American Wife (13 page)

What they were really saying was:
Look at me. I know the top SEAL sniper ever! Aren't I cool?

It grated on Chris. He'd gone from being surrounded by guys who would die for him to phonies who were using him, even if it was in an innocent way.

Leaving the war zone didn't translate immediately into leaving the war. He had bad dreams, reminders of the brutality he'd seen. His blood pressure remained high.

I have to admit, I didn't really appreciate all he was going through at the time. I was thinking: My husband is finally with us! We're going to have the perfect family life! I was impatient for that to start, and baffled when it didn't.

I was as disappointed and confused as he was. I didn't like the drinking, either by him or by friends. And the more the distance between us grew, the more I resented everything that added to it. Little things that he did or didn't do—like not holding me when I was feeling blue—grated, becoming bigger and bigger things. It worked both ways—I was certainly distracted and often couldn't help commenting negatively on things he'd say, even when I should have held my tongue.

I'm sure he must have blamed me for what he felt, because I was the major reason he'd left the Navy. To his credit, though, he never said that and never tried to make me feel bad because of it. (We only talked about it in depth much later—while he was working on
American Sniper
.)

We started arguing a lot. Some of the things I said were very hurtful, and vice versa.

I can see why your family thinks you don't want to have anything to do with them!

Silly stuff, yes. The worst of what we said doesn't even seem like much of anything except a stupid misunderstanding now.

And yet, it seemed life threatening, or at least marriage threatening, at the time.

Things finally came to a head one night. But the truth is, I didn't see it coming.

“I don't think this is working out,” Chris told me.

“What?” I said, stunned.

“It's not working out.”

“Please,” I said, feeling like a drowning swimmer groping for a rope. “We're just under stress. We—of course it will work out. We have a good marriage.”

Chris saw the relationship in much starker, and maybe more realistic, terms.

“I'm going hunting this weekend,” he told me. “Let's take this weekend to think about whether we want to stay together.”

I wasn't ready to give up. I don't think he was either. We both took our characteristic approaches to problems: he went off and cleared his head; I dug in and researched how to fix our marriage.

Among the things I read that weekend was
The Proper Care and Feeding of Husbands
. Maybe it has a silly title, but the book gave me some good insights on what I could do better. It also reassured me that I was right about the most important issue—we
did
have the basis of a great marriage, and we could make it even better.

It was just a question of getting there.

When Chris came home, we put the kids to bed, then went into the living room to talk alone.

“Did you have time to think?” I asked.

“Yeah. I don't know if we can make it, Taya. I really don't.”

“I love you,” I said.

“I love you, too,” he answered, with his sincere cowboy eyes. “I just don't know if we can be happy.”

“I think we can.”

I started telling him about the book I'd read. He laughed at the title. But the tactics it suggested were serious, and also fairly achievable.

“I'm going to do these things,” I told him. “And I'll keep doing them or whatever it takes. Just give me a chance.”

I don't think the conversation lasted more than a half hour. There was no yelling or anything like that. It may sound a little corny in the telling, but to us it was one of the most heartfelt half hours we'd shared in years.

I think Chris was wondering why things weren't okay when we'd finally reached a point where we'd thought they would be. I was wondering the same thing. So as usual, we were working together; we just didn't know it.

Looking back, I can understand exactly why we were having trouble. No privacy, work pressure, major relocation, excessive drinking, little sleep, two little kids, crazy dogs—you name the stressor, we had it.

But a key part of the problem was our—
my
—expectation of perfection without effort. Or even
with
effort.

Gradually we removed stressors. I told my relative the stay was over. The dog went with her. We cut out some of the friends who were contributing to chaos.

But the real thing that got us over that hump was simple:
We focused on each other.

I don't mean that Chris and I were together 24/7 from that point on. In fact, the increase in our time together may not have amounted to a few minutes a day, if that. But we made a conscious effort to be together mentally as well as physically. We both tried hard to think about the other person, and to take them into account—to hold them dear.

It was the whole reason we'd gotten married in the first place.

Staying in Kyle Bass's house had always been a temporary measure. As part of the effort to change the atmosphere around us, we started looking for a new place to live, outside the city. It came to symbolize a whole new start.

Our initial idea was to rent—we were still trying to sell the San Diego house—and we looked at a number of places in the general Dallas area. One day we drove out to a neighborhood that looked almost ideal. There was a house there that was nearly perfect—all it lacked was a fence for the dog in the back.

“Put in a fence and we'll take it,” we told the Realtor.

She got a funny look on her face.

“I want to show you another house,” she said. “It's actually for sale, but it's been on the market almost a year. Sometimes when houses sit that long, people are willing to rent instead of sell.”

We went along, not expecting much. Then we saw it.

A sprawling ranch-style home, it was fairly new, with a very nice kitchen, nice bedrooms, and a single room upstairs we could use as a playroom for the kids. There was an office for Chris and a nice little den tucked toward the back. The backyard—which was fenced—had to be six times the size of the one in California. The local schools were good and the neighborhood was quiet. It was the perfect place to raise our kids.

Oh my God, I thought when I walked in, I want this house.

Instead of renting, we came up with a plan to buy. Chris decided he would sell one of his guns to pay for the down payment; we'd get a mortgage for the rest. When he heard that Chris was going to sell the gun, Kyle Bass offered instead to loan Chris the down payment in exchange for the gun, and then arranged for his company to hold the mortgage on the house. It was the perfect arrangement, and a generous one.

The night we closed, we slept on a blow-up air mattress. We probably would have floated above the floor anyway.

“Can you believe this is ours?” we said to each other, over and over.

“They'll bury me in the backyard,” I told Chris.

