Chris Kyle, US Navy Seal from Texas who bragged about killing 255 Iraqis in his memoir.

(AKA the “hero” of the movie American Sniper)

#is this real?????

Chris Kyle, a US navy Seal from Texas, was deployed to Iraq in 2003 and claimed to have killed more than 255 people during his six-year military career. In his memoir, Kyle reportedly described killing as “fun”, something he “loved”; he was unwavering in his belief that everyone he shot was a “bad guy”. “I hate the damn savages,” he wrote. “I couldn’t give a flying fuck about the Iraqis.” He bragged about murdering looters during Hurricane Katrina, though that was never substantiated.

–The real American Sniper was a hate-filled killer. Why are simplistic patriots treating him as a hero? The Guardian

What tends to happen when you’re good at your job is that you also come to enjoy it. In Kyle’s book, he admitted, “I love war.” He described killing as “fun.” He noted that “I couldn’t give a flying fuck about the Iraqis,” going on to explain that “I hate the damn savages.” But are the sacrifices of war still sacrifices when you enjoy them? Is heroism still heroism when you’re motivated by hatred?

The moral element of war’s theater—in Kyle’s book, and again as Cooper portrays Kyle in the film—is populated in his mind by good guys and bad guys, by superheroes and villains, by, essentially, cowboys and Indians. (At the Washington, D.C. premiere of the film this week, Bradley Cooper described the film not just as a character study, but also as a classic Western.) Just as foxholes have no atheists, battlefields are not places that tend to afford moral ambiguity. 

–American Sniper Makes a Case Against ‘Support Our Troops’ The Atlantic

“I don’t shoot people with Korans,” Kyle retorted to an Army investigator when he was accused of killing an Iraqi civilian. “I’d like to, but I don’t.”

–Death of an American Sniper, Salon

(via cundtcake)

The thing I noticed in watching the movie was how hard it works to make movie!Kyle worthy of redemption. It opens with him faced with the decision of whether or not to shoot the (clearly murderous) child and mother, stops short of showing him make the decision, then cuts to an extended flashback to show him growing up, an innocent child pushed to be a protector of others by a harsh father. Kyle enlists in the armed forces and endures Navy SEAL training in order to protect his country. He’s a gentleman who holds a drunk woman’s hair back while she vomits, never thinking to take advantage. When the movie returns to the opening sniper scene, he kills the evil enemies at the last possible instant, but then is harshly dismissive of the less-trained Marine who is excited by what he’s done, and afterwards confides to being deeply troubled by it to a fellow SEAL. Toward the end of the movie he faces a similar situation, in which he agonizes over whether or not to shoot a young boy who has picked up the RPG of a combatant Kyle has just killed. Movie!Kyle hesitates, visibly racked by indecision, ultimately failing to shoot the boy even when he (the boy) seems clearly to be in the act of firing the weapon. So movie!Kyle is revealed as the sort of person who would go to extreme lengths not to shoot a child, even a child in the act of attempting to kill Americans. And finally, the movie depicts Kyle killing the supremely awful enemy sniper who’s been set up throughout the movie as the arch villain, doing so even though the shot Kyle makes is portrayed as being both impossibly hard and suicidal, because shooting the enemy sniper brings down overwhelmingly superior enemy forces on Kyle and his companions. Ultimately the movie mythologizes both Kyle and the US involvement in Iraq in a way that is really quite mind-boggling: He can be viewed as a sympathetic hero not only in the eyes of the half of the country that supported the war, but even in the eyes of those who opposed it. In that sense the fake-baby scene that’s received so much attention is actually just a metaphor for the movie’s most unrealistic prop: Its depiction of the war and Kyle’s role in it. Societies always mythologize war. They always employ propaganda to frame their actions in the best light. What’s fascinating about American Sniper is how sophisticated it is at doing so. It isn’t just a one-sided depiction of the pro-war position. It’s more insidious than that. It’s a meticulously crafted framing that turns Kyle into a human rorschach, allowing the widest possible spectrum of moviegoers to sympathize with him. That’s the only way a movie makes $200 million in 10 days, which I suspect was at least as important in the filmmakers’ eyes as any particular ideological agenda.