American Sniper Is Only Proganda to Civilians

Rating: 8/10 (13 February 2015)

My best friend from Louisiana told me a story his daddy told him about how there were sheep, wolves, and sheep-dogs: sheep get eaten by wolves unless sheep-dogs possess the testicular fortitude to eviscerate the wolves before they can dine on the sheep. He told me this story sitting in the back of a M998 during our first tour in Iraq.
Now, I know very little about SEALs as I only spent a short time working with them during my second tour... we had some demo/entry-breach classes (from them), shared some laughs, remarked about the awesomeness of "relaxed-grooming-standards," and they assisted us with intel on several targets they were working on but didn't have the time to complete due to deployment constraints.
American Sniper is a work of fiction but it is a work of fiction based on real people doing real things. Regardless of the current attitude of the war in Iraq - many of us who signed up post-9/11 were sent there - for the simple fact it was (for a time) much more heated than Afghanistan. We had no choice, so we made the best of it ... and in many ways, in many cases (including mine), we didn't care - as long as we got to fight and kill "bad guys." Such a concept may be foreign to most people, and I'm glad, but for those select few of us who like the idea of facing a man down in battle and taking his life, such an experience is even better than sex. So when people quote Chris Kyle talking about how he's a "sociopath" and only wishes he'd killed more - welcome to the mentality of those select few who actually signed up for, trained, and executed such actions.
Who do you think is going to fight wars so you can drive your fancy, (benzine)petrol-guzzling car to your girl's house, and impress her with your two minutes of intense man-power? Reluctant heroes? Give me a break, a reluctant man hesitates and dies.
---The movie contains inaccuracies of course, such as how the snipers set up their "hides," this may have been intentional--- However, there are quite a few accuracies. For instance, many of us who came back without missing limbs or horrific disfigurement, we were/are apprehensive about approaching or interacting with those who have... or acknowledging, due to mission priority, what happened to Iraqis who cooperated but never received protection - girls gang-raped and much worse - the reluctance in addressing these realities is only human, we seek to distort or at best, rationalize what we can't comprehend in the bowels of human depravity. Yeah, that's right ... goddamn savages exist in more than just anecdotal foreplay.
However, if films are designed to inspire, and this film, despite the negative connotations of "American Imperialism" it seems to invoke in those testicularly disengaged who have never left their couch, I will go to the VA and visit those disfigured brethren, those maimed members of less than 1% of the US population who decided to serve. Because, despite what people may think of Chris Kyle, he did understand --- he realized the war didn't end with redeployment.