From the archives—Articles you should have read but missed the first time around.
Originally posted on Salon THURSDAY, FEB 7, 2013
Death of an American sniper
Did Chris Kyle’s uncritical thinking in life — revealed in his bestselling memoir — contribute to his death?
BY LAURA MILLER
“I am not a fan of politics,” wrote Chris Kyle, the 38-year-old former Navy SEAL sniper who was shot and killed with a friend at a Texas firing range on Saturday. Yet, in his best-selling memoir, “American Sniper: The Autobiography of the Most Lethal Sniper in U.S. Military History” — originally published last year and currently experiencing a sales bump in the aftermath of Kyle’s death — the commando also wrote, “I like war.” The problem, as Kyle would have known if he’d read his Carl von Clausewitz, is that the two aren’t separable; war, as Clauswitz wrote, is the continuation of politics by other means.
Chances are, though, that Kyle never heard of Clausewitz; certainly there’s nothing in “American Sniper” to suggest that he ever thought very deeply about his service, or wanted to. The red-blooded superficiality of his memoir is surely the quality that made it appealing to so many readers. Well, that and Kyle’s proficiency at his chosen specialty: He boasted of having killed over 250 people during his four deployments as a sniper in Iraq. While Kyle’s physical courage and fidelity to his fellow servicemen were unquestionable, his steadfast imperviousness to any nuance, subtlety or ambiguity, and his lack of imagination and curiosity, seem particularly notable in light of the circumstances of his death. They were also all-too-emblematic of the blustering, tragically misguided self-confidence of the George W. Bush years.
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SIDEBAR
The Undisturbed Conscience of a Mutt Warrior
Patrice Greanville
We talked about Chris Kyle back on February 6 in an article penned by Black Agenda Report editor and senior columnist Margaret Kimberley suitably titled Sniper Gets Sniped. Kyle was a redneck, you see, and rednecks, a tribe Kyle clearly identified with, chiefly but not exclusively a human strain found in the South, have long fascinated the rest of America’s mosaic of peoples. Their gleeful predisposition to violence in all forms, especially wars; their almost homogenous British DNA (the “Anglos” of legendary fame or infamy in the eyes of “ethnics” and “nonwhites”, depending on which side of the coin you are, are actually mostly devout and frequently poor Scotch-Irish (like Sgt. York), a tough breed that earned its reputation by constant fighting in the back country (the Ulster Plantation, today Northern Ireland) and previously on the perennially shifting border separating the highlands from English fiefs. This carnage, which lasted about 800 years, and is only matched in duration by the Spaniards’ war to expel the Arabs from the peninsula, could not help but create a martial culture in which pride and loyalty to the tribe became far more revered than mere material possessions. (They count for far more when life is at stake.)
By the time they disembarked in the late 1700s and early 1800s —many in tatters, but proud and self-righteous—into what was then the Delaware/Pennsylvania matrix, only to continue deep into Western Pennsylvania and later down the nation’s Eastern spine through Kentucky, Tennessee, the Carolinas, Georgia and culminating in Texas and the Gulf states, their reputation as quick-to-stir, hard-drinking, resilient fighters preceded them everywhere they went. (In fact the more established cynical Easterners happily used them to push back the Western frontier and “clean up” the place of pesky Injuns.)
Literary men and Hollywood types have long found them irresistible, as either heroes or anti-heroes. No Country for Old Men a 2007 American neo-Western thriller directed by the Coen brothers, was based on the Cormac McCarthy novel of the same name. All its “white” leading parts are essentially Scotch-Irish characters supposedly living in West Texas. Ditto with Lonesome Dove—both Gus and Woodrow (“Capt. McCall”), the aging former Texas rangers, are clearly of Scotch-Irish parentage.
All of the preceding to say that hunting and war came naturally to Chris Kyle, along with an unquestioned obedience to the national myths. Fierce chauvinism is not an exclusive trait of the American Scotch-Irish, of course. More than a century of self-conscious “manifest destiny” manipulation by the ruling elites and unrelenting propaganda have succeeded in infesting just about every American incautious enough to drink at the poisoned well (the poisoning ever more refined by the arrival of modern media and p.r. techniques). That being so, it’s still fair to say that among the Scotch-Irish chauvinism and ready militarism found a particularly fecund soil. Not surprising that in this class/ethnic group there would be so many victims of the perfect brainwash, the ideal human product to pursue imperial designs across the globe.
Our own beloved editor emeritus, the late Joe Bageant, knew the redneck crowd well because he came from their ranks. Bageant was the descendant of ancient Virginia settlers, stoic people to a fault, but his family never quite made it above the membrane dividing the white underclass to which Joe belonged from their “betters” in the middle and upper tiers. An irrepressible talent and seeker of truth, eventually he became his people’s prime sociologist, mixing justifiable sympathy with tough criticism. It is therefore Bageant who can best explain why Kyle was so arrogantly unperturbed by his record number of kills—in the service of what? He could not say, but more disquieting, he could care less.
If Kyle was a redneck, a homeboy to many of his ilk, did he have that strain of mean-spiritdness, that quasi-indifference to death that Bageant found to be true of his kin? In his Revenge of the Mutt People (Bageant’s term for rednecks), he gave us a haunting portrait of what hard times can do to the human spirit:
Many years ago I worked at an industrial hog farm owned by the Coeur d’Alene Indian tribe in northern Idaho. The place stank of the dead and rotting brood sows we chopped out of farrowing crates — bred to death in the drive for pork production. And it stank of the massive ponds that held millions of gallons of hog feces and rotting baby pigs, and every square inch was poisoned by the pesticides used to kill insects that hogs attract and the antibiotics fed to hogs from hundred pound sacks. The Coeur d’Alene Indians refused to suffer those kinds of conditions; they wouldn’t even manage the place. They contracted it out. As my friend Walter Wildshoe said: “Only a white man would work there.”
The hog farm, however, offered one company benefit. The white manager gave employees any young pigs that developed large tumors — those with tumors smaller than golf calls went to market with the rest of the hogs — or were born with deformities such as heads scrunched sideways with both eyes on the same side, or a leg that stuck out of the muchtop of their body instead of the bottom. We employees would butcher and eat them. Among hog farm employees, all of whom were tough descendants of the Scots Irish mutt people, free pork of any kind was prized, deformed with tumors or otherwise. You never saw a Swede eat the stuff.
So I took these pigs home and, using a huge old butcher’s knife, slashed their throats in the woods, right in front of my two kids — ages two and four at the time — without flinching even as the pigs screamed almost like humans and thrashed around, splashing thick dark glops of blood everywhere. It bothered me not one bit, just like it never bothered my daddy or granddaddy. Nor did it seem to bother my children as they watched, just like it didn’t bother me as a child when my uncle handed me sacks of barn kittens to drown in the crick. And Walter would shake his head and say, “Only a white man would wrestle a hog with a butcher knife. An Indian would shoot the motherfucker with a gun.”
My point here is that we rural and small town mutt people by an early age seem to have a special capacity for cruelty, compared say, to damned near every other imaginable group of Americans.
Maybe Bageant’s words are the key to the riddle that Chris Kyle represented in life.
—PG
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A self-described “regular redneck,” Kyle grew up in Odessa, Texas, and spent his youth hunting, collecting guns and competing in rodeos until he found his life’s purpose in the Navy SEALs. “American Sniper” lovingly recounts both the rigors of the special-operations force’s training program and the extravagant hazing to which new members are subjected. (Kyle was handcuffed to a chair, loaded up with Jack Daniel’s, stripped and covered with spray paint and obscene marking-pen tattoos by his buddies on the night before his wedding. Presumably his bride got the message about whom he really belonged to.)
When the action-hungry commando finally got to Iraq during the initial push of the war in 2003, he was confronted for the first time with the soldier’s prime directive: to kill the enemy. In Nasaria, Kyle shot his first Iraqi (an incident that opens the book), a woman he spotted on a road pulling a grenade from her clothing to throw at an advancing Marine foot patrol. “I don’t regret it,” he writes. “The woman was already dead. I was just making sure she didn’t take any Marines with her.”
