LIFELONG FRIEND
There’s no way to single out in a few words the entire lifetime of a man, of a friend, like Chris. He so completely understood friendship and what it meant to be a friend that you just can’t explain it simply.
Chris and I went to school together. He didn’t have any enemies growing up. It seems funny to say, but it’s completely true. He was always looking out for other people. He was involved in a few fights, but he was never the one who started them. He was always sticking up for other kids, including me.
His protective nature went beyond bullies and fights. He only got mad at me once. I was on the track team. We were at a party and, well, kids being kids, for some reason I took a cigarette and was smoking it.
He saw me. He didn’t say anything, but he gave me a look. A real hard, Chris Kyle look.
Later on, he straightened me out. “What do you think you’re doing?” he said, in the sternest voice I ever heard him use. “You better straighten yourself up.”
And I did.
We didn’t see each other for quite a while during his military service. When he came home, I was worried that he would be different, that our friendship would change somehow. But it didn’t change at all, not one bit. We picked up exactly where we left off.
He was just as generous with other people as he was with me. As a friend, as a father—if you needed something, he’d lay it down for you. A year or so ago, there was a bad storm in our area. It knocked down a lot of trees and did some other damage to houses and the like. Well, I went out of the house at 6 A.M., just looking around to check what had happened. Chris drove up in his pickup not a minute later, a chain saw in the back.
We must have worked for several hours clearing the trees that had come down on my property. We hauled three full loads away. Finally, we were done.
“You tired?” he asked.
“A little,” I admitted.
“Why don’t we go see who else needs help?”
How could I refuse that? We spent the rest of the day working around town.
I could tell a million stories—the time he blew off George W. Bush just to be with us at a family event that meant a lot to my wife, the day he hung my Christmas lights because he knew I was stuck at work.
He was a hero on the battlefield. He saved lives there. But when he returned home, he was a superhero to his friends. He lived the meaning of friendship every day.