American Sniper - Boekje Pienter

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to die, and he wanted to do it there, not at home from a disease
he couldn’t fight with a gun or his fists.
“It doesn’t matter,” he told me. “I’ll die and you’ll find
someone else. People die out here all the time. Their wives go on
and find someone else.”
I tried to explain to him that he was irreplaceable to me.
When that didn’t seem to faze him, I tried another equally valid
point. “But you’ve got our son,” I told him.
“So what You’ll find someone else and that guy will raise
him.”
I think he was seeing death so often that he started to believe
people were replaceable.
It broke my heart. He truly believed that. I still hate to
think that.
He thought dying on the battlefield was the greatest. I tried
to tell him differently, but he didn’t believe it.
They redid the tests, and Chris was cleared. But his attitude
about death stayed.
Once the camp was settled, we started doing DAs. We’d be given
the name and location of a suspected insurgent, hit his house at night,
then come back and deposit him and whatever evidence we gathered
at the DIF—Detention and Interrogation Facility, your basic jail.
We’d take pictures along the way. We weren’t sightseeing; we were
covering our butts, and, more important, those of our commanders.
The pictures proved we hadn’t beaten the crap out of him.
Most of these ops were routine, without much trouble and almost
never any resistance. One night, though, one of our guys went into a