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

8
Family Conflicts
Taya:
We went out to the tarmac to wait for the plane when
it came in. There were a few wives and children. I came
out with our baby and I felt so excited. I was over the
moon.
I remember turning to one of the women I was with
and saying, “Isn’t this great? Isn’t this exciting? I can’t
stand it.”
She said, “Ehhh.”
I thought to myself, well, maybe I’m still new to it.

---

Later on, she and her husband, a SEAL in Chris’s
platoon, got divorced.
B
ONDING
I
’d left the States some seven months before, only ten days after
my son was born. I loved him, but as I mentioned earlier, we hadn’t
really had a chance to bond. Newborns are just a bundle of needs
—feed them, clean them, get them to rest. Now he had a
personality. He was crawling. He was more of a person. I’d seen
him growing up in the photos Taya had sent me, but this was more
intense.
He was my son.
We’d lie on the floor in our pajamas and play together. He’d
crawl all over me and I’d boost him up and carry him all around.
Even the simplest things—like him touching my face—were a joy.
But the transition from war to home was still a shock. One day,
we’d been fighting. The next, we’d crossed the river to al-
Taqaddum Airbase (known to us as TQ) and started back for the
States.
War one day; peace the next.
Every time you come home, it’s weird. Especially in California.
The simplest things can upset you. Take traffic. You’re driving on
the road, everything’s crowded, it’s craziness. You’re still thinking

---

IEDs—you see a piece of trash and you swerve. You drive
aggressively toward other drivers, because that’s the way you do it
in Iraq.
I would shut myself in for about a week. I think that’s where
Taya and I started having problems.
B
eing parents for the first time, we had the disagreements everyone
has about children. Co-sleeping, for instance—Taya had my son
sleep with her in a co-sleeper in the bed while I was gone. When I
came home, I wanted to change that. We disagreed quite a bit on
that. I thought he should be in his own crib in his own room. Taya
saw it as depriving her of her closeness with him. She thought we
should transition him gradually.
That wasn’t how I saw it at all. I felt children should sleep in their
own beds and rooms.
I know now that issues like that are common, but there was
added stress. She’d been raising him completely on her own for
months now, and I was intruding on her routines and ways of doing
things. They were incredibly close, which I thought was great. But I
wanted to be with them, too. I wasn’t trying to come between them,
just add myself back into the family.
As it happened, none of that was a big deal for my son; he slept
just fine. And he still has a very special relationship with his mom.
L
ife at home had its interesting moments, though the drama was

---

very different. Our neighbors and close friends were completely
respectful of my need for time to decompress. Once that was over,
they put together a little welcome-home barbecue.
They’d all been great while I was gone. The people across the
street arranged to have someone cut our grass, which was huge to
us financially and helped Taya with the heavy load she carried while
I was gone. It seemed like a little thing, but it was big to me.
Now that I was home, of course, it was my job to take care of
things like that. We had a small, itty-bitty backyard; it took all of
five minutes to cut the grass back there. But on one side of the yard
were climbing roses that climbed up these potato bush trees we
had. The bushes had little purple flowers on them year-round.
The combination looked really pretty. But the roses had thorns in
them that could pierce an armored vest. Every time I’d mow the
yard and come around the corner, I’d get snagged by them.
One day, those roses just went too far, tearing at my side. I
decided to take care of them once and for all: I picked up my
lawnmower, held it up about chest-high, and trimmed the mothers
(the roses and the trees) down.
“What! Are you kidding me?” yelled Taya. “Are you trimming
the bushes with a lawnmower?”
Hey, it worked. They never snagged me again.
I did do some genuinely goofy stuff. Having fun and making
other people smile and laugh has always been something I like to
do. One day, I saw our backyard neighbor through our kitchen

---

window, so I stood on a chair and knocked on the window to get
her attention. I proceeded to moon her. (Her husband happened to
be a Navy pilot, so I’m sure she was familiar with such things.)
Taya rolled her eyes. She was amused, I think, though she
wouldn’t admit it.
“Who does that?” she said to me.
“She laughed, didn’t she?” I said.
“You are thirty years old,” she said. “Who does that?”
There’s a side of me that loves to pull pranks on people, to get
them to laugh. You can’t just do regular stuff—I want them to have
a good time. Belly laughs. The more extreme the better. April
Fools’ Day is a particularly tough time for my family and friends,
though more because of Taya’s pranks than my own. I guess we
both like to have a good laugh.
O
n the darker side, I was extremely hot-headed. I have always
had a temper, even before becoming a SEAL. But it was more
explosive now. If someone cut me off—not a very rare occurrence
in California—I could get crazy. I might try and run them off the
road, or even stop and whup their ass.
I had to work at calming down.
O
f course, having a reputation as a SEAL does have its
advantages.
At my sister-in-law’s wedding, the preacher and I got to talking.

---

At some point, she—the preacher was a lady—noticed a bulge in
my jacket.
“You have a gun?” she asked.
“Yes, I do,” I said, explaining that I was in the military.
She may or may not have known that I was a SEAL—I didn’t
tell her, but word tends to get around—but when she was ready to
start the ceremony and couldn’t get anyone in the crowd to be quiet
and get into place, she came over to me, patted me on the back,
and said, “Can you get everyone to sit down?”
“Yes, I can,” I told her.
I barely had to raise my voice to get that little ceremony going.
Taya:
People talk about physical love and need when
someone comes home from a long absence: “I want to
rip your clothes off.” That sort of thing.
I felt that way in theory, but the reality was always a
little different.
I needed to get to know him again. It was strange.
There’s so much anticipation. You miss them so much
when they deploy, and you want them to be home, but
then when they are, things aren’t perfect. And you feel
as if they should be. Depending on the deployment and
what I’d been through, I also had emotions ranging from
sadness to anxiety to anger.

---

When he came back after this deployment, I felt
almost shy. I was a new mother and had been doing
things on my own for months. We were both changing
a n d growing in totally separate worlds. He had no
firsthand knowledge of mine and I had no firsthand
knowledge of his.
I also felt bad for Chris. He was wondering what was
wrong. There was distance between us that neither one
of us could really fix, or even talk about.