CHRIS’S BROTHER
Seeing Jeff off before his deployment as a Marine. 29 Palms military base, 2006.
It’s extremely difficult to squeeze a lifetime’s worth of memories into a few words.
Chris was my mentor as well as my brother and friend. Like a lot of brothers, we went through a phase where we wanted to kill each other every second. We were constantly fighting and at each other’s throats. Then, suddenly, we weren’t. I don’t know what turned it around. After he graduated from high school and went to college, I went to see him and we hung out like friends. Being together was suddenly easy. Oh, we still had our disagreements and arguments, but it was different. We got pretty tight.
Even through that little time of conflict, I’d watch what he did. He was my example, my mentor. We shared the values of how we were raised, and I saw him put them into action. As we grew older, we had more and more in common. Chris joined the military; I joined a year later. We both went to Iraq, both fought for our country. We came home, started raising families.
The kids loved him. It was the little things Chris did with the kids that I remember. My oldest daughter called him Uncle Kiss. She still asks for him. My youngest was born a few weeks prematurely—thankfully, just in time for Chris to meet her before he died. I’ll always remember how happy he was for us all. He’d do anything for the kids—even eat olives.
When my oldest was two, she became the pickiest eater in the world. And if someone made so much as a face when she was eating something, she decided that it was terrible and she wouldn’t touch it. It didn’t matter what it was—it could be Cheerios, her favorite. It was suddenly unfit for consumption.
We were all at a family dinner one day and my little girl got a plate of olives, at this point about the only vegetable she was still willing to eat. Uncle Kiss made a face, and just like that, olives were no longer edible.
“Thanks,” I told my brother, half thinking that now she’d never eat any vegetable at all until she was in her twenties.
Chris decided he was going to fix that. He looked at my daughter.
“Olives are good,” he told her. “Look, I’ll show you.”
Now you have to understand—when I say Chris hated olives, I mean he hated olives. A half sliver of one buried in a pizza somewhere would turn his stomach in the worst way. But he picked one up from her plate and ate it whole. And just like that, she was back to eating olives. I’m sure if we’d had them there, he’d’ve had her eating the entire vegetable kingdom by the end of the night, no matter what the effect on his stomach.
I want my kids to know he was an outstanding man before he was a military hero. He stuck up for people. He was inspirational and fun, and always a teacher—something always rubbed off on you, one way or another, when you were with him.
Not long after he died, a television interviewer asked me how I thought Chris would want to be remembered. I told them that he didn’t care about the hype. He just wanted to be known as Chris Kyle, a good ol’ country boy, a guy who was wired to help other people, but at the end of the day, just a regular guy.