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"" There’s a story about Chris Kyle: on a cold
January morning in 2010, he pulled into a
gas station somewhere along Highway 67,
south of Dallas. He was driving his
supercharged black Ford F350 outfitted with
black rims and oversize knobby mudding
tires. Kyle had replaced the Ford logo on
the grill with a small chrome skull, similar
to the Punisher emblem from the Marvel
Comics series, and added a riot-ready
aftermarket grill guard bearing the words
ROAD ARMOR. He had just left the Navy and
moved back to Texas.
Two guys approached him with pistols and
demanded his money and the keys to his
truck. With his hands in the air, he sized up
which man seemed most confident with his
gun.
Kyle knew what confidence with a gun
looked like. He was the deadliest sniper in
American history. He had at least 160
confirmed kills by the Pentagon’s count, but
by his own count—and the accounts of his
Navy SEAL teammates—the number was
closer to twice that. In his four tours of
duty in Iraq, Kyle earned two Silver Stars
and five Bronze Stars with Valor. He
survived six IED attacks, three gunshot
wounds, two helicopter crashes, and more
surgeries than he could remember. He was
known among his SEAL brethren as The
Legend and to his enemies as al-Shaitan,
“the devil.”
He told the robbers that he just needed to
reach back into the truck to get the keys. He
turned around and reached under his
winter coat instead, into his waistband.
With his right hand, he grabbed his Colt
1911. He fired two shots under his left
armpit, hitting the first man twice in the
chest. Then he turned slightly and fired two
more times, hitting the second man twice in
the chest. Both men fell dead.
Kyle leaned on his truck and waited for the
police.
When they arrived, they detained him while
they ran his driver’s license. But instead of
his name, address, and date of birth, what
came up was a phone number at the
Department of Defense. At the other end of
the line was someone who explained that
the police were in the presence of one of the
most skilled fighters in U.S. military
history. When they reviewed the
surveillance footage, the officers found the
incident had happened just as Kyle had
described it. They were very understanding,
and they didn’t want to drag a just-home,
highly decorated veteran into a messy legal
situation.
Kyle wasn’t unnerved or bothered. Quite
the opposite. He’d been feeling depressed
since he left the service, struggling to adjust
to civilian life. This was an exciting
reminder of the action he missed.
That night, talking on the phone to his wife,
Taya, who was in the process of moving
with their kids from California, he was a
good husband. He asked how her day was.
The way some people tell it, he got caught
up in their conversation, and only right
before they hung up did he remember his
big news of the day: “Oh, yeah, I shot two
guys trying to steal my truck today.”

A brief description of the incident appeared
in fellow SEAL Marcus Luttrell’s 2012 book
Service: a Navy SEAL at War— but not
Kyle’s own best-seller, American Sniper —
and there are mentions of it in various
forums deep in the corners of the internet.
Before Kyle’s murder at the hands of a
fellow veteran in February, I asked him
about that story during an interview in his
office last year, as part of what was
supposed to be an extended, in-depth
magazine story about his service and how
hard he worked to adjust back to this world
—to become the great husband and father
and Christian he’d always wanted to be.
He didn’t want to get into specifics about
the gas station shooting, but I left that day
believing it had happened.
THE OFFICES OF CRAFT INTERNATIONAL,
the defense contractor where Chris Kyle
was president until his death, were
immaculate. You needed one of the broad-
chested security guards from downstairs as
an escort just to get to that floor of the
building. Sitting under thick glass in the
lobby, there was an exceptionally rare,
original English translation of Galileo’s
Dialogue (circa 1661). A conference room
held a safe full of gigantic guns—guns
illegal to own without a Department of
Defense contract.
At 38, Kyle was a large man, 6-foot-2, 230
pounds, and the muscles in his neck and
shoulders and forearms made him seem
even bigger, like a scruffy-bearded giant.
