The Life and Legend of Chris Kyle: American Sniper, Navy SEAL by Mooney Michael J

Author:Mooney, Michael J. [Mooney, Michael J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780316278232
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2013-04-23T00:00:00+00:00

BY 2009 THE LIFE WAS TAKING ITS TOLL ON TAYA. She told Kyle 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 anymore, to be a SEAL and a husband. 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 ten 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.

The country was so much different in 2009 than it had been when the war began in 2003. He had been home during leave and between tours, but he was never back long enough to think about the cultural shifts. When he left for Iraq in 2003, it was still less than a year and a half after the attacks of September 11, 2001. The phrase “War on Terror” was ubiquitous, as were flag pins. Even Michael Moore was telling college students that they had to maintain respect for the troops. It seemed like every gas station sold those ribbon-shaped magnets meant to remind us to keep the military in our thoughts. There were giant American flags unrolled at so many football games, and patriotic songs filling huge chunks of the radio dial.

When the war began, there were protesters and many who opposed the war in this country (though almost none from any branch of the federal government), and a lot of those people were considered unpatriotic. More people were glued to their televisions, watching the war on cable news in near real time. This was a period when national magazines ran cover stories about the political power of American evangelicals, and gay marriage was a wedge issue that helped conservatives, not liberals. Some people forget, George W. Bush was elected with a higher percentage of the vote in 2004 than he’d received in the previous election.

But just a few years later, things seemed so different. It felt like there was less unity than ever. The expression “War on Terror” was all but retired. And while there were still active military campaigns in two theaters, most of the country’s attention was focused on the mushrooming financial crisis. There were more empty strip malls, more people looking for work, more Americans hurting.

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