Yesterday was a holiday in Texas—Chris Kyle Day. The governor made the announcement last Friday, alongside continuing reports that "American Sniper" is shattering a number of box offices records. It is now the single highest-grossing war movie of all time.
This movie has so sharply divided viewers that I’m willing to bet that readers of this column are now waiting for the big reveal. Any second now, it’ll come—am I going to paint the man as an American hero and claim that the movie is a touching tribute to the best, the bravest, the most talented among us? Or am I going to say that he is, in the words of those who have criticized him, a “hate-filled killer,” a “coward,” an “American Psycho?”
Neither. I’m sick of both of these perspectives.
I want to say two things.
First, even as a capital-L Liberal, I have an enormous amount of respect for Chris Kyle. Here’s why.
In order for society to function, we all must agree to bequeath certain people the ability to choose whether or not we need to use violent force. We may disagree, but eventually, our society only works because we settle upon policymakers to do the hard work and listen to the experts and receive the confidential intelligence and make the impossible decisions. If we disagree with their decisions, we can and should do so publicly, but the goal is to change the minds of the people making the decisions—or to change the people making the decisions when their terms have finished.
But when it comes down to it, we have to accept their choices about violent force and carry them out. We need people to execute their choices. We need people to volunteer to be the decision makers, and we need people to volunteer to be the decision enforcers.
Both of these are positively miserable jobs. They require risking one’s own life, or, sometimes even worse, risking the lives of hundreds or thousands or sometimes millions of others. They require sacrifice—years of life gone, families left unattended to, painful decisions that haunt psyches for decades. Because of the enormity of this sacrifice and because of its necessity, we owe the people who take both of these jobs a great deal.
They deserve a still higher level of respect when they do these jobs well—when decades of careful political calculus leads to the peaceful end of the Cold War, or when a sniper is so skilled that his fellow soldiers rely on him for protection.
So I respect Chris Kyle. Even if the details of his life are questionable in his autobiography and the movie is murky in its portrayal of them, two things are clear. He did an absolutely necessary job remarkably well, and he sacrificed a hell of a lot in order to do so. His eventual death is a tragedy so terrible that I understand why saying a word against him has inspired such ire.
I’m going to say something else now, too.
In the movie, we get two main villains—the Butcher, a militant so psychopathically evil that he keeps body parts in a freezer, and Mustafa, a rival sniper matched in skill only by Kyle, who he shoots from over a mile away. The problem?
The Mustafa character warrants only brief mention in Kyle’s autobiography as a largely miscellaneous skilled marksman. Kyle “never saw him,” only revealing that “other snipers later killed an Iraqi sniper [they thought] was him.” And the so-called Butcher? He doesn’t really exist—Kyle’s autobiography never even mentions him.
The reason for the movie’s choice is obvious—the stories we tell in situations as morally ambiguous as war make the most sense when we have a clear-cut enemy. Almost no one – not the American public, not Chris Kyle – wants to kill other humans. We want to kill evil.
So it’s no surprise that Kyle did exactly what the movie did—took away the personhood of his enemy. He declares unambiguously that every single person he shot is, in no uncertain terms, a “bad guy.” “I hate the d*** savages,” he wrote. “I couldn’t give a flying f*** about the Iraqis.”
I understand why he needed this narrative. I couldn’t imagine killing hundreds of people without it. And if the movie is any indication, the American public couldn’t imagine endorsing the killing of hundreds of people without it.
But once these helpful narratives are stripped away, the truth is that this war was a battle between two groups of people who were each trying to defend, perhaps in misguided ways, their people and their way of life. On both sides, the combatants perceived a threat, identified and often misidentified its source, and they lashed out against it. We all were were trying to protect the people we love against something we saw as an enemy.
Iraq is not a nation of Butchers. And Chris Kyle is not a better man than Mustafa simply because his name makes him sound like the boys I went to elementary school with.
Nearly 5,000 Americans have died in Iraq since the conflict’s beginning. How many Iraqis have died during that time? Probably around 500,000. While we don’t keep quite as close a tab on the number of slain Iraqis, it’s safe to assume that for every dead American soldier, there is a small village of dead Iraqis.
The tragedy of Chris Kyle doesn’t start on February 2, 2013. It starts a lot earlier than that, when he took a job so terrible that it left him with PTSD and a conviction that killing was “fun.”
We must not let Chris Kyle come to embody his coping mechanism—our coping mechanism: the dehumanization of and overly strong retaliation against people from whom we perceive a threat.
He was more than that. He was a man who died senselessly while trying to make sense out of his world and defend what he believed was right, no matter the cost to himself. So were many of the people he killed. On February 2nd, those are both tragedies I mourn.
Ellie Schaack is a Trinity senior. Her column runs every other Tuesday.
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