SEAL sniper killed—not exactly an eulogy
PATRICE GREANVILLE
UPDATE! Clint Eastwood has made a biopic honoring Kyle’s life. Read our review, A Tale of Two Snipers, HERE. There’s also a very solid essay on the topic penned by Chris Hedges. Read it here.
Remorseless super sniper Kyle: Karmic comeuppance? (CNN Screengrab)
[dropcap]Like most of today’s Death Star troopers[/dropcap] serving the American juggernaut, Chris Kyle, “America’s deadliest sniper,” never understood what he was doing overseas. Soaked from the cradle in the chauvinist Texas cultural DNA, he was thoroughly indoctrinated to believe in all the dense mythologies comprising the self-righteous national propaganda canon, especially as it relates to foreign crusades to save the world or protect the homeland, from real or imagined foes, no questions asked.
Obviously a gun enthusiast, war lover, upright Christian, G.W. Bush supporter, and a committed hunter, he was proud of his skill as a precision killer, and morally undisturbed by his mission in Iraq and elsewhere. Macho to caricature dimensions, by his own reckoning he killed upwards of 160 people, with 255 probable. His first kill was a woman cradling a toddler, supposedly about to toss a grenade into a nest of Marines. Kyle’s friends do not recall him dwelling unduly on the incident although such events probably left a mark on his psyche despite the buffers his military training had provided. More on that later. In any case, suffering from serious empathy deficiency for “the other”, and zero political knowledge, it never occurred to him that a mother with a toddler and a grenade only occur under very desperate circumstances, when a citizens’ irregular and vastly outgunned army is forced to resist a superpower’s almighty invading force. Wars are ugly by definition, but colonialist wars even more so, since the disproportion in kill ratios is usually grotesque.
Bradley Cooper deciding life and death as Chris Kyle in Clint Eastwood’s American Sniper (2014), a propagandistic homage to the late SEAL.
Kyle fought to keep his doubts and demons under control, but his behavior eventually suggested a maelstrom of unresolved emotions. As noted by Nicholas Schmidle in his excellent profile of Kyle for The New Yorker in 2013,
SEALs.
Schmidle continues,
Another psychiatrist, who works at a military hospital, said of special operators, “Their culture is still that you don’t show any signs of weakness. You have to believe you’re invincible and better than anyone else. Narcissism is reinforced in that culture. They’re very bright and they’re in top physical shape. All they do is train.” He added, “They’re trained to sight someone and shoot them in the head and see the bullet shatter the whole head. They’re trained not to flinch.” (Italics ours)
Yes, he was a “natural warrior”—the sort of specimen that the ruling orders and their hirelings—these days that would be the professional political prostitutes and the media—have cultivated and adulated down the ages. Perhaps unwittingly, Kyle victimized many people, but, ironically, he was also a patsy for another crowd he had been brainwashed to honor and obey, a puny but immensely rich sliver of society that cynically uses such massively ignorant yet narrowly skilled people for their own ends. Now Kyle is dead, himself victim of a bizarre incident probably triggered by PTSD (see below)—which also haunted him, even if he tried to deny it till the end. Karmic justice? Maybe. If you believe in such notions. The sad thing is that he will never know what he really contributed to. Not that such clarity would have arrived for sure if he had lived longer. Some people never learn—and that goes equally for those who call themselves conservatives or liberals. Still, it would have been nice to see Kyle struggling with his conscience after he finally figured it all out. Too bad that ingested propaganda (especially when moored in a conservative upbringing and unquestioning culture) is a very hard thing to overcome.
FINAL COMMENT
Kyle is now being remembered as a hero, but in reality he belongs to a much more morally equivocal category, those legions who serve evil as a result of misguided patriotism. Many (you know who) will argue he was brave and loyal “to his country.” But bravery —however admirable—is not a moral category and can’t be used as excuse for horrible deeds, or for serving ignoble causes.
As the hundreds of thousands who died fighting fiercely in a Nazi SS uniform ought to remind us, “loyalty to country” —always an ethically slippery slope— cannot apply to wars of aggression—”of choice”— waged behind a thick curtain of lies. That much was settled by the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal and later ratified by the United Nations, and even the US Congress, which of late—along with the DOJ— has been conveniently oblivious to their duties in this regard.
One thing now seems certain. With America’s morally bankrupt military involvements around the world extending into the indefinite future, with a wobbly economy that offers little solace to a growing sector of the lower middle class and the US population in general, and with an expanding demand for well-trained, dull-witted killers, Dante’s Seventh Ring will surely become a pretty crowded place before long.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Media and political observer Patrice Greanville is The Greanville Post’s founding editor.
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Chris Kyle, America’s deadliest sniper, offered no regrets
By Alan Duke, CNN
He also became a best-selling author, a reality TV personality, a supporter of fellow vets suffering from post-traumatic stress syndrome, an avid hunter and an outspoken opponent of gun control.
A west Texas native, Kyle studied agriculture at Tarleton State University in Stephenville, Texas, after graduating from high school in 1992. He left college after two years to work as a ranch hand until he joined the Navy in 1999.
He left the Navy as a chief petty officer in 2009 with a chest full of medals, including two Silver Stars and five Bronze Stars, according to his service record released by the Pentagon.
Although the military does not release such statistics, the book claimed Kyle had 160 confirmed combat kills from a distance of up to 2,100 yards. He holds the record for a U.S. military sniper, previously set at 93 by Marine sniper Carlos Hathcock during the Vietnam war.
Former Minnesota Gov. Jesse Ventura filed a lawsuit last year accusing Kyle of defaming him in the book by exaggerating his description of a fight between the two at the wake for SEAL Mikey Monsoor, who was killed in Iraq in 2006.
At his deposition last November, Kyle continued to insist his book accurately described his clash with Ventura.