When he greeted me with a direct look in
the eye and a firm handshake, his huge
bear paw enveloped my hand. That day he
had on boots, jeans, a black t-shirt, and a
baseball cap. It’s the same thing he wore
most days he came to the office, or when he
watched his daughter’s ballet recitals, or
during television interviews with Conan
O’Brien or Bill O’Reilly.
This was one of the rare chances when he’d
have a few hours to talk. Over the next
three days, he would be teaching a sniper
course to the Dallas SWAT teams and he
had three book signings, one at a hospital in
Tyler (for a terminal cancer patient whose
doctor reached out to him), one at Ray’s
Sporting Goods in Dallas, and one at the VA
in Fort Worth. He’d also have to fly down
to Austin for a shooting event Craft was
putting on for Speaker of the House John
Boehner and several other congressmen.
“We are not doing this for free,” he said,
anticipating a question. “We accept
Republicans and Democrats alike, as long as
the money is good.”
A few weeks later, he would have to cancel
a weekend meeting because he was invited
to hang out with George W. Bush. “Sorry,”
he said, when asked if anyone else might be
able to join. “Not even my wife’s allowed to
come.”
He loved the Dallas Cowboys and the
University of Texas Longhorns. He loved
going to the Alamo, looking at historic
artifacts. The license plate on his truck had
a picture of the flag used during the Texas
Revolution, with a cannon, a star, and the
words COME AND TAKE IT. Being in the
military forced him to move a lot, and
neither of his children was born in Texas.
But for each birth, he had family send a box
of dirt from home—so the first ground his
kids’ feet touched would be Texas soil.

He was outspoken on a lot of issues. He
believed strongly in the Second Amendment,
politely decrying the “incredible stupidity”
of gun control laws anytime he was asked.
He said he was hesitant to see the movie
Zero Dark Thirty because he’d heard that it
was a lot of propaganda for the Obama
administration. Once, he posted to his tens
of thousands of Facebook fans: “If you don’t
like what I have to say or post, you forget
one thing, I don’t give a **** what you
think. LOL.”
He didn’t worry about sounding politically
incorrect. The Craft International company
slogan, emblazoned around the Punisher
skull on the logo: “Despite what your
momma told you, violence does solve
problems.”
His views were nuanced, though. “If you
hate the war, that’s fine,” he told me. “But
you should still support the troops. They
don’t get to pick where they’re deployed.
They just gave the American people a blank
check for anything up to and including the
value of their lives, and the least everyone
else can do is be thankful. Buy them dinner.
Mow their yard. Bake them cookies.”
“The best way to describe Chris,” his wife,
Taya, says, “is extremely multifaceted.”
He was a brutal warrior but a gentle father
and husband. He was a patient instructor,
and he was a persistent, sophomoric
jokester. If he had access to your Facebook
account, he might announce to all your
friends and family that you’re gay and
finally coming out of the closet. If he
wanted to make you squirm, he might get
hold of your phone and scroll through your
photos threatening to see if you kept naked
pictures of your girlfriend.
Kyle liked when people thought of him as a
dumb hillbilly, but he had a remarkable
ability to retain information, whether it
was a mission briefing, the details of a
business meeting, or his encyclopedic
knowledge of his own hero, Vietnam-era
Marine sniper Carlos Hathcock. While on
the sniper rifle, Kyle had to do complicated
math, accounting for wind speed, the spin
of a bullet, and the curvature and rotation
of the Earth—and he had to do it quickly,
under the most intense pressure imaginable.
Those were the moments when he thrived.
The most common question he was asked
was easy to answer. He said he never
regretted any of his kills, which weren’t all
men.
“I regret the people I couldn’t kill before
they got to my boys,” he said. That’s how he
referred to the men and women he served
with, across the branches: “my boys.”

He said he didn’t enjoy killing, but he did
like protecting Americans and allies and
civilians. He was the angel of death,
sprawled flat atop a roof, his University of
Texas Longhorns ball cap turned backward
as he picked off enemy targets one by one
before they could hurt his boys. He was the
guardian, assigned to watch over open-air
street markets and elections, the places that
might make good marks for insurgent
terrorists.
