On Mr. Moore, et al . . .
I realize that in wake of any great success, there is bound
to be some controversy and negative criticism. It’s the price we pay for
success, and the privilege of living in the country with the greatest tradition
of free speech the world has ever known.
But while I think that all critics of American Sniper are
absolutely and fundamentally entitled to their opinions, I feel an obligation
to supply a little more information so that those opinions can at least be made
with some reference on facts rather than fantasies.
As many others who have not read the book, Michael Moore recently
made some remarks that, at least in my interpretation, equated snipers to being
cowards. That betrays a grave misunderstanding of how and why snipers were used
in the Iraq War.
If I read the tweets correctly, Mr. Moore unfortunately lost
an uncle during World War II to a German sniper. I am grateful to his uncle for
his service in the war; his blood helped keep my family free. In that war, a
great deal of collateral damage was done to cities, towns and villages as the
allies fought to liberate them. Not only were whole building reduced to rubble,
but many innocent civilians were caught in the crossfire, or crushed by
artillery shells and bombs.
We don’t think about this today, but there were plenty of
civilians in France, Italy and the rest of Europe when the allies liberated it,
often square foot by square foot.
In the years following that awful war, civilian leaders have
preached the importance of cutting down on collateral damage, of preserving not
only life but the infrastructure of communities whenever possible.
Minimizing civilian casualties in war is a difficult, though
worthy task. Various technologies and tactics were employed in the Second Gulf
War – including using snipers to make precision kills on enemy combatants. To
be brief, highly trained marksmen, like Chris Kyle, were given precision
weapons and extremely tight Rules of Engagement to counter terrorists who were
targeting not merely Americans but Iraqi civilians.
As you can read in the book, snipers became the target of
choice for insurgents once their positions were known – which was essentially
as soon as they fired. The reason Chris – and other snipers – had such high “kill”
counts was that the enemy recognized that they were valuable targets and did
whatever they could to attack, generally in numbers far higher than the
Americans they were attacking.
The movie really didn’t have time to explain the tactics,
but you can certainly imply much of this watching the battle scenes. If you do
want a fuller picture, though, I’d suggest reading the book.
A lot of people have focused on the number of kills we used
in the book as horrific. That number – whatever number you chose to insert, as
I see is often done – pales in comparison to the number of combatants killed by
other means such as artillery or machine guns in previous wars. But for some
reason we don’t think about those totals.
Chris would say we’re right not to think about the totals of
enemy killed. The number he was interested in was how many people he saved.
That number, thankfully, was far into the thousands.
As to whether the fight was worth it or not, Chris’s
perspective was always that he didn’t make that call. Congress and the
President sent him to Iraq. Once he was there, he did
his job: protect Iraqis and his fellow Americans.
Were the people he fought savages? Read the first few pages
of the book and decide. Or just watch the movie trailer. You can do both of
those for free.
But you don’t have to trust my perspective on the war, or
even Chris’s. Johnny Walker – an Iraqi, Muslim, and coincidentally a friend of
Chris’s – put his own thoughts together in a book I helped him write, Code
Name: Johnny Walker.
I pray that someday war won’t be necessary, that people
like Chris Kyle and Michael Moore’s uncle won’t need to give our country a
blank check on their lives, and that their families won’t have to make the
sacrifices that military service demands. Until that day, I am enormously grateful
that they do.
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