American Sniper: The Autobiography of the Most Lethal Sniper in U.S. Military History (33 page)

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.

I
didn’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.

J
ason 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.

R
OUGH
T
IMES

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.

I laughed off the message at first, but curiosity got the best of me. Soon my old girlfriend and I were talking and texting regularly.

Taya figured out that something was up. One night I came home and she sat me down and laid everything out, very calmly, very rationally—or at least as rational as you can be in that kind of situation.

“We have to be able to trust each other,” she said at one point. “And in the direction we’re going, that’s not going to work. It just won’t.”

We had a long, heartfelt talk about that. I think we both cried. I know I did. I loved my wife. I didn’t want to be separated from her. I wasn’t interested in getting divorced.

I
know: it sounds corny as shit. A fucking SEAL talking about love?

I’d rather get choked out a hundred times than do that in public, let alone here for the whole world to see.

But it was real. If I’m going to be honest, I have to put it out there.

W
e set up a few rules that we would live by. And we both agreed to go to counseling.

Taya:

Things just got to the point where I felt as if I was looking down into a deep pit. It wasn’t just arguments over the kids. We weren’t relating to each other. I could tell his mind had strayed from our marriage, from us.

I remember talking to a girlfriend who’d been through an awful lot. I just unloaded.

She said to me, “Well this is what you have to do. You have to lay it all on the line. You have to tell him that you love him, and you want him to stay, but if he wants to go, he is free to do so.”

I took her advice. It was a hard, hard conversation.

But I knew several things in my heart. First, I knew I loved Chris. And second, and this was very important to me, I knew that he was a good dad. I’d seen him with our son, and with our daughter. He had a strong sense of discipline and respect, and at the same time had so much fun with the kids that by the time they were done playing they all ached from laughing. Those two things really convinced me that I had to try to keep our marriage together.

From my side, I hadn’t been the perfect wife, either. Yes, I loved him, truly, but I’d been a real bitch at times. I had pushed him away.

So both of us had to want the marriage and we both had to come together to make it work.

I’d like to say that things instantly got better from that point on. But life really isn’t like that. We did talk a lot more. I started to become more focused on the marriage—more focused on my responsibilities to my family.

One issue that we didn’t completely resolve had to do with my enlistment, and how it would fit with our family’s long-term plans. My earlier reenlistment was going to be up in roughly two years; we had already begun discussing that.

Taya made it clear that our family needed a father. My son was growing in leaps and bounds. Boys do need a strong male figure in their lives; there was no way I could disagree.

But I also felt as if I had a duty to my country. I had been trained to kill; I was very good at it. I felt I had to protect my fellow SEALs, and my fellow Americans.

And I liked doing it. A lot.

But . . .

I went back and forth. It was a very difficult decision.

Incredibly difficult.

In the end, I decided she was right: others could do my job protecting the country, but no one could truly take my place with my family. And I had given my country a fair share.

I told her I would not reenlist when the time came.

I still wonder sometimes if I made the right decision. In my mind, as long as I am fit and there is a war, my country needs me. Why would I send someone in my place? A part of me felt I was acting like a coward.

Serving in the Teams is serving a greater good. As a civilian, I’d just be serving
my
own good. Being a SEAL wasn’t just what I did; it became who I was.

A F
OURTH
D
EPLOYMENT

I
f things had worked according to “normal” procedures, I would have been given a long break and a long stretch of shore duty after my second deployment. But for various reasons, that didn’t happen.

The Team promised that I’d have a break after this deployment. But that didn’t work either. I wasn’t real happy about it. I lost my temper talking about it, as a matter of fact. I’d guess more than once.

Now, I like war, and I love doing my job, but it rankled me that the Navy wasn’t keeping its word. With all the stress at home, an assignment that would have kept me near my family at that point would have been welcome. But I was told that the needs of the Navy came first. And fair or not, that’s the way it was.

M
y blood pressure was still elevated.

The doctors blamed it on coffee and dip. According to them, my blood pressure was as high as if I were drinking ten cups of coffee right before the test. I was drinking coffee, but not nearly that much. They strongly urged me to cut back, and to stop using dip.

