Taya Kyle called Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner’s recent remarks about her late husband Chris Kyle “cowardly” and a “cheap political trick” on Sunday, saying the attack hurt Gold Star families at a moment meant for remembrance. She made the comments on The Sunday Briefing as Americans marked Memorial Day.
Kyle, the widow of the former Navy SEAL and American Sniper author, said Platner’s comments crossed a line because they turned a holiday built around sacrifice into a political weapon. “Low brow,” she said of his approach, adding that it was not just an insult to her husband but to the people left behind when service members are killed.
Her remarks came after a Free Beacon report said Platner, a Democrat running for the Senate in Maine, suggested in a May 2024 podcast interview on Green Beret Chronicle Show that Chris Kyle shot innocent civilians in Iraq to inflate his kill count. The report said Platner was discussing his 2006 deployment to Ramadi, Iraq, when he said Kyle’s “stories about how many people he was shooting certainly tracked with the behavior I witnessed” in the city and that “it’s relatively easy to get high numbers like that if you’re a little less discriminating in your fire than, say, a more professional unit would be.”
The same report said Platner also referred to Kyle and Task Unit Bruiser as heroes, even as he expressed disbelief at the reverence surrounding them. “I almost felt like there was like a weird practical joke being played on me by the war that, like all these years later, I’m like, having to like... People are telling me like ‘Oh, look how great this guy is, these guys are amazing heroes,’ this whole incredible thing,” he said, adding, “The paragon of leadership, and I’m just sitting there like, ‘Am I living in like an alternate reality?’ Because this is the exact opposite of my experience.”
Platner also said, “I didn’t know who these guys were,” and later added, “Susan Collins voted to send me to Iraq,” tying his criticism to the 2002 Senate vote that approved the war 77-23 with the Maine Republican among the bipartisan majority. The remarks landed in a political fight that reaches well beyond one Senate race, because Kyle remains one of the most recognizable figures from the Iraq war and a target that still draws strong reaction from veterans and military families.
That legacy is part of why the dispute did not stay buried. Kyle published American Sniper in 2012, was murdered at his Texas ranch in 2013 by a former Marine he had taken under his wing while the man suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder, and then became the subject of Clint Eastwood’s 2014 film American Sniper, which drew six Academy Award nominations. The Free Beacon report said Kyle was widely regarded as a war hero and believed to be the most gifted sniper in the Iraq war, and that he earned the nickname “the Devil of Ramadi.”
There is also a gap between Platner’s public attack and the record behind the old allegations. The Free Beacon report said the remarks echoed original Reddit comments from around 2021, but that there was never an official investigation into the Marines’ claims against Task Unit Bruiser. It also said Jocko Willink has strenuously denied any improper conduct and threatened to sue Seth Hettena.
For Kyle, the issue was not just whether Platner believed what he said. It was the choice to say it at all, and to do so in a way she saw as exploiting a dead man’s name for political gain. Her answer was sharp and direct: she said the attack was cowardly, cheap and low brow. The deeper consequence is plain enough — in a race already tied to the Iraq war, Platner’s comments have turned Chris Kyle into a flashpoint again, and the backlash is now part of the campaign he will have to carry forward.
