Medals never tell the whole story. And like I said, in the end they’ve become more political than accurate. - Chris Kyle

People back home, people who haven’t been in war, or at least not that war, sometimes don’t seem to understand how the troops in Iraq acted. They’re surprised — shocked — to discover we often joked about death, about things we saw. Maybe it seems cruel or inappropriate. Maybe it would be, under different circumstances. But in the context of where we were, it made a lot of sense. We saw terrible things, and lived through terrible things. Part of it was letting off pressure or steam, I’m sure. A way to cope. If you can’t make sense of things, you start to look for some other way to deal with them. You laugh because you have to have some emotion, you have to express yourself somehow.

I was tempted to get up and run over to the bell that would end my torture — if you ring this bell, you’re taken in for coffee and a doughnut.

Meanwhile, the brass got huge promotions and congratulations for their part in the war. They got the glory. Bullshit glory. Bullshit glory for a war they didn’t fight and the cowardly stance they took. Their cowardice ended lives we could have saved if they would have let us do our jobs.