American Sniper: The Autobiography of the Most Lethal Sniper in U. S. Military History

I
N OR
 O
UT?
M
y enlistment was coming to an end. The Navy kept trying to
entice me to stay, making different offers: handle training, work in
England, anything I wanted just so I would stay in the Navy.
Even though I had told Taya I wouldn’t reenlist, I wasn’t ready
to quit.
I wanted to go back to the war. I felt I’d been cheated on my
last deployment. I struggled, trying to decide what to do. Some

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days, I was through with the Navy; other days, I was ready to tell
my wife the hell with it, and reenlist.
We talked about it a lot.
Taya:
I told Chris that both our kids needed him, especially,
at that particular time, our son. If he wasn’t going to be
there, then I would move closer to my father so that at
least he would grow up with a strong grandfather very
close to him.
I didn’t want to do that at all.
And Chris really loved us all. He really wanted to
have and nurture a strong family.
Part of it came down to the conflict we’d always had
—where were our priorities: God, family, country (my
version), or God, country, family (Chris’s)?
To my mind, Chris had already given his country so
much, a tremendous amount. The previous ten years had
been filled with constant war. Heavy combat
deployments were combined with extensive training
workups that kept him away from home. It was more
heavy action—and absence—than any other SEAL I
knew of. It was time to give his family some of himself.
But as always, I couldn’t make the decision for him.

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The Navy suggested that they could send me to Texas as
recruiter. That sounded pretty good, since the job would allow me
to have regular hours and come home at night. It looked to me like
a possible compromise.
“You have to give me a little time to work this out,” said the
master chief I was dealing with. “This isn’t the sort of thing that we
can do overnight.”
I agreed to extend my enlistment a month while he worked on it.
I waited and waited. No orders came in.
“It’s coming, it’s coming,” he said. “You have to extend again.”
So I did.
A few more weeks passed—we were almost through October
by now—and no orders came through. So I called him up and
asked what the hell was going on.
“It’s a Catch-22,” he explained. “They want to give it to you, but
it’s a three-year billet. You don’t have any time.”
In other words, they wanted me to enlist first, then they would
give me the job. But there were no guarantees, no contract.
I’d been there before. I finally told them thanks, but no thanks
—
I’m getting out
.
Taya:
He always says, “I feel like a quitter.” I think he’s
done his job, but I know that’s how he feels. He thinks if
there are people out there fighting, it should be him. And

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a lot of other SEALs feel that way about themselves, as
well. But I believe not one of them would blame him for
getting out.