He said he killed 160 people, perhaps many more, making him one of the leading U.S. military snipers of all time. In the course of four combat deployments to Iraq, he said insurgents nicknamed him "the devil of Ramadi" and placed a $20,000 bounty on his head.
"After the first kill, the others come easy," Chris Kyle wrote last year in his best-selling memoir of Iraqi war service with the elite U.S. Navy SEALs. "I don't have to psych myself up, or do something special mentally — I look through the scope, get my target in the cross hairs, and kill my enemy, before he kills one of my people."
In a career mostly lived by the gun, Kyle's death at 38 was nonetheless shocking.