Chapter One
Bustin’ Broncs and Other Ways of Having Fun
Just a Cowboy at Heart
Every story has a beginning.
Mine starts in north-central Texas. I grew up in small
towns where I learned the importance of family and traditional
values, like patriotism, self-reliance, and watching out for
your family and neighbors. I’m proud to say that I still try to live
my life according to those values. I have a strong sense of justice.
It’s pretty much black-and-white. I don’t see too much gray. I think
it’s important to protect others. I don’t mind hard work. At the
same time, I like to have fun. Life’s too short not to.
I was raised with, and still believe in, the Christian faith. If I
had to order my priorities, they would be God, Country, Family.
There might be some debate on where those last two fall—these
days I’ve come around to believing that Family may, under some
circumstances, outrank Country. But it’s a close race.
I’ve always loved guns, always loved hunting, and in a way I
guess you could say I’ve always been a cowboy. I was riding horses
from the time I could walk. I wouldn’t call myself a true cowboy
today, because it’s been a long time since I’ve worked a ranch, and
I’ve probably lost a lot of what I had in the saddle. Still, in my heart
if I’m not a SEAL I’m a cowboy, or should be. Problem is, it’s a hard
way to make a living when you have a family.
I don’t remember when I started hunting, but it would have been
when I was very young. My family had a deer lease a few miles from
our house, and we would hunt every winter. (For you Yankees: a
deer lease is a property where the owner rents or leases hunting
rights out for a certain amount of time; you pay your money and
you get the right to go out and hunt. Y’all probably have different
arrangements where you live, but this one is pretty common down
here.) Besides deer, we’d hunt turkey, doves, quail—whatever was
in season. “We” meant my mom, my dad, and my brother, who’s
four years younger than me. We’d spend the weekends in an old RV
trailer. It wasn’t very big, but we were a tight little family and we
had a lot of fun.
My father worked for Southwestern Bell and AT&T—they split
and then came back together over the length of his career. He was
a manager, and as he’d get promoted we’d have to move every few
years. So in a way I was raised all over Texas.
Even though he was successful, my father hated his job. Not the
work, really, but what went along with it. The bureaucracy. The
fact that he had to work in an office. He really hated having to wear
a suit and tie every day.
“I don’t care how much money you get,” my dad used to tell
me. “It’s not worth it if you’re not happy.” That’s the most valuable
piece of advice he ever gave me: Do what you want in life. To this
day I’ve tried to follow that philosophy.
In a lot of ways my father was my best friend growing up, but
he was able at the same time to combine that with a good dose of
fatherly discipline. There was a line and I never wanted to cross it.
I got my share of whuppin’s (you Yankees will call ’em spankings)
when I deserved it, but not to excess and never in anger. If my dad
was mad, he’d give himself a few minutes to calm down before
administering a controlled whuppin’—followed by a hug.
To hear my brother tell it, he and I were at each others throats
most of the time. I don’t know if that’s true, but we did have our
share of tussles. He was younger and smaller than me, but he could
give as good he got, and he’d never give up. He’s a tough character
and one of my closest friends to this day. We gave each other hell,
but we also had a lot of fun and always knew we had each others
back.
Our high school used to have a statue of a panther in the front
lobby. We had a tradition each year where seniors would try and
put incoming freshmen on the panther as a hazing ritual. Freshmen,
naturally, resisted. I had graduated when my brother became
a freshman, but I came back on his first day of school and
offered a hundred dollars to anyone who could sit him on that
statue.
I still have that hundred dollars.
While I got into a lot of fights, I didn’t start most of
them. My dad made it clear I’d get a whuppin’ if he found out I
started a fight. We were supposed to be above that.
Defending myself was a different story. Protecting my brother
was even better—if someone tried to pick on him, I’d lay them out.
I was the only one allowed to whip him.
Somewhere along the way, I started sticking up for younger kids
who were getting picked on. I felt I had to look out for them. It
became my duty.
Maybe it began because I was looking for an excuse to fight
without getting into trouble. I think there was more to it than that;
I think my father’s sense of justice and fair play influenced me more
than I knew at the time, and even more than I can say as an adult.
But whatever the reason, it sure gave me plenty of opportunities for
getting into scrapes.
My family had a deep faith in God. My dad was a deacon,
and my mom taught Sunday school. I remember a stretch when
I was young when we would go to church every Sunday morning,
Sunday night, and Wednesday evening. Still, we didn’t consider
ourselves overly religious, just good people who believed in God
and were involved in our church. Truth is, back then I didn’t like
going a lot of the time.
My dad worked hard. I suspect it was in his blood—his father
was a Kansas farmer, and those people worked hard. One job was
never enough for my dad—he had a feed store for a bit when I was
growing up, and we had a pretty modest-sized ranch we all worked
to keep going. He’s retired now, officially, but you can still find him
working for a local veterinarian when he’s not tending to things on
his small ranch.
My mother was also a really hard worker. When my brother
and I were old enough to be on our own, she went to work as a
counselor at a juvenile detention center. It was a rough job, dealing
with difficult kids all day long, and eventually she moved on.
She’s retired now, too, though she keeps herself busy with part-time
work and her grandchildren.
Ranching helped fill out my school days. My brother and I
would have our different chores after school and on the weekends:
feed and look after the horses, ride through the cattle, inspect the
fences.
Cattle always give you problems. I’ve been kicked in the leg,
kicked in the chest, and yes, kicked where the sun doesn’t shine.
Never been kicked in the head, though. That might have set me
straight.
