American Sniper: 9 Things The Film Lied About

7. He Didn't Actually Shoot A Boy Carrying A Grenade

After setting up the backstory, Eastwood then takes you back to the rooftop in the Middle East where Kyle is still fixated on the young woman and the boy carrying a grenade towards a group of American soldiers. After some deliberation and back and forth between his superiors, he eventually shoots both the woman and the child. Arguably the film's most iconic moment. Except it didn't actually happen. At least not the way it's portrayed in the film. In an interview he gave prior to his death, Kyle recounts an almost identical situation with a woman and a grenade, but there's no child involved. Staring down his sights as she approached US Marines, Kyle was forced to shoot and, as the film suggests, this was his first kill. There was another situation later in his tour when a small boy was sent out to retrieve a grenade and Kyle, watching above, tracked him for a number of minutes. However he didn't fire, and strongly maintained in his book that under no circumstances would he have fired on a child.