31 pages • 1 hour read
Jim DeFeliceAmerican Sniper
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 2012A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapter 12-Chapter 14Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 12 Summary: Hard Times
Chris returns to the United States and is reunited with Taya, who has been both worried about his safety and angered by his prolonged absence from his family. These are not the only problems in Chris's life: he has trouble bonding with his young children and discovers that another SEAL, Mike Monsoor, has been killed in combat. At Mike's funeral, Chris is reunited with Ryan Job and has the opportunity to pay his respects to Marc Lee, whose grave is near Mike's. Chris's time at home is also marked by bar fights, a signature part of life as a SEAL, and one that, given some of Chris's close connections among the authorities, carries few real repercussions.
Despite these dark notes, Chris is eager to get back into battle. It is his belief that the aggressive elimination of enemies is the best military strategy; at one point, he gets into an argument with Dick Couch, a military author who is more favorably inclined to a "hearts and minds" nation-building approach. Unfortunately, Chris is no longer in top physical condition. He must undergo intensive physical therapy to deal with an untreated knee injury from his time in Fallujah and suffers from elevated blood pressure. Shortly before his next deployment—his fourth—he also injures his hand in a fight. Still, he is placed in a position of authority for this next round of combat and, despite his troubles with Taya, is energized about getting back to his role as a sniper.
Chapter 13 Summary: Mortality
Chapter thirteen begins in 2008, with a depiction of a takedown mission in Sadr City. As Chris and a few other SEALs are trying to force their way into a house, gunfire erupts, and Chris is shot in the helmet. He believes he has gone blind; in reality, the bullet has simply knocked his night vision goggles out of position. Then he is shot in the back, though this bullet hits his body armor.
These experiences prompt Chris to reflect on his own mortality, even as he once again proves his worth in combat. He is part of a special unit tasked with providing protection for an infrastructure project: a large wall that would protect the American-secured Green Zone from Sadr City insurgents. Once again, Chris finds himself in a target-rich environment. Following the completion of the wall, he goes on missions that take him into Iraqi villages; in the course of one of these missions, he achieves his longest confirmed kill in Iraq, hitting an insurgent roughly 2,100 yards away. Though Chris achieves other personal victories, including a promotion to Chief Petty Officer, he remains under stress and has trouble eating and sleeping. After speaking with the doctors attached to his unit, he decides to go home.
Chapter 14 Summary: Home and Out
Chris returns home to Taya and considers his future in the navy. He takes part in a study that gauges the psychosomatic effects of combat. He decides to leave the service; though the navy appears to offer Chris a Texas-based job as a recruiter, a satisfactory offer never comes through. Chris discovers that his skills as a sniper can be put to use in the world of consulting and entrepreneurship. After finding interested investors, he founds Craft International, a firm offering instruction in tactics and weapons to private clients.
As he finishes his story, Chris also tells the fates of his fellow SEALs. Ryan Job lives a vigorous life despite his blindness—climbing mountains, hunting elk, graduating from college, and starting a family—but dies when a surgery goes wrong. Marc Lee’s memory also lives on, since Marc’s mother, Debbie, devotes herself to Marc’s former platoon and to serving veterans generally. Chris organizes outdoors events and social gatherings for veterans; it is his conviction that veterans should be treated as honorable men who can integrate successfully with the rest of society, not as charity cases.
Chris rebuilds his relationship with Taya and with his children, though first he lives through a period of hard, reckless drinking as he readapts to civilian life. Taya acknowledges that war has consumed much of Chris’s energy—changing him in the process, filling her with worry, but not disrupting their marriage beyond repair. Chris acknowledges these same struggles. War, however, has left him with a few certainties: that his enemies deserved to die, and that the conflicts of everyday life fade in importance once you have put your life on the line.
Chapters 12-14 Analysis
American Sniper does not have an overwhelming political or partisan message, yet it confronts the political side of Chris’s day-to-day life in combat. For instance, in the final chapters, Chris weighs in on issues such as the fate of Iraq and how to best handle the volatile situation in the country. As he sums up the situation during a dispute with Dick Couch, “They [Iraqis] only started coming to the peace table after we killed enough of the savages out there” (316). This bluntly worded view does not define Chris nor attach him to a specific political ideology, after all, conservatives were friendly to the nation-building that Couch supports, and liberals were opposed to the war in Iraq altogether. Rather, Chris indicates that political and cultural beliefs should be formed by on-the-ground experience.
If American Sniper has no grand political or ideological message, is there a message? As the book ends, Chris is back in the United States, the head of his small family and a participant in a business venture he genuinely enjoys. To reach this place of contentment, it was necessary for him to pass through periods of personal hardship and to give up his role as a SEAL sniper, which he genuinely loved and which defined him. Many of Chris’s triumphs come at a cost. Craft International, which adopted the Punisher logo and a mantra used by Ryan Job (365-366), reminds Chris of losses in combat.
The final message of American Sniper is ironic. We have spent almost 400 pages immersed in the life, career, and trials of Chris Kyle—and yet a barrier remains between us and the author. On his final page, Chris offers a pointed question, “You know all the everyday things that stress you here?” (377) He explains that those things do not matter to him, because combat has given him a perspective that separates Chris from the many readers who have never taken down sniper targets or lost friends in combat, and who will understand some—but by no means all—of Chris’s psyche by reading his autobiography. Readers have learned of and appreciated Chris’s life-or-death days in Iraq; Chris, in contrast, has “lived them” (377).
