Last week on my day off Heather and I saw American Sniper. It is a movie about Chris Kyle a US Navy Seal sniper. We get a fast run down of Kyle’s upbringing learning from his father the values of protecting innocent people from predators and then fast forward to the bombings of the American Embassies in Nairobi, Kenya and Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania which prompted Kyle to join the US Navy Seals and then later in Iraq after the invasion where Kyle served in several deployments as a sniper where he did overwatch over troops patrolling the streets of Iraqi cities.
From there things get pretty hairy. Kyle’s duty is to prevent harm to American troops but that harm can come from anybody from “military age males” to women and young children. He is forced to make split second decisions on who lives and who dies. The scenes are intense and not for the faint of heart but Kyle seems at home in that environment.
The hard parts are when Kyle goes back to the states to be with his young wife. He grows distant from his family as he can’t transition from life and death every day on the battlefield to life with his wife. All he can think about is that the troops in Iraq need him. The movie shows him going through several such cycles of deployments and returns.
This is one of those movies where people want the movie to be about something else. Some want Kyle to be against the Iraq war, some want him to support the war. The problem is that this is a movie about Chris Kyle. This is a movie about him protecting the troops and his life as a husband and father in between deployments and after he got out of the Seals. American Sniper is a great movie. Go see it. Leave the kiddos at home because it is very bloody. Bradley Cooper does a great job playing Kyle not only in the gory battle scenes but in portraying his increasing distance from his wife.
I thought the movie was anti-war if anything in the sense that it showed the high price that our soldiers and their families pay especially over multiple deployments. The battle scenes looked realistic to me but there was no glory in them. It is plain nasty business. It is not enough to just support our troops but we have a huge responsibility to not send them into battle without a darn good reason.
