American Sniper

I was at a salon recently having my hair trimmed when the stylist, in the midst of discussing how the cut would look, asked if I had seen the movie “American Sniper”. She was a white, middle-class, middle aged woman who didn’t appear to be the type who would like ‘war’ movies. Before I had a chance to answer, she said she had just seen it and thoroughly enjoyed it. The movie made her so proud to be an American, that the main character (Chris Kyle) was a real hero, and that we needed more like him. She added that she thought those who spoke out against the movie were un-American and were people who hated the U.S. in general and the American military in particular. I was waiting for her to call them communists or Muslim sympathizers, but she changed the subject when I responded that I hadn't seen it.

Nor do I intend to.

I had read Chris Kyle’s book and knew, based on what he said in his autobiography, that he was anything but heroic. He thought shooting people was fun and it was why he served four tours of duty in Iraq. The hair stylist talked about how brave Kyle was, how it showed what a family man he was because he missed his wife and children while serving overseas, and how the movie was an honest portrayal of a real American. Hogwash! That may have been in the movie, but that isn't what he wrote in his book.

Maybe he just ‘misremembered’ things, like NBC’s Brian Williams, but there were a lot of things Kyle lied about, not just in his book but also when he was interviewed on TV; his claim that he shot looters in New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, his gunning down two men who attempted to car-jack him at a gas station outside Dallas, his made-up story about punching out former Governor Jesse Ventura in a San Diego bar, his phony dedication to his family as he related to why he wanted to go back to Iraq…(it wasn't because he wanted to serve his country. It was because killing savages was fun!) All were investigated, some even went to court, and found to be untrue. Based on what was in his book, I wondered what this woman found heroic about him. I didn't ask her though because it was clear any response that questioned the authenticity of the movie would upset her…and she had scissors in her hands.

But I was curious; would she consider the people who executed death row inmates heroic? They were killing people who seemingly deserved it, just like Kyle claimed he did, and they at least had the bravery to face those they killed. How about the Japanese soldiers who hid in caves or trees and shot American soldiers and marines wading ashore during the invasions of Japanese islands such as Okinawa or Iwo Jima, or Japanese-controlled islands like Peleliu or Tarawa, knowing they would be blasted out of their sniper’s hideout? What about the 19 men aboard the airliners hijacked on 9/11? Were their actions heroic, especially in light of the fact that they knew ahead of time they would die? What constitutes a hero? It certainly isn’t shooting people from a rooftop a half a mile away.

I went online and found several websites that reviewed movies. I chose eight of them that had watched American Sniper and had video reviews longer than five minutes. I also read six reviews of the movie. Those fourteen covered the spectrum; from a one star rating, or didn't like it, to five stars and loved it. Every one of them said the movie only follows the book in the broadest sense of the term; it leaves out key elements that were essential to the story line, and that the movie made Kyle look far more sympathetic and conflicted than he actually wrote in the book.

Warfare has been a lifelong interest of mine, because it is a human-caused disaster. Human beings make a choice to go to war and kill other human beings. Unlike a hurricane, earthquake or volcanic eruption, it’s something that could have been avoided. I study the reasons it was not, the methods used to kill the enemy, the campaigns, and the people who are drawn in and changed by it. Heroic things can happen in wartime, but killing people is not heroic. It is barbaric and, frankly, little more than government-sanctioned murder. One of my main areas of study is aerial combat and the pilots who served, especially in World War One. I am deeply interested in why they chose such an unusual, novel, and in many ways terrifying way to fight. But none of them are my heroes. Nothing they did was heroic. It was their job. The concept of the ace simply meant they were very, very good at their job of killing. Some men did show noble characteristics, such as French ace Georges Guynemer, who refused to shoot down German ace Ernst Udet when he saw his guns were jammed. Or Captain James McCudden of the RFC, who would not ambush an opponent. In hindsight, those traits were probably court-martialable because the point was to prevent the enemy from achieving any future success. But these men decided they would not let war turn them into cold-blooded killers just because it could.

Some of the savages Chris Kyle wanted to kill

Chris Kyle showed no such inclination. He reveled in killing, calling any Iraqi a ‘savage’, whether they were ones he was about to shoot or not. He relished the competition with other snipers and found it motivated him to kill even more. Not because the enemy was a threat, but because someone was getting close to his number of kills. It’s eerily similar to the two Japanese officers whose competition during the Rape of Nanking China in 1937-38 was covered by Japanese newspapers like it was a sports match. The two officers had a ‘friendly’ rivalry to be the first to behead 100 captured Chinese.

Is this the kind of soldier we are turning out anymore? This is the legacy that the hair stylist found so fantastically American and worthy of her adulation. But the ‘American Sniper’ is how we are now viewed around the world. Some may think that it’s good, for others to fear us because we might show up in their country and shoot their citizens from distant rooftops. I think what it is doing is making the old notion of the ‘ugly’ American even uglier, more dangerous, and an evil influence in the world. That’s not a nation or a legacy to be proud of.