of the same qualities. His sense of humor, his kindness, his warmth, his courage, and a sense of responsibility. His quiet confidence inspires me.

Like any couple, we still have our day-to-day life things we have to work through, but most importantly, I feel loved. And I feel the kids and I are important.

I’m not the same guy I was when I first went to war.

No one is. Before you’re in combat, you have this innocence about you. Then, all of a sudden, you see this whole other side of life.

I don’t regret any of it. I’d do it again. At the same time, war definitely changes you.

You embrace death.

As a SEAL, you go to the Dark Side. You’re immersed in it. Continually going to war, you gravitate to the blackest parts of existence. Your psyche builds up its defenses—that’s why you laugh at gruesome things like heads being blown apart, and worse.

Growing up, I wanted to be military. But I wondered, how would I feel about killing someone?

Now I know. It’s no big deal.

I did it a lot more than I’d ever thought I would—or, for that matter, more than any American sniper before me. But I also witnessed the evil my targets committed and wanted to commit, and by killing them, I protected the lives of many fellow soldiers.

Idon’t spend a lot of time philosophizing about killing people. I have a clear conscience about my role in the war.

I am a strong Christian. Not a perfect one—not close. But I strongly believe in God, Jesus, and the Bible. When I die, God is going to hold me accountable for everything I’ve done on earth.

He may hold me back until last and run everybody else through the line, because it will take so long to go over all my sins.

“Mr. Kyle, let’s go into the backroom….”

Honestly, I don’t know what will really happen on Judgment Day. But what I lean toward is that you know all of your sins, and God knows them all, and shame comes over you at the reality that He knows. I believe the fact that I’ve accepted Jesus as my savior will be my salvation.

But in that backroom or whatever it is when God confronts me with my sins, I do not believe any of the kills I had during the war will be among them. Everyone I shot was evil. I had good cause on every shot. They all deserved to die.

My regrets are about the people I couldn’t save—Marines, soldiers, my buddies.

I still feel their loss. I still ache for my failure to protect them.

I’m not naive and I’m beyond romanticizing war and what I had to do there. The worst moments of my life have come as a SEAL. Losing my buddies. Having a kid die on me.

I’m sure some of the things I went through pale in comparison to what some of the guys went through in World War II and other conflicts. On top of all the shit they went through in Vietnam, they had to come home to a country that spat on them.