By BEN KLEINE

Staff writer

Before Chris Kyle was the most accomplished sniper in U.S. military history, before he was a bestselling author, before he started helping veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, he was a boy playing on his grandmother’s farm in Burns with Jason Callahan and other local children.

Although it was only a few times, Burns City Clerk Carol Callahan remembers Kyle being funny but respectful. He would emphasize his Texas twang for a laugh.

The roughhousing on the Joyce Kyle farm was an omen for Chris’s activities in high school — bull riding and rodeo — but not necessarily an affinity for military leadership.

Callahan said she is as shocked as anyone else that Chris Kyle survived four tours of duty in Iraq, where he was a marked man by insurgents, but was killed by a man he was trying to help Feb. 2 on a gun range near Midlothian, Texas.

There was a memorial service for Chris Kyle Monday in Cowboys Stadium in Arlington, Texas. His body was driven to Austin, Texas, on Tuesday.

Among Kyle’s survivors is grandmother and Burns resident Joyce Kyle.