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

K
NEE
 S
URGERY
I
’d first hurt my knees in Fallujah when the wall fell on me.
Cortisone shots helped for a while, but the pain kept coming back
and getting worse. The docs told me I needed to have my legs
operated on, but doing that would have meant I would have to take
time off and miss the war.
So I kept putting it off. I settled into a routine where I’d go to
the doc, get a shot, go back to work. The time between shots
became shorter and shorter. It got down to every two months, then
every month.
I made it through Ramadi, but just barely. My knees started
locking and it was difficult to get down the stairs. I no longer had a
choice, so, soon after I got home in 2007, I went under the knife.
The surgeons cut my tendons to relieve pressure so my
kneecaps would slide back over. They had to shave down my
kneecaps because I had worn grooves in them. They injected
synthetic cartilage material and shaved the meniscus. Somewhere
along the way they also repaired an ACL.
I was like a racing car, being repaired from the ground up.
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

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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

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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.