Meet the big shot
SEAL is America’s deadliest sniper
By GARY BUISO
Last Updated: 10:58 AM, January 3, 2012
Posted: 1:29 AM, January 1, 2012
More Print Secluded on the top floor of a bombed-out four-story apartment building north of war-scarred Fallujah, Iraq, Navy SEAL sniper Chris Kyle is just getting comfortable.
It’s November 2004. Thanksgiving time. The second battle of Fallujah has launched, and Kyle is swaddled in silence atop an upturned baby crib, studying the enemy through a Nightforce 4.5-22 power scope attached to a .300 Win Mag rifle.
He’s feeling badass.
“We just got word that the president of Iraq said that anyone left in the city is bad — meaning, clear to shoot,” he recalled for The Post. “From that point on, every fighting-age male was a target.”
DEVIL AND ANGEL: Navy SEAL sniper Chris Kyle watches over US Marines from his perch atop an upturned baby crib in a bombed-out building in Fallujah, Iraq. Branded a “legend” by his comrades and a “devil” by his enemies, Kyle racked up a record 160 kills.
Chris Kyle
That was just fine with Kyle, who spent five weeks in the hideout, protecting Marines on the ground and bagging seven confirmed kills — adding to his official total of 160, making him the deadliest sniper in US history.
“After the first kill, the others come easy. I don’t have to psych myself up, or do anything mentally — I look through the scope, get the target in the cross hairs and kill my enemy before he kills one of my people,” Kyle writes in his new autobiography, “American Sniper.”
During his 10-year career as a member of SEAL Team 3, Kyle, 37, saw action in every major battle during Operation Iraqi Freedom.
He became known among his fellow SEALS as “The Legend.”
The enemy was less complimentary.
In Ramadi, insurgents put an $80,000 bounty on his head and branded him “Al-Shaitan Ramadi” — “The Devil of Ramadi.”
“That made me feel like I was actually doing my job and having an effect on the war,” he said.
In north-central Texas, Kyle grew up dipping tobacco, riding horses and hunting deer, turkey and quail — a cowboy at heart.
He got his first gun at 8 years old — a bolt-action 30-06 rifle.
The son of a Sunday-school teacher and a church deacon, Kyle credits a higher authority for his longest kill.
From 2,100 yards away from a village just outside of Sadr City in 2008, he spied a man aiming a rocket launcher at an Army convoy and squeezed off one shot from his .338 Lapua Magnum rifle.
Dead. From more than a mile away.
“God blew that bullet and hit him,” he said.
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