Chris loved the house, but he had other ambitions. What he really wanted was a place where he could have horses and shoot. Which meant a lot more acres, a barn, a corral—your typical Texas ranch. We couldn't afford that—yet. For him, the new house was going to be a stepping-stone to someplace bigger. But in the meantime, if the kids and I were happy, he was happy.

DAUGHTERS OF SARAH

The idea behind Craft was a good one, but like any new business, attracting clients and just getting normal working procedures into place was a grind.

To start the company and cover initial expenses, Kyle Bass and a group of other investors loaned Craft a considerable amount of money—it would eventually come close to $2 million in 12 percent convertible preferred notes, according to court documents—to get started. Chris felt obliged to each of the investors and worked hard to make their investments pay off. He owned 85 percent of the company, which to him meant that its weight was on his shoulders. He made cold calls to police agencies and contacted military units, trying to drum up business. Not only did Craft personnel teach classes themselves, but the facility they had obtained in Arizona was used for training sessions.

As the pressures of starting the new business built, I made suggestions to Chris about different things he could do to improve the company. I had a background in sales and management, and while pharmaceuticals are nothing like tactical training, I still thought I could contribute.

I'd suggest management books he could read, only to be met with a shake of the head.

“I'm not going to do that.”

All Chris really wanted to do was train people. Management? No way.

Sniping, surveillance, even security—another name for being a bodyguard—were what he loved to do, and teaching these skills was the reason he started the company. The other parts of running a business had relatively little interest for him. Not that he didn't do them, but there wasn't the same level of enthusiasm. He was happy to turn over duties like keeping the books to his employees and partners.

For quite a while, I was frustrated that he wouldn't take my help. I felt hurt and rejected, not allowed to contribute. I surely became a bit of a nag, second-guessing or criticizing his decisions.

That, too, must have worn on our marriage, or at least on Chris. Then one weekend we took the kids to a lodge for a few days away. While Chris, Bubba, and Angel were out, I started to read a book a friend of mine had recommended called
Daughters of Sarah,
written by Genevieve M. White. I was skeptical, but I saw a lot of things that were not only true but that could be easily applied to us, and me specifically. Basically, I had to learn to trust Chris more—one of the ideas in the book—stop second-guessing him, and, more to the point, stop nagging him to do things my way. I had to learn to listen without offering opinions unless asked.

For us, the advice applied to Craft, which was truly his thing. But it applied to our family decisions as well. I had to let him lead, and help when he wanted help. In the end, if I trusted God, then I had to trust Chris as well.

And I did. So why did I have a problem?

I cried my way through the book because I knew I needed to change and didn't know if I could do it. I wondered if I would become invisible or insignificant in the process. My desire for happiness and faithfulness won out. Driving home after our stay, I told Chris a little about the book. I was going to let him lead and make a real effort not to second-guess or nag. I'm sure he doubted that would happen, but it did. It was amazing how things in our relationship worked so much better from that point on.

There's a lot more in that book, of course. Some people will find the religious angle comforting; others won't think it will work for them. But my father gave me a piece of advice that has stuck with me over the years: you don't have to follow the Bible to get to heaven, but it is a recipe for happiness. And it's the same way with that book.

At first it seemed like I was giving up a lot: disagreeing meant a chance to change a decision, and frankly I would have changed several of Chris's decisions. But the reality was that I gained much more than I lost. Once I stopped questioning everything he did, Chris consulted with me more. I changed my attitude to one that was more accepting and supportive, which made both of us happier.

Did he do everything the way I would have? No. But who's to say that his solutions weren't miles ahead of mine?

It may seem ironic now, but Chris and I never really settled on a “home” church, even in Texas. We went to several, trying to find just the right one to fit in. But while we were comfortable in many, including what's known locally as a “cowboy church,” we couldn't really pick one as a permanent home. Faith remained an important part of our lives, but for some reason we just never found the right place to worship.

I guess the exterior walls aren't important, as long as you worship in your heart.

AMERICAN SNIPER

Even before he left the Navy, Chris had heard that people were interested in writing about him. He was adamantly opposed. Chris didn't want the attention or even feel that he deserved it. Toward the end of his service, he met a man named Scott McEwen in a local bar. They got to talking, and Chris told him some war stories. At some point, McEwen suggested that they should write a book together. McEwen was an attorney, but he had always wanted to try his hand at writing.

Chris eventually agreed.

“This guy's a lawyer?” I asked. “Not a writer?”

“Yeah.”

“Why would you consider him doing it?”

“I don't think anything's going to happen anyway,” he said. “But this way I can say someone's working on it and maybe other people won't do it.”

I was like, okay.

McEwen eventually presented Chris with a contract that had McEwen owning 30 percent of the story, a similar percentage to what an attorney often gets in a contingency agreement. Publishing agents in New York typically get 10 to 15 percent of the author's money; lawyers doing book contracts are often paid on a per hour basis. (Film agents are a little different; in California, they must be registered and usually are limited to 10 percent; attorneys in the movie business usually review contracts and do other legal work on a percentage basis, generally around 5 percent of the deal.)

They started working, though in my opinion haphazardly. They never got very far, and then we left San Diego for Texas. I suspect Chris wanted to let it go and see if he really
had
to write the book—as if it were one of the high school assignments he used to try to duck, only to finish at the last minute in the cab of his truck before running in for class.

And that was where things were in the summer of 2010, with us fitting into our new home and Chris busy with Craft, when an email came to Chris from Peter Hubbard, an editor at William Morrow. Peter had heard about Chris from another SEAL, and in the email asked if he'd ever considered writing a book about his experiences: