American Wife (4 page)

He had only three days off, which meant our honeymoon was only two days. We went to Lake Tahoe, and one of the highlights was a snowmobile tour in the mountains. In theory, we had to ride our separate vehicles very placidly, with no horsing around. But Chris—or maybe it was me—discovered that by maneuvering carefully, it was possible to splash up a lot of snow, and as we went up to the top we managed to cover each other with snow. It was the sort of simple joy you vow to repeat as often as you can, even as you realize the moment will be impossible to duplicate.

They were a great two days, though I wished there were more.

I happened to be reading a book around that time that theorized that humans live through many lives. I asked Chris what he thought about the concept. Did he think he had many past lives?

“Oh, I don't know,” he said. “That's not in the Bible.”

“No, it's not.”

“I guess anything's possible,” he told me after a little thought. “I don't think we have all the answers. But I do know this: if we get more than one life, I can't wait to spend the rest of them with you.”

Chris took his vows very seriously. But even as he said them, he wondered whether the marriage would last.

In retrospect, that's not surprising. He was surrounded by Team guys who'd had their own relationships fail. A common, and tragic, statistic at the time was that the divorce rate among SEALs was over 95 percent—a stunning statistic. Actual statistics are difficult to find, but most experts estimate that the divorce rate in America in general is below 50 percent.

Chris kept his pessimism well hidden, even from me. It wasn't until years later that I found out about it.

He asked why I'd stayed with him through some difficult times.

“I told you I meant what I promised,” I answered.

“I know, but I didn't count on it,” he confessed. “So few women stick it out.”

Maybe. But he was worth it.

S
EALs train all the time. All . . . the . . . time. That's why they're an elite force.

But with the war in Afghanistan continuing and an invasion of Iraq seeming inevitable, Chris's training schedule picked up considerably right around the time we were married. Within months, he was packing to go to the Middle East.

Technically, I didn't know where he was going or what he would be doing, but wives pick up hints. Besides the “normal” things that SEALs practice—like raiding enemy strongholds to “extract” terrorists or others—they were working a lot on desert warfare and ship takeovers. And his SEAL team was ordinarily tasked to work in the Middle East, which of course included Iraq and the Persian Gulf. There were constant stories in the media about troops being sent to the region in preparation for an invasion. It wasn't hard to figure where he was heading before his deployment orders came that summer.

When it came time for Chris to leave, we drove his Yukon down to the base. Chris was excited to go to war—he'd spent years training for it, after all. He was somber and serious, but also looking forward to it.

Me?

I felt as if a part of myself was leaving, and there was nothing I could do about it. I longed to be with him, but knew that our separation would be deep, and perhaps permanent. I felt trapped by fate, a prisoner of whatever inevitability the future was bringing.

We sat together in the back of the SUV, waiting until it was time for him to board the bus waiting to take him to the plane. Finally, it was time to go. Chris was wearing sunglasses, but I could see his eyes leaking tears under them.

I thought he was nervous because he was going to war and was afraid that he would die. It wasn't until years later that he straightened me out: “I was afraid you wouldn't be there when I came back.”

TIPTOEING TO WAR

I might have imagined that Chris and the others would jump right into the fighting, but in fact what happened was more a slow tiptoe to war. President Bush delivered an ultimatum to Saddam Hussein, demanding that he comply with the U.N. resolution that had ended the First Gulf War, which Saddam had agreed to. The Iraqi dictator stalled and stalled; in the meantime, President Bush went to Congress for support to enforce the resolutions and get rid of Saddam. The process took months—the congressional vote was in October 2002; Secretary of State Colin Powell presented the arguments for using force to the U.N. in February 2003. (In the end, though a number of allies joined the U.S. in the war, the U.N. did not vote to sanction an invasion.)

One of the more—
interesting?
—things I did for Chris during that first deployment was send him some sexy photos of me in lingerie.

I knew he wanted something to remember me, and I knew that other wives were doing the same thing. But getting the pictures was difficult.

I finally got my courage up and asked my sister to help. Even then, I was so embarrassed that I needed to have a couple of beers to get through the session.

This was back in the days before camera phones and digital photographs were everywhere, and so the photos were taken on a Polaroid camera. They came home a little worse for wear, so obviously he enjoyed them.

Chris talks about some of what he did in those long months before the war in
American Sniper.
Most of it, including the ship searches, was routine. Even the scouting missions near the Iraqi border were, to a SEAL at least, somewhat boring. But then, these guys hardly get excited even when someone's shooting at them.

A lot of the time, at least from what Chris told me, was spent training. Late one evening Chris called to say hello. It was a very short conversation—he had to leave for a helicopter training mission and had just grabbed a few minutes to chat and say he loved me.

It was a conversation we'd had dozens, maybe even hundreds, of times. He'd steal a moment or two to say hello. My heart would jump answering the phone; for just a few moments, I'd feel the strong love between us. Then it would be back to work or chores or whatever else I had been doing.

This one turned out to be different.

The next morning I flipped on the news and saw a report that a helicopter had crashed during training.

“Special Forces were involved,” intoned the newscaster.

My heart stopped.

In the military, the term
Special Forces
specifically applies to the U.S. Army unit known colloquially as the Green Berets. Like SEALs, they're specially trained commandos who routinely go behind enemy lines and carry out dangerous missions. Like SEALs, they are part of the Special Operations Command. But while their missions occasionally overlap, they are separate and distinct from SEALs.