[pullquote]While Kyle’s physical courage and fidelity to his fellow servicemen were unquestionable, his steadfast imperviousness to any nuance, subtlety or ambiguity, and his lack of imagination and curiosity, seem particularly notable in light of the circumstances of his death.[/pullquote]It is both cruel and perverse to reproach soldiers for killing the enemy when that’s what they’re sent to war to do, and when they do so in defense of their own lives and the lives of their comrades. Nevertheless, you can expect soldiers to kill and still recoil when they kill blithely and eagerly. In “American Sniper,” Kyle describes killing as “fun” and something he “loved” to do. This pleasure was no doubt facilitated by his utter conviction that every person he shot was a “bad guy.” Fallujah and Ramadi, where he saw the most action, were certainly crawling with insurgents and foreign Islamist militants, and Kyle swears that every man he picked off with his sniper rifle was manifestly up to no good. But his bloodthirstiness and general indifference to the Iraqis and their country don’t suggest that he was highly motivated to make sure.
“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.” Later in “American Sniper,” he announces, “I couldn’t give a flying fuck about the Iraqis.” “I hate the damn savages,” he explains. What does matter most to him are “God, country and family” (although much of the friction in his marriage arose from his ordering of those last two items). As Kyle saw it, he and his fellow troops had been sent to war in this contemptible place “to make sure that bullshit didn’t make its way back to our shores.”
In Kyle’s version of the Iraq War, the parties consisted of Americans, who are good by virtue of being American, and fanatic Muslims whose “savage, despicable evil” led them to want to kill Americans simply because they are Christians. (Later in his service, Kyle had a blood-red “crusader cross” tattooed on his arm.) While he describes patriotism as the guiding force in his life, Kyle’s patriotism is of the visceral, Toby Keith variety. It consists of loving America — specifically, being overwhelmed emotionally by the National Anthem and flag, and filled with a desire to dedicate one’s life to such symbols — rather than a commitment to tangible democratic principles, such as civilian oversight of the military. That Iraqis, too, might have been patriotically motivated to defend their own country against foreign invaders like himself does not appear to have ever crossed Kyle’s mind.
As for Americans, they come in two varieties: “badasses,” of which Navy SEALs are the premiere example, and “pussies.” The latter could be anyone from congressmen who impose onerous restrictions on, say, a SEAL sniper’s freedom to shoot anyone he deems a “bad guy,” to journalists who present unflattering reports on military activities. The recurring designation of “bad guy” suggests just how profoundly Kyle’s view of the conflict was shaped by comic books and video games, where moral inquiry takes a back seat to heroics, exhibitions of skill, gear and scoring. (In Ramadi, Kyle and another sniper, egged on by their superiors, hotly competed to be the one to officially kill the most people.)
In the world of the video game, there’s no difference between a reason to kill people and a pretext for doing so; the point of the game is to kill, and the reason (they’re “bad guys”) is just an excuse. In real life, the reason is everything (unless, that is, the killer is a psychopath). A soldier almost always has an excellent reason: protecting himself and his comrades. But when soldiers are part of an invading army, the more thoughtful among them usually end up asking why they and their buddies have been put in mortal danger to begin with. That’s why so many Iraq War memoirs resolve in bitterness and betrayal. The heroism and sacrifice of the troops were very real, but the war itself was based on lies.
All such questions about the origin of wars amount to “politics,” and they’re a bummer if what you really want is to read about exciting house-to-house battles, amazing long shots made with lovingly described high-end weapons and anecdotes celebrating the strutting prowess of elite American commandos. To get that sort of book, you need that oxymoronic thing, an unthoughtful writer. “American Sniper,” which was produced with two ghostwriters, is a work that would never have existed were it not for Kyle’s own glamorous, mediagenic reputation because he sure wasn’t going to produce it on his own; you get the impression that he exerted enormous efforts not to reflect on what happened in Iraq and why. You’ll find no mention of Abu Ghraib, the WMD fraud or the pre-war absence of al-Qaida operatives in these pages.
