At face value, a story about the nation's most lethal sniper is probably interesting and most likely worth informing Americans of. In the last decade plus, we have undergone a new era of war different than any other war era before and certainly more significant than peacetime endeavors. Its probably important in this time of espousing ideologies to give true stories of American military forces in action. And this story definitely sticks out due to its objective numbers.
I went into this movie not knowing exactly what to expect, but worrying it would be a propaganda flick. I came out thinking the storytelling was more responsible than that and respecting Eastwood for his conveyance. It takes a lot of fortitude to in any way portray an American soldier as.......conflicted, controversial, narrow-minded, or what have you. Hats off to the filmmakers for humanizing him the same way that in the story, they exhibited Kyle dehumanizing the enemy.
For me this all harkens back to the double standard we put on soldiers, especially the good ones. Civilians and politicians do not give a fair shake to soldiers executing their jobs because they do nothing to realize the mentality necessary to achieve their goals. They expect Chris Kyle to humanize all his victims, to commit only moral judgments, to divorce a macro view of the military involvement in Iraq from his daily responsibility in protecting our soldiers. There is little room for error while assuming that each and every soldier has upstanding moral turpitude. I don't envy that kind of retrospective magnifying glass nor the shitty conditions of endlessly varying nature that we put our fighting forces in. For me, I believe that the military should operate exactly as the rest of our foreign policy and military intervention does - a means to an end. Was Chris Kyle an asshole who killed because he believed the visions through his sniper scope were lesser human being? Maybe. Did he ascribe to the regulations we forced upon him from a place of safe office revisions? Definitely. But foremost, did Chris Kyle secure the mission at hand and do both his job and duty? It would seem so. And I don't think its fair to any human to put years of their life they volunteered under a microscope for examination when they merely were following the directives they were trained and expected to do. Ergo, criticizing Chris Kyle's service is no different than shooting the messenger. -Some dirty liberal