“You don’t think of the people you kill as
people,” he said. “They’re just targets. You
can’t think of them as people with families
and jobs. They rule by putting terror in the
hearts of innocent people. The things they
would do—beheadings, dragging Americans
through the streets alive, the things they
would do to little boys and women just to
keep them terrified and quiet—” He paused
for a moment and slowed down. “That part
is easy. I definitely don’t have any regrets
about that.”
He said he didn’t feel like a hero. “I’m just
a regular guy,” he said. “I just did a job. I
was in some badass situations, but it wasn’t
just me. My teammates made it possible.”
He wasn’t the best sniper in the SEALs
teams, he said. “I’m probably middle of the
pack. I was just in the right spots at the
right times.”
The way he saw it, the most difficult thing
he ever did was getting out of the Navy.
“I left knowing the guy who replaced me,”
he said. “If he dies, or if he messes up and
other people die, that’s on me. You really
feel like you’re letting down these guys
you’ve gone through hell with.”
The hardest part? “Missing my boys.
Missing being around them in the action.
That’s your whole life, every day for years.
I hate to say it, but when you’re back and
you’re just walking around a mall or
something, you feel like a *****.” It nagged
at him. “You hear someone whining about
something at a stoplight, and it’s like, ‘Man,
three weeks ago I was getting shot at, and
you’re complaining about—I don’t even
care what.’ ”
There was also the struggle to readjust to
his family life. “When I got out, I realized I
barely knew my kids,” he said. “I barely
knew my wife. In the three years before I
got out, I spent a total of six months at
home. It’s hard to go from God, Country,
Family to God, Family, Country.”
But three years after he left the SEALs, he
had a job he liked. He could do (mildly)
badass things: shoot big guns, detonate an
occasional string of explosives, be around a
lot of other former special-operations types.
His marriage was finally back in a good
place. He had a book on the best-seller list.
And he had the chance to help veterans
through a number of charities.
“A lot of these guys just miss being around
their boys, too,” he said. “They need guys
who speak their speak. They don’t need to
be treated like they’re special.”
He’d often take vets out to the gun range.
Being around people who understood what
they’d been through, being able to relax and
shoot off some rounds, it was a little like
group therapy.
With his family, and with training people,
helping people, he had found a new
purpose. Chris Kyle could do anything if he
had a purpose. He’d been like that since he
was a little boy.

HE WAS THE SON OF A CHURCH DEACON
AND a Sunday school teacher. His father’s
job at Southwestern Bell had the family
moving a lot, so he was born in Odessa, but
he told people he grew up “all over Texas.”
About the same time he was learning to
read, he learned to love guns. He liked to
hunt with his father and brother. For his
birthday parties, he wanted to have BB gun
wars. He perched on the roof of his parents’
house waiting for his friends to dart across
the yard. He wasn’t a great shot back then,
but at least one friend is still walking
around with one of Kyle’s BBs in his hand.
In high school in Midlothian, he played
football and baseball. He showed cows
through the FFA. He and his buddies
cruised for girls in nearby Waxahachie. He
also liked to fight. His father warned him
never to start a fight. Kyle said he lived by
that code “most of the time.” He found that
if he was sticking up for his friends, or for
kids who couldn’t defend themselves, he got
to fight and he got to be the good guy at the
same time. Once he felt like he was standing
up for something right, he would never
back down.
Bryan Rury was a close friend of Kyle’s in
high school. Rury was much smaller than
his friend, but it seemed they were always
standing next to each other. “I think Chris
liked looking like a giant,” Rury says.
One time, there was a new kid in school
who was trying to make a name for himself
by picking on Rury. Kyle came into class
one day to find Rury quiet, upset. “He asked
me what was wrong, and I wouldn’t tell
him,” Rury says. “But he figured it out on
his own pretty fast.”
Kyle went over to the new kid’s desk and,
in his not-so-subtle, Chris Kyle way, told
him he better leave his friend alone. Or
else. The kid stood up from his desk, and
they went at it. Kyle almost never started
the fight, his friends say, but he always
ended it. “As they were taking him off to
the principal’s office, I just remember him
flashing me that giant smile of his,” Rury
says.
