‘The Ideal Thing Would Be If I Knew the Number of Lives I Saved’: Chris Kyle Defends His Record

https://youtube.com/watch?v=gsXzymeF1LY

Michael Moore called him a “coward.” Peter Mass of Glenn Greenwald’s the Intercept slammed him for calling Iraqis “savages.” Former Daily Beast reporter Max Blumenthal described him as a “mass murderer” — a sentiment later echoed on a defaced billboard that’s advertising the most popular movie in America.

The American Left is frothing at the mouth over Clint Eastwood’s portrayal of decorated Navy SEAL Chris Kyle in American Sniper.

Murdered by a mentally ill veteran he was counseling in February 2013, Kyle is no longer here to defend himself. But a C-SPAN video from April 2012 does a pretty good job of putting the lie to the Left’s portrait of a remorseless sociopathic killer.

The most lethal sniper in American history, Kyle is credited with 160 confirmed kills during his four tours of duty in Iraq. But while his detractors would claim Kyle obsessed over that number as a badge of honor, the real American sniper’s focus for his work lay elsewhere. “The ideal thing would be if I knew the number of lives I saved, because that’s something I’d love to be known for,” he said. “But you can’t calculate that.”

Kyle also described his very first kill in Iraq — a woman trying to blow up advancing Marines with a hidden grenade. And while liberals have made much of Kyle’s written admission that he “enjoyed” taking lives, that was not at all the sentiment he expressed during the interview.

“At this point I’d never killed anyone, so it definitely made me pause,” he said. “But also the fact that it’s not a man — it was difficult. So we tried to radio the Marines to let them handle it. I didn’t want to have to be the one who had to take the woman’s life. We couldn’t raise them on the radio, so I ended up having to take the shot.”