I'm not particularly interested in seeing the movie, American Sniper, if it is full of historical inaccuracies. Still, in his article, American Sniper?, Ross Caputi applies his signature broad brush of personal viewpoint, as if he is the sole objective authority on the Iraq War. <http://www.telesurtv.net/english/opinion/American-Sniper-20150110-0019.html>

And in his trademark fashion personally condemns Navy Seal and sniper, Chris Kyle (deceased), and then attempts to camouflage his personal condemnation of Kyle with specious self-denigration of joint guilt with Kyle for war crimes—without criminality due to dupery and usury.  And in his warped guilt complex thinks he has extended Chris Kyle a partial pass for being a "murderer." A full exoneration Caputi grants only himself for “seeing the light” retrospectively. Meanwhile, he sorrowfully bemoans and dismisses all the other combat veterans he served with, particularly in the 2nd siege of Fallujah (his personal cross to bear as a participator in “one of the most criminal operations of the entire occupation of Iraq”), as lacking intelligence and moral clarity to get the truth he has grokked from a higher intellectual and moral plane.

Caputi goes after Kyle’s hero status personally, then attempts to assuage this repudiation by unconvincingly aiming it at a flawed-thinking, morally-skewed American society suffering from “moral disengagement” that assigns hero status upon an individual who took part in a military “… operation that killed between 4,000 to 6,000 civilians, displaced 200,000, and may have created an epidemic of birth defect and cancers …” Yet, he alleges that “It is not my intention to accuse Chris Kyle of committing war crimes as an individual, or to attack his character in any way.” REALLY! Does Caputi truly think that claiming later, in his article’s dismantling of Chris Kyle’s character, that he also has blood on his hands for “… helping to destroy the city of Fallujah.” makes his denunciation of Kyle to be an impersonal historical facts correction.

Caputi’s fact checking for society’s reflection and history’s benefit comes off like the same usury of Chris Kyle’s ‘rock star’ “… power to legitimize this sanitized version of events in Iraq that not all veterans have.” for his own reader audience hook. When Ross says our country, our ideas, our reaction, our culture, our mission, our hands, our veterans, I cannot help but wonder if he is motivated to set the record straight on the Iraq war and American militarism, or simply his own record of disillusioned war veteran still trying to wash the blood off his own hands.

The controversy over American Sniper is not merely about Clint Eastwood’s movie and its depiction of the Iraq War. Because of its biographical focus on Chris Kyle and his war deeds, it has become the shinning and tarnishing of Chris Kyle.

The Morality of War and Snipers:

In Nam, we got sniped at all the time. In the context of war, I didn't consider it cowardly but an effective way to punish your enemy, exact casualties and disrupt their maneuvering and counterattacking. Attrition is an element of war. Snipers can and are used offensively to attack enemy troops and defensively to protect their own troops in the open. 

As far as the movie scene snippet circulating on the Internet, depicting sniper Kyle shooting a child running toward troops with explosive ordnance goes, I would have taken the shot under the same circumstances.

In a fire fight, you scramble for whatever cover you can get, if any, rather than duel in the open like gunslingers at high noon. We hated having to assault enemy positions across open space, trying to gain fire superiority against heavy fire. Rarely do you see the whites of their eyes, unless you're getting overrun. Of course, when enemy combatants bleed your troops, kill your troops from hiding, you despise it. 

In truth, however, the bread and butter of ground troop operations are surprise ambushes: hiding, waiting, killing. (The Marine joke to debunk the idea of Marines ever falling asleep during an ambush, LP [Listening Post] or OP [Observation Post)] is "Marines don't sleep; they WAIT.” When you're on the wrong side of an ambush, it doesn't feel like cowardice, but surprise. Naturally, when you've been surprised by an invisible enemy, you want visibility, gunfight at OK Corral. In Nam we had both, and at the end of the day, it pretty much seemed all the same: death, carnage, and the uncertainty of survival. 

The taking of a life from the physical and emotional distance of invisibility is what some react to—the seeming lack of fairness by which a person is scrutinized and targeted from concealment for harm. This is what political activist and film maker Michael Moore is reacting to. It is one thing to consider war to be a reprehensible human condition, another to allege snipers to be cowards for not announcing themselves when doing their job.

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For your consideration: To understand the root of war, the conversation must move beyond the usual binary of far right–far left examination. As long as we approach war as a pure good or evil, there is no real examination, only ideological moral certitude in a false vacuum of incontestable truth. This narrow band of filtered subjectivism is the crux of psychological turmoil that some war veterans feel and voice in self-abasement toward themselves and their own. A popular, misinformed voice that is readily taken up by anti-war proponents and academia as the answer for lasting peace—but on the contrary a redux rattling of the ghosts of the Vietnam War. A voice full of emotion, but one lacking true insight; a reductionist view that says more about the tortured war veteran than it does about the cause of war. Rather than a new voice transfigured from the archived past, it is pure echo reformed into the tantara of a tormented soul. Strange how only the voices of retrospective guilt on the left and unrepentant hubris on the right ever catch the notice of truth seekers and protagonists.

For another point of view: Sitting with Warrior.

Carl