American Sniper

American Sniper is the story of a U.S. Navy SEAL whose defining skill is his ability to hit targets, alive and inert, at a distance and through a scope.  It is the story of Chris Kyle; an all-American boy who found his calling, post 9-11, in the invasion of Iraq, in the city of Fallujah.

The movie has been vilified as the work of the right-wing former movie star, Clint Eastwood.  A man, it is assumed, with an agenda and who glorifies killing and holds up American nationalism. It has been seen as an apologia for American brashness, forgetfulness, imperialism, capitalism and martial culture. 

The movie has some intelligent detractors: An excellent column written by Gary Younge for the guardian.com very ably parses the argument for the middle road.  America's short recall of history, it's use of Guantanamo Bay even as it pointed out for half a century Cuba's slights against human rights, the immediate and reactionary call to arms against all comers after a terror attack, America's support of the human rights-stomping theocracy of Saudi Arabia are all (and rightly so) used to show how hypocritical the U.S. can be in it's relations with the world.

For me, the movie is a measure of true American stock: Middle American families, stoutly built with a work ethic to match, clever, inventive, adaptable -- God's people in the best sense of that phrase. Chris Kyle is perhaps not the best representative of this type, but I did once meet an American who did "represent."  

I had the opportunity of spending four days in a Land Rover driving through the national parks of Tanzania: Ngorongoro, Olduvai Gorge, the Serengeti Plains and Lake Manyara with a retired American and his wife on holiday.  I was in my late 30's and he was in his late 60's.  It was a year after 9-11.  He was ex-military, fond of hunting near his home in Oregon, kids in university and kind and attentive with his wife.  While I strained to spot wildlife in the distance, this man, past his prime, would spot cheetahs and deer before the guide ever did.  He told stories with aplomb and ignored tourist traps and touts without blinking an eye.  He was, in my estimation, confident, accomplished, humble, and unabashedly proud to be an American but tempered by a need to learn about the world.

He is the kind of American I imagine meeting in small town America, or on a university campus; he is as easily found astride a combine as on a humvee.  He is the best that America has been and still is in some ways.  He reminds me a lot of Chris Kyle, the sniper.

American Sniper is not so much a jingoistic ode to America as it is a chance to reflect on the inhumanity of humanity; on our ability to recklessly kill our sons and daughters for an idea that may not last to the end of this century.  Our ability to send well intentioned men like Chris Kyle to murder and oppose the equally well intentioned Iraqi father who gladly serves up his son as a human bomb in a fight for his own country and God.  The movie does in fact show the human face of the "hajis"; it also shows us the obverse of the confident and accomplished sniper who never acknowledges the people he kills as anything but targets and yet, somehow, he suffers for his acts in the form of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder: call it Karma or a sense of inner justice which could not be ignored.  Killing people does take its toll and won't be denied an outlet.  Perhaps the best message to take away from the movie is in the humbling of the warrior through the illness which returns him to his humanity once again.


And so the American sniper, Iraqi father, Islamist sniper are all complicit.  There are no good guys in war but equally, there are no bad guys either.  There is just you and me and them, and we just can't see eye-to-eye so it has to be an eye-for-an-eye.