After high school, he went to Tarleton State
for two years, mostly to postpone the
responsibilities of adulthood. He spent more
time drinking than studying, and soon he
decided he’d rather be working on a ranch
full-time. But he knew his future was in the
military—in the Marines, he thought, until
a Navy recruiter told him about all the cool
things he could potentially do as a SEAL—
and he figured he shouldn’t waste any more
time.
Kyle breezed through the Navy’s basic
training. He only made it through BUD/S
(Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL)
training by way of sheer resolve. He told
stories about lying there on the beach, his
arms linked with his friends’, their heads
hovering above the frigid rising tide. He
knew if he got up and rang the bell—if he
quit—he could get hot coffee and a
doughnut. The uncontrollable shivering—
they called it “jackhammering”—lasted for
hours, but he never wanted to stop. He
joked that he was just lazy, that if the bell
had only been a little closer, maybe his
entire life would have been different. But
the truth is, nothing could have kept him
from his dream.
“He had more willpower than anyone I’ve
ever met,” Taya says. “If he cared about
something, he just wouldn’t ever quit. You
can’t fail at something if you just never
quit.”
Taya met Kyle in a bar in San Diego, just
after he finished BUD/S. When she asked
what he did—she suspected from the
muscles and the swagger that he was in the
military—he told her he drove an ice cream
truck. She figured he’d be arrogant but was
surprised to find him idealistic instead. But
she was still skeptical. Taya’s sister had
divorced a guy who was trying to become a
SEAL, and she’d specifically said she could
never marry someone like that.
But Kyle turned out to be quite sensitive. He
was able to read her better than anyone
she’d known. Even when she thought she
was keeping something hidden behind a
good facade, he could always see through it.
That kept them from needing to talk about
their emotions or constantly reassess their
relationship. They got married shortly
before he shipped out to Iraq for the first
time.

IT TAKES YEARS TO EARN ENOUGH
TRUST TO be a SEAL sniper. Even after
sniper school, Kyle had to prove himself
again and again in the field, in the pressure
of battle. He served other missions before
Afghanistan and Iraq, in places he couldn’t
discuss because the operations were
classified.
As he would eventually describe in
American Sniper , his first kill on the sniper
rifle came in late March 2003, in Nasiriya,
Iraq. It wasn’t long after the initial
invasion, and his platoon—“Charlie” of
SEAL Team 3—had taken a building earlier
that day so they could provide overwatch
for a unit of Marines thundering down the
road. He was holding a bolt-action .300
Winchester Magnum that belonged to his
platoon chief. He saw a woman about 50
yards away. As the Marines got closer, the
woman pulled a grenade. Hollywood might
have you believe that snipers aim for the
head—“one shot, one kill”—but effective
snipers aim for the middle of the chest, for
center mass.
Kyle pulled the trigger twice.
“The public is soft,” he used to say. “They
have no idea.” Because of that softness, he
had to have that story, and others, cleared
by the Department of Defense before he
could include them in his book.
He wanted outsiders to know exactly what
kind of evil the troops have had to deal
with. But he understood why the Pentagon
wouldn’t want to give America’s enemies
any new propaganda. He knew the public
didn’t want to hear about the brutal
realities of war.
Kyle served four tours of duty in Iraq,
participating in every major campaign of
the war. He was on the ground for the
initial invasion in 2003. He was in Fallujah
in 2004. He went back, to Ramadi in 2006,
and then again, to Baghdad in 2008, where
he was called in to secure the Green Zone
by going into Sadr City.
Most of his platoon was in the Pacific
theater before the 2004 deployment. Kyle
was sent early to assist Marines clearing
insurgents in Fallujah. Tales of his success
in combat trickled back to his team. He was
originally supposed to watch over the
American forces perched at a safe distance,
but he thought he could provide more
protection if he was on the street, going
house to house with his boys. During one
firefight, it was reported that Kyle ran
through a hail of bullets to pull a wounded
Marine to safety. His teammates, hearing
these stories, started sarcastically referring
to him as The Legend.
