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| Chris Kyle as a Navy SEAL sniper in Fallujah, Iraq. |
Thatkind of courage, which is conspicuous in danger and enterprise, if devoid ofjustice, is absolutely undeserving of the name of valor. It should rather beconsidered as a brutal fierceness outraging every principle of humanity. –
Cicero, TheOffices, Book I Chapter XIX
As a sniper with the Navy SEALs in Iraq, ChrisKyle was shot twice and wounded on several other occasions. He is creditedwith 160 confirmed kills. He received several commendations. Of his fiercenessthere is no reasonable doubt. Whether his exploits display courage is anentirely separate question.
AmericanSniper: The Autobiography of the Most Lethal Sniper in U.S. Military History, theghost-written memoir for which Kyle claims primary authorship, offersconvincing testimony that Kyle not only failed to display genuine courage inIraq, but was incapable of recognizing it when it was exhibited by desperatepatriots seeking to evict the armed foreigners who had invaded and occupiedtheir country.
The insurgents who fought the American invasion (and the few“allied” troops representing governments that had been bribed or brow-beateninto collaborating in that crime) were sub-human “savages” and “cowards,”according to Kyle.
“Savage, despicable evil,” writes Kyle. “That’s what we werefighting in Iraq…. People ask me all the time, `How many people have youkilled?’... The number is not important to me. I only wish I had killed more.Not for bragging rights, but because I believe the world is a better placewithout savages out there taking American lives.”
None of the American military personnel whose lives werewasted in Iraq had to die there, because none of them had any legitimate reasonto be there. From Kyle’s perspective,however, only incorrigibly “evil” people would object once their country hadbeen designated the target of one of Washington’s frequent outbursts ofmurderous humanitarianism.
The insensate savagery of the Iraqi population wassupposedly illustrated by the first kill Kyle recorded as a sniper, whilecovering a Marine advance near Nasiriyah in March, 2003.
“I looked through the scope,” Kyle recalls. “The only peoplewho were moving were [a] woman and maybe a child or two nearby. I watched thetroops pull up. Ten young, proud Marines in uniform got out of their vehiclesand gathered for a foot patrol. As the Americans organized, the woman tooksomething from beneath her clothes, and yanked at it. She’d set a grenade.”
Kyle shot the woman twice.
“It was my duty to shoot, and I don’t regret it,” Kyleattests. “The woman was already dead. I was just making sure she didn’t takeany Marines with her. It was clear that not only did she want to kill them, butshe didn’t care about anybody else nearby who would have been blown up by thegrenade or killed in the firefight. Children on the street, people in thehouses, maybe her child….”
Of course, if the Marines hadn’t invaded that woman’sneighborhood, she wouldn’t have been driven to take such desperate action – butKyle either cannot or will not understand the motives of an Iraqi patriot.
“She was … blinded by evil,” Kyle writes of the woman hemurdered from a safe distance. “She just wanted Americans dead, no matter what.My shots saved several Americans, whose lives were clearly worth more than thatwoman’s twisted soul.”
Were Kyle just a touch more literate, he might recognize theterm untermenschen, a Germanexpression that encapsulates his view of the Iraqis who took up arms to repelforeign invaders. From his perspective, they were incurably inferior to their“liberators” and possessed of an inexplicable hatred toward their naturalbetters.
For some reason many Iraqis resented the armed emissaries ofthe distant government that had installed Saddam in power, built up his arsenaland apparatus of domestic repression, and then conferred upon the inhabitantsof that nation the unmatched blessing of several decades of wars, embargoes, airstrikes,disease, and the early, avoidable deaths of hundreds of thousands of children.
“The people we were fighting in Iraq, after Saddam’s armyfled or was defeated, were fanatics,” Kyle insists. “They hated us because weweren’t Muslim. They wanted to kill us, even though we’d just booted out theirdictator, because we practiced a different religion than they did.”
Actually,most of them probably wanted to kill Kyle and his comrades because they had invaded and occupied their country. They wereprepared to use lethal force to protect their homes against armed intruders whohad no right to be there. Ironically,Kyle’s book offers evidence that he understands that principle; he simplydoesn’t believe that it applies to Iraqis.
