WHEN OUR EDITOR FIRST CONTACTED US ABOUT PUTTING together a memorial edition as a tribute to Chris, we were overwhelmed. While Chris certainly deserved such an honor, we worried about how to adequately sum up what he meant to people. What more could be said about him that hadn’t been told, either in American Sniper itself or the more recent American Gun, which at that point was going to press?
As we thought about it, though, we realized that while those books have Chris’s voice, both miss the voices of those around him. We knew the best tribute would be to include the words of others, with their own unique perspectives on who Chris was. And so we started contacting his fellow SEALs, veterans, friends, relatives, neighbors, and others to ask for help.
The program from Chris’s memorial, held at Cowboys Stadium in Arlington, Texas, on February 11, 2013.
These are the memories of everyday people loving each other the best they can and unknowingly blessing each other along the way. As humble as Chris was, the people in his life were also humble. In writing about Chris, not one of them drew attention to themselves. So please allow us a moment to thank them, as well as all of his friends and family and the many supporters we’ve met and have yet to meet, readers and well-wishers in general.
The list of contributors here is nowhere near an exhaustive list of Chris’s closest friends, let alone a list of those he touched with his life. It is merely a cross-section, a taste, of those he meant a lot to. Some of his closest and dearest friends are not represented. The contributions were unfortunately limited by time and space. Please accept that they are meant to be representative rather than exhaustive. Taken together, they provide one more glimpse not just of who Chris was or how others saw him when he was alive, but of the legacy that he has left behind. He lives on not just in our hearts, but in the deeds and actions of those who knew him in the short time God shared him with us.
We start with some messages from the memorial service at Cowboys Stadium in Arlington, Texas, on February 11, 2013, read by Chris’s parents and Taya.
—TAYA KYLE AND JIM DEFELICE