(He lost vision in both eyes but survived the injury. Job, who was critically wounded, was evacuated in a tracked personnel carrier. A single round hit the M-60 machine gun of Kyle’s partner, a twenty-five-year-old named Ryan Job. Kyle and his two teammates weren’t on the roof long before they came under enemy fire. In his book, he recounts telling an Army colonel, “I don’t shoot people with Korans. He tattooed one of his arms with a red crusader’s cross, wanting “everyone to know I was a Christian.” When he learned that insurgents had placed a bounty on his head and had named him al-Shaitan Ramadi-the Devil of Ramadi-he felt “proud.” He “hated the damn savages” he was fighting. (“Ninety per cent of being cool is looking cool,” he wrote.) Like many soldiers, Kyle was deeply religious and saw the Iraq War through that prism. Kyle made a point of ignoring the military dress code, cutting the sleeves off shirts and wearing baseball caps instead of a helmet. His platoon had spray-painted the image of the Punisher-a Marvel Comics character who wages “a one-man war upon crime”-on their flak jackets and helmets. Kyle seemed to consider himself a cross between a lawman and an executioner. When the Al Qaeda members appeared, he killed them both. Kyle climbed a ladder that had been affixed to a palm tree and hid among the fronds. The spies feared that they would be kidnapped. An ex-Ranger, whose unit was housed in Ramadi on the same base as Kyle’s SEAL platoon, recently told me about the day that two Iraqi spies-both working for the Americans-reported being trailed by members of Al Qaeda in Iraq. To other servicemen, Kyle, an affable, brawny Texan with reddish-blond hair, could seem like Paul Bunyan in fatigues. A former officer in Kyle’s platoon said that Kyle was willing to spend hours setting up the perfect shot, and joked, “He was extremely patient while being a sniper. On another occasion, he killed an enemy fighter from more than a mile away. “When you’re in a profession where your job is to kill people, you start getting creative,” Kyle wrote. There was the time in Ramadi that he shot two insurgents who were riding tandem on a moped with a single bullet. In “American Sniper,” a memoir that was published in 2012, and went on to sell more than a million copies, Kyle recounted some of his most dramatic tales of marksmanship. Marine Combat Outpost,” adding that his “performance under fire cannot be overstated.” Two previous evaluations had recommended Kyle for SEAL Team Six, the unit that later killed Osama bin Laden, and Kyle had received two Silver Stars for his achievements in combat. In a written evaluation, his commanding officer reported that Kyle had “single-handedly thwarted a large-scale attack on a U.S. He was on his way to becoming one of the deadliest snipers in American history, with a hundred and sixty confirmed kills. That summer, he recorded his hundredth career kill-ninety-one of them in Ramadi. It was an especially bloody phase of the war, and Kyle, who was thirty-two at the time, had distinguished himself amid the violence. Peering through his gun’s scope, Kyle scanned the streets below as other American soldiers searched and cordoned off homes, he waited for insurgents to appear in his sight line. One of them, a petty officer and a sniper named Chris Kyle, got into position with his rifle. On the morning of August 2, 2006, three Navy SEALs walked onto the roof of a four-story apartment building in Ramadi, in central Iraq. Frackattack PHOTOGRAPH: left: Reuters right: Eric Tanner Kyle, right, wrote a best-selling memoir about his life as a SEAL. Eddie Ray Routh, left, served in the Marines for four years.
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