Hearing
Garett Reppenhagen describe how he felt the first time he shot someone
is like listening to an addict talk about his first time injecting
heroin. “I leveled my M-4, put him in my iron sights, and took three
shots. One of them hit him center mass and he went down in the middle of
the road. I had this instant sense of satisfaction, overwhelming
excitement and pride. It was really kind of an ecstatic feeling that I
had.”
I had just seen the film “American Sniper,” the
revisionist propaganda piece of myth-making and nationalistic war porn being sold to us by
Bradley Cooper, Clint Eastwood and screenwriter Jason Hall as an
apolitical character study. I wanted to talk with an actual American sniper, and Garett was generous enough to pick up the phone.
(He’s also written for Salon.)
Garett
has a lot in common with Chris Kyle. Both entered the military at an
older age; both spent endless hours on rooftops, in windows or in trash
piles in Iraq, “doing their job”; both were in Iraq in 2004 hunting
al-Qaida leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi; and both spent time after active
duty trying to help veterans.
The similarities end there.
I’ll
admit, listening to Garett talk about his first kill, taking place when
he was ambushed and life presented him a clear choice — kill or be
killed — I’m a touch envious. Life rarely offers us such moments of
clarity. As haunted as Garett and others who struggle with
post-traumatic stress disorder are because of events like this one, he
was describing a moment so simple and so heightened because of that
simplicity.
“I was training for three years to be in the moment to
do that, and I did it,” Garett tells me. “It was really an ecstatic
feeling that I had. I remember looking at the other guys, seeing if they
saw it, because I wanted somebody else to witness it.”
In
2004, while Garett was in that life-or-death firefight, the mundane
questions life presented me with could easily paralyze me. What should
we do for dinner? Where to go on summer vacation? Boxers or briefs? This
paralysis is a common side effect of privilege: We get to sweat the
small stuff when the big stuff is never in doubt. When faced with a kill
or be killed moment, one answers the former, or one is dead. It does
not get any clearer than that. I fear that if I found myself in Garett’s
2004 shoes, I would have soiled my boxers and my briefs.
The only
time Chris Kyle says he soiled himself was on purpose. He would not
leave his position to answer nature’s call so he just kept his rifle
trained and went to the bathroom in his pants. Such was his commitment
to God and country. In a micro sense, it served him well. In a macro
sense, however, our invasion and occupation of Iraq was not a “kill them
or they will kill us” scenario. History has borne that fact out, and
that lack of context makes “American Sniper” a dangerous film.
Dangerous
because kids will sign up for the military because of this movie.
Dangerous because our leaders have plans for those kids. Some will kill.
Some will be killed. Or worse. There is no narrative existing outside
the strict confines of “American Sniper’s” iron sights that allows for
the war on terror to be over. It’s like a broken record looping over and
over: attack, blowback and attack. Repeat.
Imagine the cultural
shift that needs to take place for screenwriters to write, studios to
greenlight, and A-list Hollywood actors to portray an American hero who
says something like this in a blockbuster movie:
“You feel like
there is this debt that you build for every life that you take,” Garett
tells me. “You feel like you owe the world something because you left it
without this other person that could have done something amazing. I
think about all of these soldiers coming out of the U.S. military and
helping them get jobs and education and hearing about what they aspire
to do and be in the world. And I wonder about all of the Iraqis, Syrians
and others that we killed in that country and what they aspired to be.”
Garett
wonders about the mothers of those we killed in Iraq. What aspirations
were dashed when an occupying force killed their children, for whom they
invested so much of their lives?
He did not keep track of his kills and he hates that I ask him for a number.
“I
wasn’t keeping track and oftentimes there was no confirmation. I feel
it didn’t make me a better soldier and certainly doesn’t make me more of
a man. If Chris Kyle got 160 confirmed kills, I joke and say that I
missed 160 times. I wish that was true. We are talking about human
beings and I hate quantifying that. Each life is so precious. We destroy
that every time. One was too many, the truth is unspeakable.”
Garett came home and began speaking out. He still does, in fact.
“I
do antiwar talks in high schools and colleges. I stopped telling war
stories at these events because no matter how bad and awful it sounds,
you can still see the look in kids’ eyes that say, ‘That is the rite of
passage, that is how I become a man. I have to go there and live through
that horrible shit to know that I am an adult.’”