Kyle’s account of his return home suggests that it was not just the rationale for the invasion that messed with his simplified, sentimentally patriotic conception of the Iraq War. He went from one drunken brawl to another, including an alleged altercation with Jesse Ventura. Kyle’s description of that led to a libel suit: Ventura says the fight never happened. The former Minnesota governor has always forthrightly expressed his opposition to the Iraq War, but Kyle claimed that Ventura had insulted American troops. To judge by other passages in “American Sniper,” Kyle doesn’t seem to have understood the difference, or to have considered the possibility that opponents of the war also wanted to save American lives. War and politics: difficult to separate even when you’re hellbent on denying the connection.
Kyle finally sobered up. (It was totaling his pickup that did it, but he also missed one of his kids’ birthday parties because was in jail for a bar fight.) By all accounts, he had begun to wrestle with the war’s toxic legacy, establishing a nonprofit that donated in-home fitness equipment to veterans suffering from the physical and psychological toll of battle. Kyle’s dedication to his fellow fighters was admirable and selfless, and exercise can be great therapy. Still, the preference for activity over rumination and consideration remained a persistent theme.
Eddie Routh, the veteran who shot Kyle and his friend Chris Littlefield, had reportedly been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder as a result of his experiences in the war. In the immediate aftermath of Kyle and Littlefield’s murders, many people expressed incredulity at the notion of taking a person troubled with PTSD to a firing range. One-time presidential candidate Ron Paul provoked a firestorm of criticism by questioning this choice and tweeting, “he who lives by the sword dies by the sword.” (Word of advice: Twitter, like video games, is not an appropriate forum for complex argument.) In fact, controlled exposure to triggering stimuli is an established treatment for PTSD. It works much like phobia therapies that have patients, under a therapist’s guidance, first imagine and then gradually encounter the objects of their fears. Over time, the triggers can be desensitized.
But Routh also appears to have had other underlying mental health and substance abuse issues. He’d been hospitalized multiple times for threatening to kill both himself and family members. He may have had problems that pre-existed his service or that were exacerbated by it. Furthermore, there’s no indication that Routh was receiving any kind of psychotherapy or that Kyle and Littlefield had run the firing range idea past a therapist who was familiar with his case. Why should they? What would some egghead, like the brass and the politicians, who had never been in the shit, know about it, anyway, compared to someone like Kyle who had actually been there? Routh was not just an American, but an American soldier, a person who was by definition incapable of doing anything evil.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Laura Miller is a senior writer for Salon. She is the author of “The Magician’s Book: A Skeptic’s Adventures in Narnia” and has a Web site, magiciansbook.com.
Very well written sidebar on Laura Miller’s excellent piece. It is in the blood [of Scots-Irish, Gauls] as even Caesar in de Bello Gallico wrote referring to the wild Anglo Gaelic tribes and their blue stained faces. The rawness has never abated and is still found in the British Isles…it permeated all of US mythology. Gore Vidal was a real hater of the kind, writing in his satirical novel Myra Breckenridge about the humiliation of one such example. I worked with them a very long time ago in a chemical fertilizer factory in Memphis, TN and then marveled at their… Read more »
Capo, this article is a bitter pill and yes, your background (in the sidebar) added much to it. It speaks to me as it would have to Joe Bageant. I too am of the Scotch-Irish strain, I think, closer to the Irish Stewarts, uncertain however. But I lived as a kid surrounded by rednecks. They are a race: their own language and general attitudes and lifestyle. And they are mean. When you have a drink with a redneck you never know where it will end – if he will try to kill you, loving you a lot first as you… Read more »
Our correspondent for animal issues, Ruth Eisenbud, has filed the following comment: In response to your well written introduction to the article on Chris Kyle: https://www.greanvillepost.com/2013/10/30/perfect-brainwash/ it is not possible to leave religion out of the equation as a significant factor for so much terror and killing. Much of the violence presented was religiously instigated, such as the effort of Christian Spain to expel Islam. http://crooksandliars.com/blue-texan/fallen-seal-sniper-chris-kyle-believed- Fallen SEAL Sniper Chris Kyle Believed He Was Fighting A Religious War By Blue Texan There’s a fascinating new piece in the New Yorker about Chris Kyle, the decorated Navy SEAL sniper who was… Read more »