Chris Kyle Quotes

Until you actually experience something, you just don’t know.

how much better America looks when you’ve been gone from it for a while.

Everyone talks about there being no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, but they seem to be referring to completed nuclear bombs, not the many deadly chemical weapons or precursors that Saddam had stockpiled.

He’d already accepted that he was going to die, and he wanted to do it there, not at home from a disease he couldn’t fight with a gun or his fists. “It doesn’t matter,” he told me. “I’ll die and you’ll find someone else. People die out here all the time. Their wives go on and find someone else.

People want America to have a certain image when we fight. Yet I would guess if someone were shooting at them and they had to hold their family members while they bled out against an enemy who hid behind their children, played dead only to throw a grenade as they got closer, and who had no qualms about sending their toddler to die from a grenade from which they personally pulled the pin — they would be less concerned with playing nicely.

They were driven by more than just religion and adrenaline, even more than blood lust. They were already halfway to Paradise, in their minds at least.

I signed up to protect this country. I do not choose the wars.

The Navy disqualified me when my physical revealed that I had pins in my arm from the rodeo accident. I tried arguing, I tried pleading; nothing worked. I even offered to sign a waiver saying that I’d never make the Navy responsible for anything that happened to my arm. They flat-out turned me down. And that, I concluded, was the end of my military career.

I didn’t go to a doctor. You go to a doctor and you get pulled out. I knew I could get by.

Anticipation makes things worse.

I loved them. True, I was scared to death getting on the damn thing. But once the pilot took off and we were in the air, I was hooked. It was a tremendous adrenaline rush — you’re low and fast. It’s awesome. The momentum of the aircraft keeps you in place; you don’t even feel any wind buffeting. And hell — if you fall, you’ll never feel a thing.

plastic bottle of water. One of the Marines pulled his ruck over and used it as a pillow, catching some sleep. Another went downstairs, to the store on the first story of the building. It was a smoke shop; he returned with cartons of flavored cigarettes. He lit a few, and a cherry scent mingled with the heavy stench that always hung over Iraq, a smell of sewage and sweat and death.

The good people of this world are very far from being satisfied with each other and my arms are the best peacemakers.” — Samuel Colt, 1852

The problem with the ROEs covering minutiae is that terrorists really don’t give a shit about the Geneva Convention. So picking apart a soldier’s every move against a dark, twisted, rule-free enemy is more than ridiculous; it’s despicable.

People try to put me in a category as a bad-ass, a good ol’ boy, asshole, sniper, SEAL, and probably other categories not appropriate for print. All might be true on any given day. In the end, my story, in Iraq and afterward, is about more than just killing people or even fighting for my country.