Reppenhagen is
certain there will be young kids who join the military because of the
movie “American Sniper.” Life, however, is never as neat as Hollywood.
Take
Garett’s first hit, the one he described as giving him a feeling of
ecstasy. The feeling did not last long. His target was not dead.
“I
remember looking back and he was down in the middle of the road arching
his body, spinning on his back and screaming and pulling on his stomach
as if I shot him with an arrow and he was trying to pull it out. All
the sense of satisfaction just washed away and this horror filled it —
this sadness, anger and frustration. I was mad at him that he just
didn’t die. I ended up putting another three rounds down and he finally
stopped moving. That was the first time I took another life.”
There is a long pause on the other end of my phone.
“He
looked like he could have been my father. Who knows why he was out
there fighting. A lot of people were fighting us because they did not
want to be occupied or because they had family members who were hurt or
killed and they wanted to get some sort of vengeance. By the end of my
tour, it was really hard to justify killing them. We should not have
been there in the first place.”
While in Iraq, Garett was told by
an army chaplain that a stronger belief in God would alleviate the guilt
he was feeling. God was on America’s side, and Garett was fighting for
God and country. Get over it, soldier.
Once home, he sought
treatment for his PTSD from a Veterans Administration hospital and heard
the same message delivered in a different way.
“I was taken aside
more than once at the VA [during group therapy] and told that the VA is
not a platform to express my political views. My recovery hinged on the
fact that I felt guilt and shame over committing atrocities against an
occupied country. We went over there and brutalized and oppressed, and
that is part of my psychological and moral injuries. If I can’t talk
about it at the VA, then the VA can’t help me.”
Garett’s views are
“political,” but the worldview of Chris Kyle as brought to life in
“American Sniper” is not. It may be true that it is good for box office
for the creators of “American Sniper” to pretend that their movie is not
a political one, but if Cooper and Eastwood actually believe that, any
narrative not draped in yellow ribbons and billowing red, white and blue
flags cannot penetrate the cloak of white imperial privilege they have
pulled over their heads.
Which is unfortunate, and not just for
those of us who are insulted by a movie that so ignores important
historical context as to cross the line from art to propaganda. It robs
movie lovers of a better movie. Allowing such complexities into the
narrative, or even framing the context of Kyle’s time in Iraq
truthfully, would have made it a stronger story.
We are living
through a moment in time where a perverse experiment has gone wrong and
led to the creation of an out-of-control monster. In this case, the
monster itself is the blowback-inducing, homicidal bull in cultural,
religious and geopolitical china shops that has been U.S. foreign policy
for at least the past 75 years. That concept, personified, is the myth
of Chris Kyle that is breaking box office records and marching toward
the Oscars with all of the pomp, precision and sense of a rightful place
at the head of the line displayed by the Marine Corps Marching Band at
the Rose Bowl Parade.
In addition to the outright lies (weapons of
mass destruction, a connection between Iraq and 9/11, etc.), the main
ingredient of this nightmare is the belief in American exceptionalism:
the wind beneath the wings of the 19th century concept of Manifest
Destiny. The offspring of that concept, we can call it Manifest
Destiny’s child, is a privileged, spoiled, brutal bully on the world
stage.
That Chris Kyle, nurtured as he was by the insidious
worldview of Manifest Destiny’s child, turned out the way he did makes
him common.
That someone like Garett Reppenhagen emerged from this
experiment honestly facing down his own demons and the demons of his
country makes him a hero, worthy of a major motion picture in his own
right.
Bradley Cooper and Madeleine McGraw in "American Sniper" (Credit: Warner Bros. Entertainment)
Hearing Garett Reppenhagen describe how he felt the first time he shot someone is like listening to an addict talk about his first time injecting heroin. “I leveled my M-4, put him in my iron sights, and took three shots. One of them hit him center mass and he went down in the middle of the road. I had this instant sense of satisfaction, overwhelming excitement and pride. It was really kind of an ecstatic feeling that I had.”Dennis Trainor Jr. directed the documentary "American Autumn," and is the host of Acronym TV. Twitter: @DennisTrainorJr
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