BUSINESSMAN, FRIEND
Blayne Cupp, Chris, and Randy Cupp during a charity event for veterans. Chris’s friendship inspired Randy to become even more active in veterans’ issues.
I first met Chris Kyle at a Boot Campaign fund-raiser for veterans that I helped to sponsor in May of 2012.
We spent the day shooting sporting clays and seemed to hit it off real well. He told me and my son Blayne that he had never killed a big white-tailed deer. We invited him to our ranch for the upcoming hunting season and told him to bring a couple of friends along.
We stayed in touch, and it seemed like he was on TV all summer long. When the time for our hunting expedition came, the first weekend in November, he arrived with two wounded veterans, Lance Burt and Steve Land. We had several volunteers to guide, clean, cook, and otherwise keep Chris and his friends entertained. Chef Jon Bonnell of Bonnell’s Restaurant in Fort Worth cooked a dinner that included elk tenderloin, bison tenderloin, stone crab claws, and grilled quail. Coors Distributing of Fort Worth sent twenty cases of Coors Light, Chris’s favorite brew.
Lance joked that he was a bullet catcher. He’d “caught” two bullets in Panama during the Noriega incident. He recovered from that and then caught five more bullets in Mogadishu, Somalia, in the operation made famous by the movie Black Hawk Down. It just so happened it was the nineteenth anniversary of the event.
Steve Land was a twenty-seven-year-old double leg amputee. He lost his legs to an IED in Afghanistan. He was the lone survivor when an IED hit his Humvee; six others were killed. Steve was the only soldier in the Humvee who was not a parent and suffers from something I have heard called survivor’s remorse.
We sat on my porch on Friday afternoon and had a few beers before the evening hunt. Chris told us a couple of stories that I would be nervous to put down in print.
Steve got a scimitar-horned oryx the next morning. Chris and my son Blayne bow hunted but did not get a buck. I had several friends and area ranchers out for a BBQ lunch. Chris entertained the crowd by telling funny stories and demonstrating how to choke a person out. He also referred to my friend’s .338 Lapua as a nice midrange rifle.
Lance got a big seven-point management buck Saturday evening. Chris and Blayne were still waiting to get a big whitetail within bow range and did not have any luck.
We took our veteran friends out to dinner at Mary’s Cafe in Strawn, Texas, which happened to be one of Chris’s favorite places to eat when he was at Tarleton College. While we were eating, I had a call from Allan Meyer of the Mingus Lake Ranch inviting the guys out for an evening to try to empty his bar. The guys accepted, and off we went on another adventure! I mainly sipped water and let the boys have fun. When the hosts were worn down, it took me about forty-five minutes to round my crew up and get them back to the ranch so they could hunt the next morning. Needless to say, I now know what it must be like to herd cats.
Chris and Blayne tried bow hunting again on Sunday morning but had no luck. Maybe deer hate the smell of whiskey, tequila, and cigars . . .
Everyone started packing up around noon Sunday, and by 1 p.m. it was just me and Chris at the ranch. We decided that maybe it would be best if he used his rifle to take another crack at getting his deer. We sat in the blind for quite a while that afternoon and talked about our kids, our life goals, and things that we could do together and separately to help our returning veterans. Chris talked a lot about PTSD and how it is mostly overlooked in society. He explained to me that it was a ticking time bomb. We discussed how to include Chris in some of the charity benefits that I am involved in, combining some of our fund-raising efforts.
I remember a couple of my friends asking Chris if he had considered politics. He told them that in order to be involved in politics, his children would be photographed and their names published. He wanted his children to remain shielded from the public and never mentioned their names in the book for that reason. Chris was very devoted to his family. You could see it in his eyes when he talked about them.
A short time later, a mature eleven-point buck came walking out of the brush in front of us. Chris touched off his .308 rifle and the old buck went down. It was a great day for both of us. Chris had killed his biggest white-tailed deer and I was his guide.
While taking pictures of Chris and the buck, I glanced off the side of the hill we were on and saw a few scimitar oryx feeding in a field. Twenty minutes later, we had stalked up on the herd. Chris selected a big one and got his second trophy for the day.
On Saturday, February 2, 2013, I was out at my ranch by myself. I’d been at one of my blinds taking photos of some of my deer and had left my phone at the ranch house. At sunset, I went up to the house and made dinner. I kept hearing my phone vibrate, but didn’t bother checking it. When I did pick it up, I was shocked by all the missed calls and text messages on the screen. Before I had even checked a message, it dawned on me that there was only one common thread between all the names that I was looking at. I knew that something had happened to Chris.
I tried my best to keep up with the news and hoped the reports were wrong. There were reminders all around, including a bottle of whiskey we’d opened but would never finish together. When I opened the freezer to get ice cubes, I saw the two cans of Copenhagen that Chris had left in case he ran out the next time he was down—he didn’t like my Skoal.
Besides being one of the most lethal military individuals in history, Chris was probably one of the most compassionate and respectful men I’ve ever met. He never failed to thank a former military man or woman for their service. He treated all veterans as equals and was genuinely interested in hearing their stories more than telling them his own.
Chris may be gone, but those of us who got to know him will never forget him. Being a businessman, I found it hard at first to believe that he gave away all of the money from his book; after spending time with him, I believed it. His big black Ford truck looked pretty cool, but it also had around 150,000 miles and he could not afford to replace it. He was a true American hero.