In one incident described by Kyle, he and several other U.S.personnel raid an Iraqi home, in the basement of which they discover a massgrave containing the bodies of several soldiers and Marines. For severalpanic-stricken moments, Kyle is understandably terrified by the thought that hemight find the lifeless body of his younger brother, a Marine who had also beendeployed to Iraq.
With obvious and vehement disgust, Kyle cites the “murderedyoung men whose bodies we had pulled out” of that basement grave as evidence ofthe bestial nature of the enemy. He exhibits no interest at all in the factthat tens of millions of Iraqis have seen friends and family meet violent,avoidable deaths as a result of the wars and sanctions imposed on their countryby Washington. Untermenschen,apparently, aren’t entitled to experience grief and rage – much less the rightto defend their homes and families against aggressive violence.
After returning from his first combat tour in Iraq, Kylerecalls, he was rudely roused from slumber one morning when the burglar alarm wentoff. Although this was a malfunction rather than a real emergency, Kyle’sreaction was revealing.
“I grabbed my pistol and went to confront the criminal,” herecalls. “No son of a bitch was breaking into my house and living to tell aboutit.”
Why was it “evil” for Iraqis to feel exactly the same wayabout the foreign sons of bitches who broke into their country and wrecked theplace?
Later in the book, describing a stalking exercise during histraining to become a sniper, Kyle recounts how he “heard the distinct rattle ofa snake nearby.”
“A rattler had taken a particular liking to the piece ofreal estate I had to cross,” Kyle recalls. “Willing it away didn’t work…. Icrept slowly to the side, altering my course. Some enemies aren’t worthfighting.”
Exactly: The only enemies worth “fighting,” apparently, arethose who aren’t capable of hurtingyou when you trespass on their turf.
The Gadsden Flag – featuring a coiled rattlesnake and thedirective “Don’t Tread On Me” – was, and remains, the best symbolic expressionof authentic American patriotism. Genuine American patriots can understand why patriots of other countries would feel similar attachments, and be similarly inclined to repel foreign invaders. This is why they willnever support any war that puts other Americans in the position of killingforeign patriots who are defending their own homes.
A rattlesnake defending its territory earns Kyle’s respect;an Iraqi patriot fighting on his home soil with his back to his home and theface to his enemy, however, is “blinded by evil” and not truly human.
“They may have been cowards, but they could certainly killpeople,” observes Kyle of the guerrillas. “The insurgents didn’t worry aboutROEs [Rules of Engagement] or court-martials [sic]. If they had the advantage, theywould kill any Westerner they could find, whether they were soldiers or not.”
If that charge (made on page 87 of Kyle’s book) is accurate,it might reflect the fact that the Iraqi resistance (as well as the tactics offoreign guerrillas who joined the fight) was playing according to ground rulesestablished by the U.S. early in the war.
On page 79, Kyle describes the Rules of Engagement that hisunit followed when they were deployed to Shatt al-Arab, a river on theIraq-Iran border: “Our ROEs when the war kicked off were pretty simple: If you see anyone from about sixteen tosixty-five and they’re male, shoot ‘em. Kill every male you see. That wasn’tthe official language, but that was the idea.” (Emphasis in the original.)
Those orders were of a piece with the studied indifferenceto civilian casualties that characterized the “Shock and Awe” bombing campaignthat began the war. In preparing that onslaught General Tommy Franks and hismilitary planners were guided by a computer program that referred to civiliancasualties as “bugsplat.” Franks had no compunction about ordering bombing missionsthat would result in what the computer projections described as “heavybugsplat.” After all, aren’t the lives of American military personnel “clearlyworth more” – to use Kyle’s phrase -- than those of the Iraqi civilians, whowere mere insects to be annihilated?
In one of her occasional contributions to Kyle’s book, hiswife Taya rebukes people who criticize the bloodshed wrought in Iraq by herhusband and his colleagues: “As far as I can see it, anyone who has a problemwith what guys do over there is incapable of empathy.” The trait she describesisn’t empathy; it’s a variation on the kind of pre-emptive self-pity describedby Hannah Arendt in her study Eichmannin Jerusalem.
