The man was screaming in pain from gunshots to one arm and both legs, and worse, a devastating gut shot that somehow had slid below his body armor. Kyle scurried in front of the enemy's hideout and grabbed one of the injured Marines.
#28 WEEKS LATER SNIPER TORRENT#
Kyle and the other SEAL darted out into the street to the injured men, sprinting 20 yards into a torrent of gunfire. "It's beaten into your head throughout your training: 'You're the better, more effective warrior.'" That meant he had to get those Marines, no matter what. As a Navy SEAL amongst a group of "young, 18-year-old kids" barely out of basic training, Kyle felt he had a special obligation. "When you see an injured man, you do whatever you can to save him," he told me. Kyle couldn't bear to see the Marines struggling helplessly in the street. By this time, the Marines had barricaded themselves in a building across the street from the insurgents' house.īut two Marines had been shot and lay in the road, writhing in pain. Kyle and another SEAL sniper realized they were no longer effective from the rooftop, so they flew down the stairs to support the Marines. The Marines were left exposed in the street. The enemy fell back and barricaded themselves into a house. The Marines encountered a group of enemy fighters, and "heavy contact" erupted. It was during an overwatch mission, in which Kyle was providing rooftop cover for Marines clearing buildings below. The first episode occurred in early November 2004. I feel compelled to tell these stories because they reveal Kyle's dedication to saving lives, not just taking them. Two incidents during the Second Battle of Fallujah in November 2004 illustrate this selflessness, this willingness to put himself in grave danger for his comrades. Kyle's response was telling: "The Americans, the local Iraqis, anyone who I witnessed violence coming down on them and I could not save them." That flies directly in the face of the bogus "racist" claim. In fact, later in his 2012 interview with O'Reilly, the host asked whether he had any regrets, and Kyle said, "Yes - it's the people I couldn't save." O'Reilly pushed him, saying: "The Americans you couldn't save? The allied forces?" No, the Kyle I knew was motivated by something far more noble - defending innocent civilians and his American brethren. It was all about the terrorists who were beheading and torturing civilians (Iraqis and westerners alike). Heck, I freely admit that I hate terrorists, too.īut Kyle never expressed to me any comparable views about Iraqi civilians. That's not a problem at all."įorgive me, but that doesn't seem terribly damning in my view. When Kyle appeared on Bill O'Reilly's show in 2012, he said: "I'm killing to protect my fellow Americans." When O'Reilly insisted that Kyle liked it, he responded, "It's not a problem taking out people that want your people dead. "They were complete dumbasses," he said to me. He called them "savages" and spoke of them with unmistakable disdain. In our interviews, Kyle certainly conveyed that he hated the insurgents, the Islamic fundamentalist militants against whom they were fighting, and that he was proud of killing many of them. But not "a racist who took pleasure in dehumanizing and killing brown people," as one writer suggested in a British periodical. So, when I heard some negative backlash about Kyle - calling him "a hate-filled killer," "coward," or "mass-murdering sniper" - I had to share my experience.įirst, Kyle was a hate-filled killer. Protecting American lives, he told me, was his driving force. On several well-documented occasions, he deliberately put his life in grave danger to save other Americans. His dedication to his fellow American troops was intense and overpowering.
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