"The number"

In pretty much every news story on Chris Kyle, his “record” of sniper kills is mentioned. That’s not surprising, of course; it’s one of the things that helped bring him to national attention.

But it’s worth saying that Chris was very, very ambivalent about the so-called record and “the number” or tally of kills. While he was proud of the job and service he had done as a SEAL, and while he fully understood that those battlefield “kills” represented in tenfold the lives of innocent civilians and fellow Americans he had saved, he nonetheless looked at the number as a strange artifact of time and circumstance. If it were up to him, it would not have been used in the book.

The number we published – over one hundred and sixty – is purposely vague. The actual number of “kills” recorded by Chris Kyle as a Navy SEAL is considerably higher. That should be obvious to anyone carefully reading the book.

The high number seems to alarm a number of people – journalists especially, who in the wake of Chris’s death haven’t failed to ask about it, and then gone on to imply that he should have somehow felt guilty about doing his job protecting Americans and Iraqis so well.

The number is partly a product of the fact that Chris was involved in some of the fiercest battles in Iraq, and thereby operated in what military analysts call a “target rich environment.” But even more critically, it’s the result of changing technology and attitudes toward warfare. At its heart, it’s the result of a conscious decision by the U.S. to limit collateral damage and civilian deaths, especially when warfare is conducted in an urban environment at a time and place when the enemy is consciously using civilians and the threat of their deaths as part of their warfare strategy.

A full analysis of the tactics employed in Iraq and to some extent in Afghanistan is probably far more than most people care to read. But it may be useful for people to consider World War II, and how that war was waged.

I think most mental images of the Good War feature a sanitized battlefield, one where two armies maneuvered across vast areas of empty terrain. No civilians enter the picture. Even when the image we conjure has an urban setting, we rarely if ever picture civilians, or stop to consider that the buildings in shambles were very recently houses and businesses.

But of course, hundreds of thousands of civilians died in the war. And yes, the American army was, at times, responsible for their deaths. Even if the people were fortunate enough to have fled before the troops arrived, the destruction of their homes certainly could not have been considered a good thing.

The changes in attitudes and technology since then are most obvious in air warfare. The cases of deliberate targeting of civilian areas during World War II is rightfully notorious. But in truth, when a munitions plant or even an army camp was bombed, a large portion of those bombs fell on non-military targets.

The development of so-called “smart bombs” has radically changed that. While there are still mistakes and malfunctions, military targets can be hit with a precision undreamed of in World War II or Korea. Collateral damage – a fancy term for civilian deaths – can be drastically reduced.

On the ground, artillery and machine guns were the main killing weapons from roughly World War I on. A single machine gunner in a critical unit could easily account for several hundred deaths over the course of a war; so could an artillery crew. No one would question whether any of them were operating outside the norms expected of any soldier.

The tactics that relied on those weapons are still possible – witness Syria, among other examples. But they’re no longer considered acceptable to most Western nations, the U.S. especially. (Their effectiveness, of course, is another question – again, witness Syria.)

Snipers* make possible different tactics – selective engagement of enemy soldiers at relatively long-range, or at least far enough away that they can’t put too many Americans or nearby civilians at risk. Those tactics produced Chris Kyle’s “record.” They also made possible the Iraqi elections, allowed a fair number of Iraqis to remain in their homes despite a violent civil war, and greatly reduced collateral damage. They also helped reduce American casualties.

This is not to say that there wasn’t a great deal of damage or no casualties – war is still hell. And the use of well-trained snipers and other soldiers was just one facet of the changing tactics that have been employed over the last decade or two. But it’s important to realize that “the number” – not just Chris’s, but that of every sniper and even soldier in the war – is really just a statistical byproduct, an accident if you will, of an attitude that tries to keep civilians apart from war, even if the enemy is using their safety and deaths as a tactic against you.

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I should probably note the reason there is a number in the first place: Specific shooter records were kept during a significant portion of some of the battles Chris participated in. I can only speculate why that was so, but it seems obvious that some members of the military hierarchy weren’t entirely comfortable with either the tactics themselves, or perhaps what they saw as the possible public reaction to them. It must have seemed somehow more antiseptic if a mortar round killed an enemy soldier, rather than a single bullet fired by a single man who studied him and his actions for considerable time before shooting – even if the mortar round killed nearby civilians being used as a shield.

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You can read Chris’s attitude toward “the number” in the prologue to American Sniper. It’s possible that most of the words in that specific section were mine, but the sentiment is one hundred percent his. We talked about “the number,” many, many times, and his thoughts were always the ones captured there.

There is no deep discussion or analysis of tactics and the evolving nature of warfare in the book. That wasn’t the way Chris thought things. For Chris, his job was to protect people – his fellow Americans, other allies in the war, and the Iraqi people. He did it with grace and efficiency few others have exhibited.

* Just a note for the technically inclined and those who have asked: Yes, the U.S. also employed snipers in what most people would consider a more "traditional" sniper role: individual missions, and advance scout/recon. While Chris was trained that way and took part in such missions, the vast majority of his kills and his war experiences came from the urban warfare referred to here.