American Sniper Watch

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Cecelia Seiner

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Aug 3, 2024, 11:20:36 AM8/3/24

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During my combat tour I never saw the Iraqis as "savages." They were a friendly culture who believed in hospitality, and were sometimes positive to a fault. The people are proud of their history, education system and national identity. I have listened to children share old-soul wisdom, and I have watched adults laugh and play with the naivet of schoolboys. I met some incredible Iraqis during and after my deployment, and it is shameful to know that the movie has furthered ignorance that might put them in danger.

As a sniper I was not usually the victim of a traumatic event, but the perpetrator of violence and death. My actions in combat would have been more acceptable to me if I could cloak myself in the belief that the whole mission was for a greater good. Instead, I watched as the purpose of the mission slowly unraveled.

I served in Iraq from 2004 to 2005. During that time, we started to realize there were no weapons of mass destruction, the 9/11 commission report determined that Iraq was not involved in the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, false sovereignty was given to Iraq by Paul Bremer, the atrocities at Abu Ghraib were exposed, and the Battle of Fallujah was waged.

The destruction I took part in suddenly intersected with news that our reasons for waging war were untrue. The despicable conduct of those at Abu Ghraib was made more unforgivable by the honorable interactions I had with Iraqi civilians, and, together, it fueled the post-traumatic stress I struggle with today.

The responsibility to make a picture that takes into account all of the political and social dynamics might not rest on any individual filmmaker. After all, it is just a movie. But that means the public should treat it like that, and educate themselves before jumping to a conclusion that the whole war was just like that. Especially if they support the democratic ideals that Chis Kyle, me and every veteran who put on a uniform swore an oath to defend with our lives.

Garett Reppenhagen served as a Cavalry Scout Sniper with the 1st Infantry Division in the US Army and deployed on a peacekeeping mission in Kosovo and a combat tour in the Diyala Province, Iraq in 2004. Garett works as a Regional Director for Vet Voice Foundation and is a veterans advocate and social justice organizer.

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Christopher Scott Kyle was the most lethal sniper in American military history, awarded for his multiple acts of courage and heroism. For his service, Kyle received two Silver Star Medals, five Bronze Star Medals, two Navy and Marine Corps Achievement Medals, and one Navy and Marine Corps Commendation Medal. He served in Iraq for four tours and had over 160 kills as a sniper.

During his life and notoriety, Chris Kyle was known to wear two watch models, a Casio G-Shock and a Resco Patriot. He also mentioned having received a Rolex Submariner from his father-in-law as a gift that his wife wore in tribute to him after his death.

During his life, Chris Kyle wore a G-Shock. In American Sniper, Bradley Cooper, who played Kyle in the film, wears a Casio G-Shock DW-6600-1V. This model features a stopwatch, 24-hour countdown timer, and an EL backlight.

The Casio G-shock watch is very popular among military personnel around the world. It was introduced in 1983 following the success of the G-Force series, which used the armed forces as a source of inspiration and has features adapted for military personnel. For example, G-Shock watches run on solar power and have 31 time zones, a countdown timer, a power-saving function, a long battery life, and a full auto EL backlight with afterglow. They are also shock and water resistant to 200m.

Casio decided to produce a robust watch for rugged industries, resulting in a collection of incredibly resistant watches that remain unaffected by heavy impact, making the G-Shock popular in the military. So it comes as no surprise that Chris Kyle chose to wear this timepiece during his missions, as depicted in American Sniper.

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"American Sniper" lionizes the most despicable aspects of U.S. society--the gun culture, the blind adoration of the military, the belief that we have an innate right as a "Christian" nation to exterminate the "lesser breeds" of the earth, a grotesque hypermasculinity that banishes compassion and pity, a denial of inconvenient facts and historical truth, and a belittling of critical thinking and artistic expression. Many Americans, especially white Americans trapped in a stagnant economy and a dysfunctional political system, yearn for the supposed moral renewal and rigid, militarized control the movie venerates. These passions, if realized, will extinguish what is left of our now-anemic open society.

The camera cuts to a church interior where a congregation of white Christians--blacks appear in this film as often as in a Woody Allen movie--are listening to a sermon about God's plan for American Christians. The film's title character, based on Chris Kyle, who would become the most lethal sniper in U.S. military history, will, it appears from the sermon, be called upon by God to use his "gift" to kill evildoers. The scene shifts to the Kyle family dining room table as the father intones in a Texas twang: "There are three types of people in this world: sheep, wolves and sheepdogs. Some people prefer to believe evil doesn't exist in the world. And if it ever darkened their doorstep they wouldn't know how to protect themselves. Those are the sheep. And then you got predators."

"They use violence to prey on people," the father goes on. "They're the wolves. Then there are those blessed with the gift of aggression and an overpowering need to protect the flock. They are a rare breed who live to confront the wolf. They are the sheepdog. We're not raising any sheep in this family."

There is no shortage of simpletons whose minds are warped by this belief system. We elected one of them, George W. Bush, as president. They populate the armed forces and the Christian right. They watch Fox News and believe it. They have little understanding or curiosity about the world outside their insular communities. They are proud of their ignorance and anti-intellectualism. They prefer drinking beer and watching football to reading a book. And when they get into power--they already control the Congress, the corporate world, most of the media and the war machine--their binary vision of good and evil and their myopic self-adulation cause severe trouble for their country. "American Sniper," like the big-budget feature films pumped out in Germany during the Nazi era to exalt deformed values of militarism, racial self-glorification and state violence, is a piece of propaganda, a tawdry commercial for the crimes of empire. That it made a record-breaking $105.3 million over the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday long weekend is a symptom of the United States' dark malaise.

"The movie never asks the seminal question as to why the people of Iraq are fighting back against us in the very first place," said Mikey Weinstein, whom I reached by phone in New Mexico. Weinstein, who worked in the Reagan White House and is a former Air Force officer, is the head of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, which challenges the growing Christian fundamentalism within the U.S. military. "It made me physically ill with its twisted, totally one-sided distortions of wartime combat ethics and justice woven into the fabric of Chris Kyle's personal and primal justification mantra of 'God-Country-Family.' It is nothing less than an odious homage, indeed a literal horrific hagiography to wholesale slaughter."

Weinstein noted that the embrace of extreme right-wing Christian chauvinism, or Dominionism, which calls for the creation of a theocratic "Christian" America, is especially acute among elite units such as the SEALs and the Army Special Forces.

The evildoers don't take long to make an appearance in the film. This happens when television--the only way the movie's characters get news--announces the 1998 truck bombings of the American embassies in Dar es Salaam and Nairobi in which hundreds of people were killed. Chris, now grown, and his brother, aspiring rodeo riders, watch the news reports with outrage. Ted Koppel talks on the screen about a "war" against the United States.

He heads down to the recruiter to sign up to be a Navy SEAL. We get the usual boot camp scenes of green recruits subjected to punishing ordeals to make them become real men. In a bar scene, an aspiring SEAL has painted a target on his back and comrades throw darts into his skin. What little individuality these recruits have--and they don't appear to have much--is sucked out of them until they are part of the military mass. They are unquestioningly obedient to authority, which means, of course, they are sheep.

Chris and Taya watch in horror. Ominous music fills the movie's soundtrack. The evildoers have asked for it. Kyle will go to Iraq to extract vengeance. He will go to fight in a country that had nothing to do with 9/11, a country that columnist Thomas Friedman once said we attacked "because we could." The historical record and the reality of the Middle East don't matter. Muslims are Muslims. And Muslims are evildoers or, as Kyle calls them, "savages." Evildoers have to be eradicated.