Of course I didn’t argue with them. I didn’t want to get kicked out of the SEALs, or go down a road that might lead to a medical discharge. I suppose, in retrospect, some might wonder why I didn’t do that, but it would have seemed like a cowardly thing to do. It would never have felt right.

I
n the end, I was all right with being scheduled for another deployment. I still loved war.

D
ELTA
P
LATOON

U
sually, when you come home, a few guys will rotate out of the platoon. Officers will usually change out. A lot of times the chief leaves, the LPO—lead petty officer—becomes the chief, and then someone else becomes LPO. But other than that, you stay pretty tight-knit. In our case, most of the platoon had been together for many years.

Until now.

Trying to spread out the experience in the Team, command decided to break up Charlie/Cadillac Platoon and spread us out. I was assigned to Delta, and put in as LPO of the platoon. I worked directly with the new chief, who happened to be one of my BUD/S instructors.

We worked out our personnel selections, making assignments and sending different people off to school. Now that I was LPO, I not only had more admin crap to deal with, but couldn’t be point man anymore.

That hurt.

I drew the line when they talked about taking my sniper rifle away. I was still a sniper, no matter what else I did in the platoon.

Besides finding good point men, one of the toughest personnel decisions I had to make involved choosing a breacher. The breacher is the person who, among other things, is in charge of the explosives, who sets them and blows them (if necessary) on the DA. Once the platoon is inside, the breacher is really running things. So the group is entirely in his hands.

T
here are a number of other important tasks and schools I haven’t mentioned along the way, but which do deserve attention. Among them is the JTAC—that’s the guy who gets to call in air support. It’s a popular position in the Teams. First of all, the job is kind of fun: you get to watch things blow up. And secondly, you’re often called away for special missions, so you get a lot of action.

Comms and navigation are a lot further down the list for most SEALs. But they’re necessary jobs. The worst school you can send someone to has to do with intel. People hate that. They joined the SEALs to kick down doors, not to gather intelligence. But everyone has a role.

Of course, some people like to fall out of planes, and swim with the sharks.

Sickos.

T
he dispersal of talent may have helped the Team in general, but as platoon LPO I was concerned about getting the best guys over to Delta with me.

The master chief in charge of the personnel arrangements was working everything out on an organizational chart that had been set up on a big magnetic board. One afternoon, while he was out, I snuck into his office and rearranged things. Suddenly, everyone who was anyone in Charlie was now assigned to Delta.

My changes had been a little too drastic, and as soon as the master chief got back, my ears started ringing even more than normal.

“Don’t
ever
go into my office when I am not here,” he told me as soon as I reported to him. “Don’t touch my board.
Ever
.”

Well, truth is, I did go back.

I knew he’d catch anything drastic, so I made one little switch and got Dauber into my platoon. I needed a good sniper and corpsman. The master chief apparently never noticed it, or at least didn’t change it.

I had my answer ready in case I was caught: “I did it for the good of the Navy.”

Or at least Delta Platoon.

S
till recovering from knee surgery, I couldn’t actually take part in a lot of the training for the first few months the platoon was together. But I kept tabs on my guys, watching them when I could. I hobbled around the land warfare sessions, observing the new guys especially. I wanted to know who I was going to war with.

I was just about back into shape when I got into a pair of fights, first the one in Tennessee I mentioned earlier, where I was arrested, and then another near Fort Campbell where, as my son put it, “some guy decided to break his face on my daddy’s hand.”

“Some guy” also broke my hand in the process.

My platoon chief was livid.

“You’ve been out with knee surgery, we get you back, you get arrested, now you break your hand. What the fuck?”

There may have been a few other choice words thrown in there as well. They may also have continued for quite a while.

T
hinking back, I did seem to get into a number of fights during this training period. In my mind, at least, they weren’t my fault—in that last case, I was on my way out when the idiot’s girlfriend tried picking a fight with my friend, a SEAL. Which was absolutely as ridiculous in real life as it must look on the printed page.