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the two M60 machine gunners with him opened up as well. The attack slowed momentarily, then the insurgents figured out where Chris and the rest of the team were hiding. They returned fire, and it grew so intense that the Marines at the outpost ordered them to collapse back to the safety of their walls. Two of the men made it, but Chris, an officer, and one of the machine gunners stayed behind to cover their withdrawal. Before they could get out, the enemy had surrounded their building, cutting off their escape route.
    As the fighting intensified, the Marines sent out a quick reaction force, or QRF, to fight their way on foot to the building. As they fought through the two hundred yards of urban jungle to Chris’s building, a cagey insurgent lurked in an alleyway and let the patrol pass him by. As soon as the Marines had their backs to him, he swept out of his position, weapon ready. Kyle spotted him and dropped him with a single shot. He was so close to the Marines that Chris’s fellow Americans thought they were taking insurgent sniper fire.
    Later, after the Marine QRF had extracted Chris and the rest of the men, an officer approached him and thanked him for saving his life. Apparently, the insurgent who had moved in behind the patrol had been drawing a bead on him when Chris’s bullet ended the threat.
    In the days and weeks that followed, Chris took part in dozens of patrols and missions. He killed two enemy sharpshooters during countersniper missions in support of the 8th Marines as they sought to increase the size of their footprint in the city. In other actions, he and Team Three worked with Army units and National Guard troops. They conducted joint patrols, provided overwatch for Marine units, and went after insurgent leaders in kill or capture missions. Through all the fighting around Ramadi, Chris Kyle’s coolness under fire and incredible accuracy had become almost mythic to his fellow Navy SEALs, who nicknamed him “The Legend.” Around Ramadi, as Chris’s kills mounted, the insurgents came to know who he was, too. They dubbed him Al Shatan, or “The Devil.” The Sunni terrorists grew so desperate to stop him that they put a twenty-thousand-dollar bounty on his head. Though he was blown up in IED (improvised explosive devise) attacks seven times and wounded by gunfire on six other occasions during his ten-year career as a SEAL, no insurgent ever collected that bounty.
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    Meanwhile, as the fighting raged in Ramadi and around Youssifiyah, American intelligence picked up the trail of the men who had murdered Thomas Tucker, Kristian Menchaca, and David Babineau.
    In early July, the insurgents released a second video that showed terrorists dragging Tucker’s and Menchaca’s bodies through a street while a crowd looked on and cheered. They then set the bodies afire, and kicked Thomas Tucker’s head around as if it were a soccer ball.
    These were the images the Mujahideen Shura Council showed the world. But there was another video that American intelligence captured that proved the insurgents were lying about who actually killed the two 101st Airborne troopers. The Mujahideen council had announced that al-Masri, the new leader of al-Qaida Iraq, had personally executed the men. The video showed that another high-level al-Qaida leader had actually been the perpetrator. Dubbed “Muhammad” by the Americans, he had used a large knife to behead the helpless prisoners. It was reminiscent of the murder of American civilian Nicholas Berg, which was personally carried out by al-Qaida’s leader in Iraq, Musab al-Zarqawi.
    Zarqawi had been killed only ten days before Tucker and Menchaca were captured. The truth was that al-Qaida’s senior command structure in Iraq had suffered a staggering blow, and the organization was struggling to recover with al-Masri now at the controls. American intelligence believed that Muhammad had been in the running