“Racism and violence comprise the majority of ‘American Sniper,’ Clint Eastwood’s box-office hit,” declared Andy Reuss last week (“‘American Sniper’ and killing the other,” Jan. 29). This is a painfully shallow assessment.
As a combat veteran, I believe racism is wrong. Unwarranted prejudice, regardless of whether employed for the “good” of the state, is not only unjust, but also a weakness that compromises combat effectiveness. Violence applied justly does not require racism. Sufficient moral passions inherent in the warrior ethos can animate an American combatant to kill when innocents are imminently threatened.
The term “racist” also implies an inherent, unjustified prejudice in Kyle and his teammates which predisposes them to “reduce the being” of enemies to cope psychologically with killing. Yet assuming it is impossible to kill a man with full knowledge that he is a man not only mischaracterizes the motives of men Reuss doesn’t know, speaking to actions of which he knows little and has never done, but also implies that American armed forces are weak-minded dopes, so fearful of their jobs that they require superficial psychological tricks to rationalize their actions.
One need not reduce another’s being to kill. In fact, the reality of an opponent’s humanity is visceral, undeniable, and inescapable in close quarters battle.
“My experience … was that although there were vast differences between U.S. and Afghan culture, the humanity of the soldiers of the Afghan National Army or even the people of Afghanistan was never in question,” said Army Staff Sgt. Frank Beranek of his 2010 stint in Wardak province, Afghanistan. “If anything, they demonstrated a humanity the likes of which I had never seen before… The very idea of ‘conditioned racism’ would be laughable if it wasn’t so infuriating. However, the enemy was not constrained by the law of land warfare and yes, often their tactics were in fact savage. I am a professional soldier, a volunteer, not some conscript that needed to be conditioned to do my job[.]”
Kyle’s frequent use of the word “savage” has offended many. Merriam-Webster defines savage as “lacking the restraints normal to civilized human beings.” Don’t men who brutalize women and children meet this definition? To display so much concern for the projected “non-being” by Kyle while ignoring the total obliteration of the “being” of the women and children butchered by Muslim extremists is a curious moral stance indeed.
Nathan Siether was a vehicle commander and machine gunner with Second Battalion, Seventh Marine Division in Helmand province, Afghanistan in 2008.
“It would be easy to assume that taking someone’s life based on their beliefs would be racist or prejudiced, except one thing: They have sworn to take your life as well,” Siether said. “Here there is common ground. Let us not forget that in the Iraq War, we were reacting to someone else’s actions… These terrorists believed that they had the right to kill our people and take away the paramount right to life. In the movie, Chris Kyle states that these people are savages, and rightfully so. They call us infidels, and rightfully so. Despite what the author of last week’s article supposes, this is not racism. It is a kind of conversation with bullets discussing politics and religion; the oldest form of political discourse and one lost on many who have not served or understand the horrors of war. Kyle was not racist, nor did he use this as a ruse to confuse his psyche in order to pull the trigger. Like any operator who fights and puts his own life at risk for his principles, he will rectify his actions, and make rational decisions to kill other human beings. The definition he attributes to his enemies is a representation of his rational soul.”
If, concurrent with the Hillsdale ethos, we are to be men and women of virtue and knowledge, we cannot blind ourselves to what is, including the dark underside of human nature which the politely-conditioned conscience sometimes acknowledges with difficulty. Hillsdale is a nice place, full of nice people who largely come from nice places where malicious violence is extremely rare. This often makes understanding just killing and the just application of violence difficult. Recognizing that words alone, surmising, or intuiting cannot rightly understand some things is a sign of wisdom. Some realities simply lie outside the limits of everyday experience.
