Chris Kyle: “Combat hardened warrior!”

“Unsurpassed courage under fire while conducting sniper operations in support of [redacted] during the siege of Fallujah. His display of unparalleled bravery and skill as a sniper contributed significantly to the success of this strategic victory over the insurgents while reducing the risk of harm to coalition troops,” reads the evaluation.

“During a seven month deployment to Iraq, IS2 Kyle recorded [redacted] enemy KIA [Killed in Action] as a sniper. His contributions to success over the insurgency in Iraq cannot be overstated!”

Over the course of his career as a Navy SEAL Team 3 sniper, Kyle had 160 confirmed kills. Kyle himself estimated that he had probably killed 255 insurgents.

American Sniper in Baghdad

I've seen links to this article several places so I went to have a look.  It reminds me of the reporting done on Iraq in the early years when we got blogs from Iraqis and from American soldiers that showed us the Iraqi (and Afghan) people as Real in a way that our media seldom does.   The Iraqi's interviewed have individual opinions.  Some think the movie is great.  Some don't like it but have seen it multiple times anyway.  Some are philosophical about a man's responsibility to serve his country.

Mohammed says one of the film’s opening scenes, when Kyle spots a woman and child who appear to be preparing to attack US troops during the initial invasion of Iraq, had the entire audience on the edge of their seats.

“When the sniper was hesitating to shoot [the child holding the RPG] everyone was yelling ‘Just shoot him!’” he said.

(...)

#AmericanSniper

I saw American Sniper yesterday with my son. The other half of my family expressed no interest in seeing it nor even hearing what we thought of it. That probably represents America in a way.

My first reaction afterwards was to call my mother to get some PTSD family stories straight. Her brother-in-law (my uncle) had served in WW II and had survived fierce hand-to-hand combat at Guadalcanal, and had had problems. I was way too young to remember anything about that or the aftermath and she's my only living link back now. I will let those stories be, as horrific as they were, out of respect for the dead and for the living as they still affect the next generation(s). I also wanted to know more about an older cousin who had fought on helicopter gunships in Vietnam. He was older than me by 10 years and so I never knew him well as a kid like I did other cousins. I do remember his going over there -- conscripted. And I thought about him during scenes of "American Sniper." He returned home to a small Wisconsin town --the same one where my parents grew up and which I knew as a kid. I remember hearing about how dynamite explosions at a local stone quarry used to give him the jitters. My mother told me some detail about how his later marriage dissolved that I had never heard. I will not repeat those stories either, out of respect for the living but suffice it to say it could not have been his fault.

"American Sniper" isn't supposed to be about those wars but it is somehow. It's supposed to be about the Iraq War.  I have no family who served there, but only a dearly loved neighbor who did two tours in Iraq as a Marine. I wrote about him here. I thought about him too.

I felt a jumble of other emotions: guilt, anger, pride.  The anger came from critics dissing this movie as "pro-war." I mean, WTF?  Another piece of residual anger comes from unresolved issues dating back to Vietnam and its aftermath. When I was 19, I saw members of a mayoral administration openly cheer the "anti-war" killers of an innocent man -- one of whom is still at large. I can never "unremember" that.  That story doesn't belong here and I already wrote about it here. I see the same attitude today. I cannot square it with reality. The guilt part is more complex and I'm not quite willing or able to confront that yet, let alone talk about it.  The pride part come from the sense that somebody can still make movies like "American Sniper."  See it -- I think it's supposed to disturb you.