Those stories of bravery in battle
proliferated on his third deployment. A
younger SEAL was with Kyle at the top of a
building in Ramadi when they came under
heavy fire. The younger SEAL, who is still
active in the teams and can’t be named,
dropped to the ground and hid behind an
interior wall. When he finally looked up, he
saw Kyle standing there, glued to his
weapon, covering his field of fire, calling
out enemy positions as he engaged.
Kyle said the combat was the worst on his
last deployment, to Sadr City in 2008. The
enemy was better armed than before. Now
it seemed like every time there was an
attack, there were rocket-propelled grenades
and fights that went on for days. This was
also the deployment that produced Kyle’s
longest confirmed kill.
He was on the second floor of a house on
the edge of a village. With the scope of
his .338 Lapua, he started scanning out
farther into the distance, to the edge of the
next village, a mile away. He saw a figure
on the roof of a one-story building. The
figure didn’t seem to be doing much, and at
the moment he didn’t appear to have a
weapon. But later that day, as an Army
convoy approached, Kyle checked again and
saw the man holding what looked like an
RPG. At that distance, Kyle could only
estimate his calculations.
He pulled the trigger and watched through
his scope as the Iraqi, 2,100 yards away, fell
off the roof. It was the world’s eighth-
longest confirmed kill shot by a sniper.
Later, Kyle called it a “really, really lucky
shot.”

CHRIS KYLE DIDN’T FIT THE STEREOTYPE
OF the sullen, lone wolf sniper. In many
ways, he was far from the model
serviceman. While he always kept his
weapons clean, the same was not true of his
living space. The way some SEALs tell it,
after one deployment, his room was in such
a disgusting condition that it took two days
to clean. There were six months worth of
spent sunflower seed shells he had spit
around the bed.
He was seldom seen in anything remotely
resembling a military uniform. His
teammates remember him painting the
Punisher skull on his body armor, helmets,
and even his guns. He also cut the sleeves
off his shirts. He wore civilian hunting
shoes instead of combat boots. Eschewing
the protection of Kevlar headgear, he wore
his old Longhorns baseball cap. He told
people he wore that hat so that the enemy
knew Texas was represented, that “Texans
shoot straight.”
Kyle heard people call snipers cowards. He
would point out that snipers, especially in
urban warfare, decrease the number of
civilian casualties. Plus, he said, “I will
reach out and get you however I can if
you’re threatening American lives.”
He terrorized his enemies in true folkhero
fashion. In 2006, intelligence officers
reported there was a $20,000 bounty on his
head. Later it went up to $80,000. He joked
that he was afraid to go home at one point.
“I was worried my wife might turn me in,”
he said.
Taya has been asked often over the years
how she reconciles the two Chris Kyles: the
trained killer and the loving husband and
father—the man who rolled around on the
floor with his kids and planned vacations to
historical sites and called from wherever he
could. (Once he thought his phone was off
and she ended up overhearing a firefight.)
She always worried about him, but
understanding how he could do what he did
was never hard.
“Chris was out there fighting for his
brothers because he loved them,” she says.
“He wanted to protect them and make sure
they all got to go home to their families.”
He never cared to talk much about the
number of confirmed kills he had. It’s likely
considerably higher than what the Pentagon
has released, but certain records could
remain classified for decades. Besides, while
the number garners a lot of attention, it
doesn’t tell Kyle’s story. He told people he
wished he could somehow calculate the
number of people he had saved. “That’s the
number I’d care about,” he said. “I’d put
that everywhere.”
While seeing his enemies die never gave
him much pause, losing his friends
devastated him. When fellow Team 3
Charlie platoon member Marc Lee died in
August of 2006—the first SEAL to die in the
Iraq war—Kyle was inconsolable. All of
Lee’s teammates prepared remarks for a
memorial service in Ramadi. Kyle wrote out
a speech, but when it came time to give it,
he couldn’t talk. Every time he tried, he
broke down, sobbing.
