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

W
AR
I
’m not the same guy I was when I first went to war.
No one is. Before you’re in combat, you have this innocence
about you. Then, all of a sudden, you see this whole other side of
life.
I don’t regret any of it. I’d do it again. At the same time, war
definitely changes you.
You embrace death.
As a SEAL, you go to the Dark Side. You’re immersed in it.
Continually going to war, you gravitate to the blackest parts of
existence. Your psyche builds up its defenses—that’s why you
laugh at gruesome things like heads being blown apart, and worse.
Growing up, I wanted to be military. But I wondered, how

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would I feel about killing someone?
Now I know. It’s no big deal.
I did it a lot more than I’d ever thought I would—or, for that
matter, more than any American sniper before me. But I also
witnessed the evil my targets committed and wanted to commit, and
by killing them, I protected the lives of many fellow soldiers.
I
don’t spend a lot of time philosophizing about killing people. I
have a clear conscience about my role in the war.
I am a strong Christian. Not a perfect one—not close. But I
strongly believe in God, Jesus, and the Bible. When I die, God is
going to hold me accountable for everything I’ve done on earth.
He may hold me back until last and run everybody else through
the line, because it will take so long to go over all my sins.
“Mr. Kyle, let’s go into the backroom. . . .”
Honestly, I don’t know what will really happen on Judgment
Day. But what I lean toward is that you know all of your sins, and
God knows them all, and shame comes over you at the reality that
He knows. I believe the fact that I’ve accepted Jesus as my savior
will be my salvation.
But in that backroom or whatever it is when God confronts me
with my sins, I do not believe any of the kills I had during the war
will be among them. Everyone I shot was evil. I had good cause on
every shot. They all deserved to die.

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M
y regrets are about the people I couldn’t save—Marines,
soldiers, my buddies.
I still feel their loss. I still ache for my failure to protect them.
I’m not naive and I’m beyond romanticizing war and what I had
to do there. The worst moments of my life have come as a SEAL.
Losing my buddies. Having a kid die on me.
I’m sure some of the things I went through pale in comparison to
what some of the guys went through in World War II and other
conflicts. On top of all the shit they went through in Vietnam, they
had to come home to a country that spat on them.
When people ask me how the war changed me, I tell them that
the biggest thing has to do with my perspective.
You know all the everyday things that stress you here?
I don’t give a shit about them. There are bigger and worse things
that could happen than to have this tiny little problem wreck your
life, or even your day. I’ve seen them.
More: I’ve lived them.

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