Referring to those who killed onbehalf of the Third Reich, Arendt observed:
“What stuck in the minds of thesemen who had become murderers was simply the notion of being involved insomething historic, grandiose, unique (`a great task that occurs once in twothousand years’), which must therefore be difficult to bear. This wasimportant, because the murderers were not sadists or killers by nature; on thecontrary, a systematic effort was made to weed out all those who derivedphysical pleasure from what they did....”
This was true even of those whobelonged to the SS: Even those in the Reich’s killer elite were not able tosuppress their conscience entirely. Thus the “trick used by Himmler — who apparently wasrather strongly afflicted by these instinctive reactions himself — was verysimple and probably very effective; it consisted in turning these instinctsaround, as it were, in directing them toward the self. So that instead of saying:`What horrible things I did to people!,’ the murderers would be able to say: `Whathorrible things I had to watch in the pursuance of my duties, how heavily thetask weighed upon my shoulders!’"
Kyle’smemoir is remarkable chiefly for the complete absence of the kind of moralanguish Arendt describes among the SS. Kyle eagerly participated in a patentlyillegal and entirely unnecessary war of aggression against a country that neverattacked, harmed, or threatened the United States. He killed scores of people,terrorized thousands more. As Kyle tells the story, he reveled in theexperience, and regrets only that he wasn’t able to slaughter more of the “savages”who surrounded him.
DuringKyle’s last deployment to Iraq, his unit – Charlie Company of SEAL Team 3 –assigned themselves the nickname “The Punishers,” appropriating as theirinsignia the Death’s Head logo used by the psychotic comic book character ofthe same name.
Interestingly,a groupof police officers in Milwaukee had exactly the same idea. Theyalso adopted the “Punisher” logo, which they displayed on their policevehicles and wore on knitted caps as they prowled the street in search of assesto kick.
The most memorable exhibition of what they regarded as valor came inOctober 2004, when a thugscrum of “Punishers” beset a male dancer named FrankJude, who was nearly beaten to death because he was suspected of stealing abadge.
After throwing Jude to the ground, the Punishers severelybeat, kicked, and choked him – then put a knife to his throat and jammed a peninto one of his ears. The victim survived the assault, but was left withpermanent brain damage. The officers later claimed that this amount of violencewas necessary to “subdue” Jude – who was never charged in connection with theincident. The jury in the criminal trial accepted that claim and acquitted theofficers – who were later found guilty of criminal civil rights violations.
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| Imperial troops raid a home in Iraq.... |
During his service in Iraq, Kyle occasionally functioned as a lawenforcement officer of sorts. He was involved in dozens of raids against thehomes of suspected “insurgents,” many of whom were arrested on the basis ofuncorroborated accusations by anonymous informants.
He allows that many of the people dragged off in shackles were entirely innocent, but maintains that he wasn't ever troubled by that fact; he was just doing his "duty."
Shortly before the war began, Kyle was part of a SEAL unittasked to enforce UNsanctions against Iraq by intercepting tankers leaving thecountry with unlicensed oil deliveries. On one occasion, he boarded a tankercommanded by a commercial sea captain who “had some fight in him, and eventhough he was unarmed, he wasn’t ready to surrender.”
“He made a run at me,” Kyle continues. “Pretty stupid. Firstof all, I’m not only bigger than him, but I was wearing full body armor. Not tomention the fact that I had a submachine gun in my hand. I took the muzzle ofmy gun and struck the idiot in the chest. He went right down.”
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| ... and their domestic counterparts do the same in the U.S. |
If Kyle had been a warrior, rather than a bully, he wouldhave admired the authentic courage displayed by the smaller, unarmed man whofought to protect the ship and cargo entrusted to him.
How would he act if the roles were reversed – if he were the over-matched mantrying to defend private property from a group of state-licensed piratesclaiming “authority” from a UN mandate? We’ll never know the answer to thatquestion, because Kyle’s “courage” is of the sort that only manifests itself inthe service of power, and in the company of those enjoying a prohibitiveadvantage over their victims.
Kyle’s “service” continues, even though he’s retired fromthe military. He is president of CraftInternational, a Homeland Security contractor involvedin training domestic law enforcement agencies. It’s quite likelythat Kyle’s outfit will soak up a considerable portion of theroughly $1.5 billion dollars the Obama administration seeks to hire militaryveterans of Iraq and Afghanistan to work as police, emergency personnel, andpark rangers.
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