Growing up, I raised steers and heifers for FFA, Future Farmers
of America. (The name is now officially The National FFA
Organization.) I loved FFA and spent a lot of time grooming and
showing cattle, even though dealing with the animals could be
frustrating. I’d get pissed off at them and think I was king of the
world. When all else failed, I was known to whack ’em upside
their huge hard heads to knock some sense into them. Twice I
broke my hand.
Like I said, getting hit in the skull may have set me straight.
I kept my head when it came to guns, but I was still passionate
about them. Like a lot of boys, my first “weapon” was a Daisy
multi-pump BB rifle—the more you pumped, the more powerful
your shot. Later on, I had a CO2-powered revolver that looked like
the old 1860 Peacemaker Colt model. I’ve been partial to Old West
firearms ever since, and after getting out of the Navy, I’ve started
collecting some very fine-looking replicas. My favorite is an 1861
Colt Navy Revolver replica manufactured on the old lathes.
I got my first real rifle when I was seven or eight years old. It
was a bolt-action 30-06. It was a solid gun—so “grown-up” that it
scared me to shoot at first. I came to love that gun, but as I recall
what I really lusted after was my brother’s Marlin 30-30. It was
lever action, cowboy-style.
Yes, there was a theme there.
You’re not a cowboy until you can break a horse. I
started learning when I was in high school; at first, I didn’t know
a whole heck of a lot. It was just: Hop on them and ride until they
quit bucking. Do your best to stay on.
I learned much more as I got older, but most of my early
education came on the job—or on the horse, so to speak. The horse
would do something, and I would do something. Together, we came
to an understanding. Probably the most important lesson was
patience. I wasn’t a patient person by nature. I had to develop that
talent working with horses; it would end up being extremely valuable
when I became a sniper—and even when I was courting my wife.
Unlike cattle, I never found a reason to smack a horse. Ride
them till I wore them out, sure. Stay on them till they realized who
was boss, absolutely. But hit a horse? Never saw a reason good
enough. Horses are smarter than cattle. You can work a horse into
cooperating if you give it enough time and patience.
I don’t know if I exactly had a talent for breaking horses or not,
but being around them fed my appetite for all things cowboy. So,
looking back, it isn’t very surprising that I got involved in rodeo
competitions while still in school. I played sports in high school—
baseball and football—but nothing compared with the excitement
of the rodeo.
Every high school has its different cliques: jocks, nerds, and so
on. The crew I was hanging out with were the “ropers.” We had
the boots and jeans, and in general looked and acted like cowboys.
I wasn’t a real roper—I couldn’t have lassoed a calf worth a lick at
that point—but that didn’t stop me from getting involved in rodeos
around age sixteen.
I started out by riding bulls and horses at a small local place
where you paid twenty bucks to ride as long as you could stay on.
You would have to supply your own gear—spurs, chaps, your
rigging. There was nothing fancy about it: you got on and fell off, and
got on again. Gradually, I stayed on longer and longer, and finally
got to the point where I felt confident enough to enter some small
local rodeos.
Bustin’ a bull is a little different than taming a horse. They buck
forward, but their skin is so loose that when they’re going forward,
you not only go forward but you slip side to side. And bulls can
really spin. Let me put it this way: staying on top of a bull is not an
easy matter.
I rode bulls for about a year, without a ton of success. Wising
up, I went to horses and ended up trying saddle bronc bustin’. This
is the classic event where you not only have to stay on the horse
for eight seconds, but also do so with style and finesse. For some
reason, I did a lot better in this event than the others, and so I kept
with it for quite a while, winning my share of belt buckles and
more than one fancy saddle. Not that I was a champion, mind you,
but I did well enough to spread some prize money around the bar.
I also got some attention from the buckle bunnies, rodeo’s version
of female groupies. It was all good. I enjoyed going from city
to city, traveling, partying, and riding.
Call it the cowboy lifestyle.
I continued riding after I graduated high school in
1992 and started going to college at Tarleton State University in
Stephenville, Texas. For those of you who don’t know it, Tarleton
was founded in 1899 and joined the Texas A&M University system
in 1917. They’re the third largest non-land-grant agriculture university
in the country. The school has a reputation for turning out
excellent ranch and farm managers as well as agricultural
education teachers.
At the time, I was interested in becoming a ranch manager.
Before enrolling, though, I had given some thought to the military.
My mom’s dad had been an Army Air Force pilot, and for a while
I thought of becoming an aviator. Then I considered becoming a
Marine—I wanted to see real action. I liked the idea of fighting. I
also heard a bit about special operations, and thought about joining
Marine Recon, which is the Corps’ elite special warfare unit.
But my family, Mom especially, wanted me to go to college. Eventually,
I saw it their way: I decided I would go to school first, then
join the military. Heck, the way I looked at it, doing that meant I
could party for a while before getting down to business.
I was still doing rodeo, and getting fairly good at it. But my
career ended abruptly around the end of my freshman year, when
a bronco flipped over on me in a chute at a competition in Rendon,
Texas. The guys watching me couldn’t open up the chute because
of the way the horse came down, so they had to pull him back over
on top of me. I still had one foot in the stirrup, and was dragged
and kicked so hard I lost consciousness. I woke up in a life-flight
helicopter flying to the hospital. I ended up with pins in my wrists,
a dislocated shoulder, broken ribs, and a bruised lung and kidney.
Probably the worst part of the recovery was the dang pins. They
were actually big screws about a quarter-inch thick.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from American Sniperby Chris Kyle, Scott McEwen, Jim DeFelice Copyright © 2012 by Chris Kyle, Scott McEwen, Jim DeFelice. Excerpted by permission of William Morrow. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
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