At the time, however, the distinction was lost on most of the news media. They were calling any Special Operations troops, including SEALs, “Special Forces.”

So what I heard was that a helicopter with SEALs had crashed.

Maybe with SEALs, the logical part of my brain said.

Probably not SEALs! it screamed.

Definitely not your husband, it insisted.

That was the logical part of my brain. The emotional half was having a frenzy fit of freakin' worry.

I tamped down the emotions, forcing myself to get to work. I went into my office and buried myself in paperwork. As the day continued, I did whatever I could to distract my mind from the possibility.

But dread continued to grow. The emotions were winning out.

Maddeningly, the media didn't carry any more details about the crash. Worse, Chris didn't call. By early evening, when he still hadn't phoned or emailed, I was a wreck.

I phoned my sister in Australia. “I'm trying not to freak out, but I'm kind of losing it here.”

She tried talking me through it. I was a little calmer when we got off the phone, but fear has a way of clawing its way back, and in short order I was feeling a panic attack coming on.

I told myself he was fine. I told myself he was busy.

I'm sure it's fine. I'm sure it's fine. Do not freak out. Do not do it.

Finally, the phone rang. It was Chris.

Chris!

“Hey, sexy!” he said. It was his usual greeting.

I started sobbing so hard I literally could not get a word out.

“Babe . . . babe, what's wrong?!” he asked.

I still couldn't get words out. After what seemed like forever I managed to grunt, “I'm just . . . you're okay.”

He'd just come in from the training mission. He knew nothing about the crash.

After I managed to explain, he suggested I shouldn't watch the news.

As time went on, I felt I had to pretend that I was never worried or concerned. Because if I didn't—if I let on that I was truly, deeply worried for his safety—that would surely unsettle him. He needed to concentrate on his job. It was an ironic catch-22—if he knew how much I was worried about him, I thought he would turn around and start worrying about me. Taking his mind off what he was doing could be fatal; combat requires intense concentration and constant attention. A worried wife is a distraction no fighter needs.

So not for the last time I pretended that I
knew
he was safe. I might pray like crazy when I hung up, but on the phone I was as blasé as I could possibly be. My tone was the same as if he were down the street—at least that was my aim.

Like all of his regular rotations into Iraq, Chris's deployment was originally scheduled to last six months, but it was extended as the war neared. He took part in the initial assault on Iraq, securing oil fields and a piping area so that Saddam couldn't repeat the environmental destruction he'd perpetrated during the First Gulf War. It was an important mission, but not one that got a lot of press back home.

After that, he went north along the border with Iran, then joined the land war and took part in a rescue operation that remains classified. Our conversations were rare once the war started. If I got to talk to him two days in a row, I was excited.

I was paranoid about missing a call and took great pains to keep my cell phone charged and with me at all times. I was always worried there'd be some glitch in the reception that would rob me of a conversation with him—and my greatest fear was that the call would have been my last chance to talk to him, ever.

Even in war, life consists of inane juxtapositions—life-and-death missions to rid a small section of a city of terrorists, and thoughts of home and “regular” life. One moment, Chris had dozens of lives in his hands; he focused completely on his mission. The next moment—or more likely, an hour later, back at camp—his thoughts were more familiar, at least to me: How were the kids, could he afford a new computer, what sort of truck should he get when he got home?

Talking to me, whether on the phone or in emails, he segregated his world into parts: I heard the concerns about home, the house, our extended family. War rarely entered the conversation. The things I heard were mostly random and trivial—a funny story about how he traveled from one place to another, progress on the hut they were building to live in. The occasional glimpses of battle were brief and without detail: “we rescued hostages,” he wrote in one email, and that was all I ever found out until he was working on
American Sniper
.

THE WHOLE STORY

At some point in the first month or so of the war, Chris and his unit began scouting ahead for advancing regular troops in southeast Iraq. During this time, they found themselves surrounded by an unexpectedly large Iraqi force. They fought until they were down to their last rounds of ammunition, then called in air support.

That firefight is detailed in
American Sniper
. It's a dramatic encounter there, with the SEALs outnumbered and ready to go hand to hand with the enemy at any moment.

In the middle of that battle, with the enemy about to charge, Chris called me on the unit's sat phone. Sure he was going to die, he wanted to say one last good-bye.

I wish I could say that I remember that call. But the truth is, it was so normal, he was so completely calm, that I don't. I had no reason to think it was anything but a routine hello in the middle of a hectic day.

Hey, babe. Just callin' to tell ya I love ya. Gotta go 'cause a bunch of guys are waitin' to use the phone.

As it turned out, they were rescued at the very last minute—just before they ran out of bullets, and a few minutes before a fighter jet they were calling in to bomb the area would have attacked. But I didn't know the drama until years later. When Chris sprung the story on me, I was shocked, and not just because he'd been so close to death. He told me he would have preferred to die from an American bomb than from the enemy.

“Why?” I asked. “What sense does that make?”

“Because we didn't want to be captured. We knew what would happen to us.”

After he explained it, I realized it made perfect sense from his point of view. It was simply an extension of the SEAL mentality: they would have preferred to die than be taken prisoner. They believed that if they were captured, they would be used for propaganda and completely disgraced, then killed anyway. Why put your family through that? Why torture your own people and suffer besides? Better to go out in a blaze, whether it was glorious or not.