Christopher Scott “Chris” Kyle, 38, was a United States Navy SEAL and the most lethal sniper in American military history. Kyle and a companion, Chad Littlefield, were shot and killed on Feb. 2 by the 25-year-old Iraq veteran Eddie Ray Routh, who is allegedly a mentally ill young man which Mr. Kyle had tried to help.
About 7,000 people, including former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin and her husband, attended Mr. Kyle’s Memorial Service at Cowboys Stadium in Arlington, Texas on Monday; where his wife Taya Kyle spoke through tears about her husband. She described to the crowd, with a trembling voice, what “my slow-talking Texas man” had meant to his family, friends and country.
“Chris, there isn’t enough time to tell you everything you mean to me and everything you taught me,” the widow said Monday during the two-hour memorial service for Kyle.
He was a devoted father who walked away from his military career to spend more time with his wife and two children.
“God knew it would take the toughest and softest-hearted man on earth to get a hardheaded, cynical, hard-loving woman like me to see what God needed me to see, and he chose you for the job,” Mr. Kyle’s wife, Taya Kyle, told the audience. “He chose well.”
As Mrs. Kyle spoke Monday, a Marine in uniform stood by her, providing encouragement and, at one point when she needed a tissue, his white glove. She spoke to her children, her sobs echoing through the silent stadium.
“So, my sweet angels, we will put one foot in front of the other,” she said.
Taya Kyle, 38, is formerly Taya R. Studebaker. Her parents are Lake Oswego Mayor Kent Studebaker and Kim Studebaker. Taya and her sister were raised in Gladstone, Oregon. Taya’s mother, Kim, was a member of the Gladstone School Board for more than a decade and traveled with Kent Studebaker to Texas on Sunday morning.
Mr. Kyle grew up raising cows for the National FFA Organization. In high school, he planned to become a county agricultural agent, but joined the Navy instead. He was still in training in San Diego when he met his wife, Taya.
The couple met in 2001 and married just before he deployed for the first time at the start of the Iraq war, according to his book. Together they had two children, 8-year-old son and 6-year-old daughter; they lived in their home in Midlothian, Texas.
Chris Kyle would deploy three more times to Iraq before retiring in 2009. That decision, according to a report from the CBS station in Dallas last year, came after an ultimatum from Taya Kyle. She told him to choose their family or continue fighting.
“Of course he looked at that and thought the marriage would be over, and you know what, he’s probably right,” Taya Kyle told CBS Dallas/Fort Worth. “I honestly didn’t think that far ahead.”
“She means the world to me, especially the kids I didn’t really have the opportunity to know,” Chris Kyle told the station. “I want to make sure they knew their dad, and know how much I love them.”
Mr. Kyle, the author of “American Sniper: The Autobiography of the Most Lethal Sniper in U.S. Military History,” continued to protect troops by other means. He helped create the nonprofit Fitco Cares Foundation to help veterans overcome post-traumatic stress disorder by providing exercise equipment and counseling.
In a passage she wrote for his book, his wife Taya recalled telling Mr. Kyle that she thought SEAL personnel were “arrogant, self-centered and glory-seeking.”
“I would lay down my life for my country,” she recalled him responding. “How is that self-centered?” They talked some more, and finally Mr. Kyle announced that he was going home. “Well, you were saying about how you never would date a SEAL or go out with one,” he told her. “Oh no,” she replied, “I said I would never marry one. I didn’t say I wouldn’t go out with one.”
They married not long after.
In a funeral procession planned for Tuesday, Mr. Kyle’s body will be carried 200 miles from Midlothian, the Dallas suburb where he attended high school and returned years later to live with his wife and children, to Austin. He will be buried there at the Texas State Cemetery.
Speaking only a few yards from her husband’s coffin, Taya recalled a man she fought with and loved endlessly.
“You taught me innocent, reckless love without abandon,” she said. “You taught me how to turn a life full of fear into a life full of faith. You taught me that I could be more independent than I ever wanted to be. You taught me how to raise children with love and softness and proved it could be done with a high standard of respect and old-fashioned values.”
At the end of the service, Mr. Kyle’s wife and children walked hand in hand behind the uniformed pallbearers as the sound of bagpipes filled the stadium.
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