“He came up and hugged me afterwards,”
an active SEAL says. “He apologized. He
said, ‘I’m sorry. I wanted to, but I just
couldn’t do it.’ ”
It was at a similar event later that year— a
wake for fallen SEAL Michael Monsoor,
who was posthumously awarded the Medal
of Honor for throwing himself on a grenade
to save the lives of fellow SEALs—when
Kyle had his now-infamous confrontation
with former Minnesota governor Jesse
Ventura.
They were in a bar popular among SEALs in
Coronado, California. Kyle said that
Ventura, a former SEAL himself, was in
town for an unrelated event and stopped by
the wake. According to Kyle, Ventura
disrespected the troops, saying something to
the effect of, “You guys deserve to lose a
few.” That was enough. Kyle punched him
and left the bar. Ventura denied the entire
incident and later filed a lawsuit against
Kyle. But two other former SEALs, friends
of Kyle’s, told me they were there that
night, and it happened just the way Kyle
said it did.

BY 2009, THE LIFE WAS TAKING ITS TOLL
ON Taya. She told him that, because he was
gone so much, she would see him just as
often if she lived somewhere else. He took
that as an ultimatum. As Kyle pointed out
in his book and in interviews, the divorce
rate among Navy SEALs is over 90 percent.
He knew he wouldn’t be able to do both. So
he left his promising career, the dream job
for which he felt exceptionally well-suited,
the purpose that had kept him so motivated
for 10 years.
“When I first got out, I had a lot of
resentment,” he said. “I felt like she knew
who I was when she met me. She knew I
was a warrior. That was all I’d ever wanted
to do.” He started drinking a lot. He stopped
working out. He didn’t want to leave the
house or make his usual jokes. He missed
the rush of combat, the way being at war
sets your priorities straight. He missed
knowing that what he was doing mattered.
More than anything, though, he missed his
brothers in the SEALs. He wrote to them
and called them. He told people it felt like a
daze.
But when he wrote to his closest friends, he
talked about the one benefit of being out of
the Navy. In all those years at war, he’d
had almost no time with his two children.
And in his time out, he discovered there
was something he liked even more than
being a cowboy or valiant sniper.
“He loved being a dad,” Taya says. She
noticed he could be rough and playful with
their son and sweet and gentle with their
daughter. “A lot of fathers play with their
kids, but he was always on the floor with
them, rolling around, making everyone
giggle.”
Kyle began to feel better. He got sick of
feeling sorry for himself. He didn’t want a
divorce. He started working out again—
“getting my mind right,” he called it.
When he met other vets who were feeling
down, he told them they should try working
out more, too. But many of them, especially
the wounded men with missing limbs or
prominent burns, explained that people
stared too much. Gyms made them
uncomfortable. That’s how he got the idea
to put gym equipment in the homes of
veterans. When he approached FITCO, the
company that provides exercise machines
for facilities all over the country, and asked
for any used equipment, they said no. They
donated new equipment instead and helped
fund a nonprofit dedicated to Kyle’s
mission.
“With helping people,” Taya says, “Chris
found his new purpose.”
She watched him use the same willpower
that had carried him through SEAL training
and all those impossible missions, but now
he was trying to become a better man. He
started coaching his son’s tee-ball team and
taking his daughter to dance practice. He’d
always liked hunting, but he hated fishing.
Still, when he learned that his son liked to
fish, he dedicated himself to becoming a
great fisherman, so they could bond the way
he did with his own dad.
Kyle took the family to football games at
Cowboys Stadium. He took them to church.
Unless he was hanging out of a helicopter
with a gun doing overwatch, he hated
heights. But when his kids wanted to go, he
took them to Six Flags to ride the roller
coasters and to the State Fair for the Ferris
wheel. His black truck became a familiar
sight driving around Midlothian.
