As far as I remember, in the book he does talk about being in New Orleans for some school during the time Katrina occurred, but he does not go beyond talking about learning certain spy craft such as lock picking and stealing a car (then returning it). I have to admit that it does sound like bullshit that he would go to a course that involved stealing someone's actual car. I'm sure that certain groups are taught this skill, but I'm sure they use cars that they own and not random citizens cars. Then again, I've never been in that course so maybe they do have students commit car theft to graduate. Seems like bullshit to me though.
The shooting people during Katrina story is something I've heard as pure secondary information. I've never seen where Chris Kyle made that claim, only that people say he told them that story. For all we know, he could have just been fucking with some guy who crossed a line by asking him about his kills or something. I just don't know. It seems like he's definitely an exaggerator if not straight up liar not I can't attribute that Katrina story to him.
For everyone ITT wondering about Kyle's 'Murdering Americans' stories, they're from this 2013 article in the New Yorker:
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/06/03/in-the-crosshairs
Murdering Americans in Texas:
In January, 2010, Kyle later told friends, he was once again put to the test: two men tried to carjack his truck. He was parked at a gas station, southwest of Dallas. “He told the robbers that he just needed to reach back into the truck to get the keys,” Michael J. Mooney wrote in a recent article about Kyle, in
D Magazine. Mooney, who had worked on the piece with Kyle’s coöperation, wrote that Kyle “turned around and reached under his winter coat instead, into his waistband. With his right hand, he grabbed his Colt 1911”—a sidearm that is popular with military personnel. “He fired two shots under his left armpit, hitting the first man twice in the chest. Then he turned slightly and fired two more times, hitting the second man twice in the chest. Both men fell dead.”
Police officers arrived at the scene. When they ran Kyle’s license, Mooney wrote, something unusual occurred: “Instead of his name, address, and date of birth, what came up was a phone number at the Department of Defense. At the other end of the line was someone who explained that the police were in the presence of one of the most skilled fighters in U.S. military history.” According to Kyle, security cameras documented the episode.
Like Mooney, I also heard many of Kyle’s friends and associates tell this story. Details varied, but the ending was the same: Kyle drove away without being charged and, as Mooney put it in a related blog post, later received “e-mails from police officers all over the country, thanking him for ‘cleaning up the streets.’ ” Mooney never saw the security tape or found other corroborating evidence, such as police files or a coroner’s report for the dead carjackers. “Consider this story confirmed by the man himself,” he wrote in the blog post, in which he described Kyle as a “true American badass” and a “real-life action hero.”
Murdering Americans in New Orleans:
Not long after the radio-show (O&A) appearance, Kyle was contacted by Brandon Webb, a veteran who had served with him on
SEAL Team Three. Webb, now the editor of
SOFREP, a Web site covering special-operations forces, invited Kyle and another former
SEAL to participate in a taped discussion about life as a special operator. Webb asked Pat Kilbane, an actor, to moderate the discussion. Kyle met them at a bar in San Diego to tape the program.
The session went well. Kilbane told me that he was struck by Kyle’s “aura,” noting that whenever “he walked in the room the dynamic would change, the energy in the room would shift.” Afterward, a larger group went out for dinner, closed the hotel bar, and hung out in Kyle’s suite, drinking until late. The
SEALs began telling stories, and Kyle offered a shocking one. In the days after Hurricane Katrina, he said, the law-and-order situation was dire. He and another sniper travelled to New Orleans, set up on top of the Superdome, and proceeded to shoot dozens of armed residents who were contributing to the chaos. Three people shared with me varied recollections of that evening: the first said that Kyle claimed to have shot thirty men on his own; according to the second, the story was that Kyle and the other sniper had shot thirty men between them; the third said that she couldn’t recall specific details.
Had Kyle gone to New Orleans with a gun? Rumors of snipers—both police officers and criminal gunmen—circulated in the weeks after the storm. Since then, they have been largely discredited. A spokesman for U.S. Special Operations Command, or
SOCOM, told me, “To the best of anyone’s knowledge at
SOCOM, there were no West Coast
SEALs deployed to Katrina.” When I related this account to one of Kyle’s officers, he replied, sardonically, “I never heard that story.” The
SEAL with extensive experience in special-mission units wondered how dozens of people could be shot by high-velocity rifles and just disappear; Kyle’s version of events, he said, “defies the imagination.” (In April, Webb published an article on
SOFREP about the incident, but took it down after concluding that Kyle’s account was dubious.)
