Wednesday night I was honored to be given tickets to the
movie premier of American Sniper here in San Antonio. I went with three friends from Sparks
Firearms. Steve Sparks donated money
to the Chris Kyle Frog
Foundation and got us reserved seats!
Spoiler alert/bottom line, the movie is worth seeing. Go see it.
I was really wondering about how this was going to be. It was nothing like I expected.
I had previous thoughts about what it would look like but,
and all three were nothing to do with what actually was. I heard Fox News saying people are
complaining that it was “Republican Propaganda” but there were no politics
involved. The only thing close could
have been when Chris and his wife watch the news reports of 9/11 happening and the
planes crashing into the buildings. No
politicians were ever shown or mentioned by name in the movie. Nor were any foreign policies named or talked
about. If anything, there is a time in
the movie where things go wrong, people die and his team gets side-lined by
politics. That was during the time the
Republicans had the majority everywhere.
I also thought the movie was either going to betray him as a
bigger than life hero that never made mistakes, killed all the bad guys and
saved all the good guys, or a broken man that was crying to his family all the
time. Nope, it told of his triumphs and
failures. And when you see the movie,
you’ll see that even the best in the world has horrible failures. In the game of war, failure means people die,
lots of people.
I was also worried that it was going to show a girly version
of him that only talked about his feelings with his wife. That’s not the real world. You don’t become that good at the game of
killing and not have it affect your family and home. But it also affects the man that gets that
good and those affects go home from the battlefield. Separating them is a farce. Men that do that
well in battle aren’t the touchy feely kind generally.
The movie premier started out with an ad for Kryptek Camo and so I thought the movie
would be like anything else, but it was a military ad and kind of fun to
see. The guy with the logo tattooed on his
arm was a little much.
Then this message came on and got us in the mood for the
movie.
It was a good way to start the movie…
The opening scene is Kyle behind a rifle doing over watch
for a patrol of Marines and a tank going through a city in Iraq. He watches a couple of things and then sees a
mother and her son come out far in front of the patrol. He watches her hand the son a stick grenade
and then shows the son running at the patrol with it and raises it over his
head… Then flashes back to his childhood and his life growing up. It goes fast, but shows how and why he joined
the Navy and then how he met his wife.
Not the most flattering of meetings for her, but fun to watch and
probably pretty close to how a lot of military guys met their wives.
It shows them together watching the news reports of 9/11 and
then jumps to his first deployment. Most
of the movie is about his four deployments in Iraq and how he was trying to
adjust coming back. If you’ve been there,
you’ll relate to many things he did and a lot of the things they show in the
movie.
The movie shows how Iraq really was. It shows how evil people can really be and
how the really motivated in the military were trying to stop evil. You can also see the many times it goes wrong
for him and his teams and how bad the aftermath is of those events. When people you have around you die, it
sucks. Even people you just met and they
invited you into their lives. I
personally know how bad that feels.
The movie also shows the other half. His wife was ready to leave him multiple
times because he just couldn’t make the adjustment back to the real world. He almost kills his dog because it was
playing with the kid too rough. But if
you watch the movie you kind of understand his reaction when you know the whole
story. To people in the civilian world,
we wouldn’t think there was any problem with the kid and dog playing.
In his fourth tour he gets injured and has to come
home. It takes him a while but the
interview they show between him and a psychologist is worth seeing the entire
movie for. How one idea he was given by
that psychologist changed his life, gave him purpose, gave him his family back,
and created everything that continues today.
If you want to understand what our military is going through
in the current “War on Terror,” go see the movie and know that his deployments
were not that bad. He succeeded in his
missions and most things went well for him and his team. For others, the missions went further south
and they saw and did things that no one should have to endure.
Stay Safe,
Ben
Originally posted at ModernSelfProtection.com