He started collecting replicas of Old West
guns, like the ones the cowboys used in
movies when he was a boy. Taya would find
him practicing his quick draw and gun
twirling skills. Sometimes they would sit on
the couch, watching TV, and he would twirl
an unloaded six-shooter around his finger.
If she saw someone on the screen that she
didn’t like, she would jokingly ask, “Can
you shoot that guy?”
He’d point the pistol at the TV and pretend
to fire.
“Got him, babe.”

J. KYLE BASS IS A HEDGE FUND MANAGER
in Dallas, the founder of Hayman Capital
Management. He was featured prominently
in the Michael Lewis book, Boomerang:
Travels in the New Third World , which
documented both his keen financial mind
and his fantastically opulent lifestyle. A few
years ago, Bass was feeling overweight and
out of shape. A former college athlete, he
wanted something intense, so he found a
Navy SEAL reserve commander in
California, a man who gets prospective
SEALs prepared for BUD/S, and asked if
they could tailor a short program for him.
Bass found that he really liked hanging out
with the future and active SEALs. He said if
they knew any SEALs coming back to Texas,
he’d love to meet them.
That’s how Bass met Chris Kyle. Bass was
building a new house at the time, and he
offered to fly in Kyle and pay him for some
security consulting.
“I was just trying to come up with anything
to help the guy out,” Bass says. “I was
looking for ways to try and help him make
this transition back into the real world.”
Bass invited Kyle to live at his house with
him while Taya finished selling their place
in San Diego. He introduced Kyle to as
many “big money” people as he could. And
the wealthy men were enthralled by Chris
Kyle. They loved being around the legend.
They loved hearing his stories and invited
him to go hunting on their ranches. Bass
would hold an economic summit every year
at his ranch in East Texas. He would kick
off the festivities by introducing his sniper
friends.
“I’d have Chris and other SEALs come out
and do exhibition shoots,” Bass says. “They
would take 600-yard shots at binary
explosives, so when they hit them it’s this
giant explosion that shakes the ground.” He
smiles as he tells the story. “For all the
people that manage money all over the
world and on Wall Street to come to Texas
and see a Navy SEAL sniper shoot a bomb,
it’s about as cool as it gets.”
Bass and some business associates also
helped start Craft International. They put
the Craft offices on the same floor as
Hayman, so the finance folks and the
defense contractors often crossed paths.
Despite working in a plush office building in
downtown Dallas, Kyle didn’t change much.
Even if he saw an important meeting, it
wouldn’t stop him from grinning and
flipping off an entire room of people.
The idea was to market Kyle’s skills. He
could help train troops (a lot of military
training is done by third-party contractors),
and police officers, and wealthy
businessmen who would pay top dollar for
hands-on instruction from an elite warrior
like Chris Kyle. He could take people out to
Rough Creek Lodge in Glen Rose, a luxury
resort with an extended shooting range. It’s
the same place he would take buddies and
wounded vets when they were feeling down
and needed to unwind.

KYLE INSISTED THAT HE NEVER HAD ANY
intention of writing of a book. He was told
there were already other writers working
on it, and he figured if it was going to
happen anyway, he might as well
participate. He wanted to give credit where
he felt it was due.
He and Taya were flown to New York in the
middle of winter, to meet writer Jim
DeFelice and begin pouring out their story.
The interviews were exhausting.
“He was not naturally loquacious,” DeFelice
says. “Nor did he particularly like to talk
about himself. When we first started
working together, telling me what happened
in the war put an enormous strain on him.
He was reliving battles in great detail for
the first time since he’d gotten out of the
service. He could have been killed in any
number of the situations he’d been in.
That’s a reality that can be difficult to
comprehend at the time, and even harder to
understand later on.”
Kyle did find time at one point for a
snowball fight with DeFelice’s 13-year-old
son. The war hero claimed he’d had plenty
of experience in snow, but on this day, the
boy got the better of him. Kyle came
running in and grabbed a beer.
“Okay, kid,” Kyle told him. “Now you can
say you beat a Navy SEAL in a snowball
fight.”