Chapter 5

Gettysburg-on-the-Gulf

Major Gates: I don’t even know what we did here. … Just tell me what we did here, Ron.

Col. Horn: What do you want to do—occupy Iraq and do Vietnam all over … again? Is that what you want? Is that your brilliant idea?

—Three Kings1

Savage, despicable evil. That’s what we were fighting in Iraq.

—Chris Kyle2

The Blue, the Gray, and the Difference

“What we did here.” It’s a little phrase, four one-syllable words of no extraordinary nature. When Archie Gates, a disaffected Special Forces officer, says it early in David O. Russell’s film Three Kings, he probably doesn’t deliberately echo one of the great American speeches made in time of war, Abraham Lincoln’s “Gettysburg Address” (1863): “The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.” Lincoln had come to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, to memorialize the Union dead from a battle that cost the North and its Confederate enemy more than 50,000 men killed, wounded, captured, or missing over three days and ended General Lee’s second attempt to invade the North. In November of the same year, following a more ceremonial two-hour oration by Edward Everett, a well-known political figure of the time, the president consecrated the land set aside for a national cemetery with a speech of just under 300 words.

The word “here” comes up eight times in Lincoln’s address, a curious persistence in so brief a statement. Yet that one repeated word hammers home the immediacy of the location in which the president and his audience find themselves, the deeds that were done, and the lives lost there. In Three Kings, Major Archie Gates (George Clooney) stands in the desert in Kuwait at the end of Desert Storm, equally aware of his war-torn surroundings. Just across the country’s northern border, Iraqi nationals have responded to President George H.W. Bush’s exhortation to rise up against Saddam Hussein. Convinced the United States will support them, they are being slaughtered by Saddam’s army as American forces stand by, watching.

Unlike Lincoln, Gates believes that his country has snatched defeat from the mouth of victory, and he substitutes anger and frustration for Lincoln’s hallowing of the Union casualties. Whether conscious or unconscious, Gates’ complaint reveals further disjunctions. Where Lincoln affirmed a national purpose—maintaining the Union—Gates clearly feels Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm have violated the higher principles implicit in that purpose. Freeing Kuwait may have some higher value, but we have fallen short. In the wake of the Emancipation Proclamation that freed all slaves in the ten rebel states, Lincoln used the Gettysburg Address to invoke the Declaration of Independence and the Founding Fathers’ belief that “all men are created equal.” A witness to the slaughter in Iraq, by contrast, Gates knows that for purposes of foreign policy decision making in the late 20th century, American lives are worth more than Iraqi lives.

The film is set in 1991. Released in 1999, it anticipates events just over the horizon; the United States would invade first Afghanistan and then Iraq in the wake of 9/11/2001. Many stories would be told about the wars, and war generally, in the years that followed. I have previously named a few of them: Jarhead (2005), In the Valley of Elah (2007), Stop-Loss (2008), Restrepo (2010), The Messenger (2009), and Lone Survivor (2013). Kathryn Bigelow followed The Hurt Locker with Zero Dark Thirty (2012), which chronicles the hunt for and assassination of al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden by a U.S. SEAL team in 2011. The film seizes on a key symbolic moment in the two Middle East wars that have dominated U.S. overseas engagements so far in this century. As I noted earlier, her take on the story bears a strong resemblance to the cable TV series Homeland in that it focuses on a female Central Intelligence Agency analyst, the fictional Maya, who seems to have both a preternatural ability to imagine her way into the heads of her opponents and the persistence to make that insight pay off.

For all its potent symbolism, though, Bigelow’s film seems not to have registered in the consciousness of the American public—certainly not so much as the killing itself, on which President Obama prided his administration and which garnered recognition from both sides of the aisle in Congress as well as from the average citizen. Indeed, none of the films mentioned above provoked anything like the public response to the  release of Clint Eastwood’s American Sniper in late 2014. Based on the book of the same name by SEAL team veteran Chris Kyle, both the film and the book respond unambiguously to Desert Storm veteran Archie Gates’ plea for a meaning to U.S. involvement in the Gulf. Kyle puts it unambiguously in his book, and Eastwood does not blur the image in the film that emerges from Kyle’s memoir. Together, they make a morally certain case for U.S. intervention in the wake of 9/11. It is, as Kyle puts it theatrically, about “evil” and the need to overcome it.

If Archie Gates were real and an audience to either the book or the film, he might well approve the invasion of both countries, with an eye to the viability of the strategy he sought in Kuwait. It seems equally likely, though, that he would not have accepted Kyle and Eastwood’s rationale for the wars. The world of Three Kings, while blessedly free of more than a decade’s worth of post-mortems on our initial defense of Kuwait, offers a very different preview of why the wars were fought and what leadership they needed to succeed. In the following pages, we will look at both these elements in films that were made 15 years apart and with a lot of history between them but that raise the same fundamental question about the American way of war.

The White Man’s Burden?

The English writer Rudyard Kipling published “The White Man’s Burden: The United States and the Philippine Islands” in 1899. The title phrase has since become the label for practically every engagement launched by the developed world—Europe, the United States, and other primarily white-skinned populations—whether military, economic, or philanthropic.

Take up the White Man’s burden—

Send forth the best ye breed—

Go bind your sons to exile

To serve your captives’ need;

To wait in heavy harness,

On fluttered folk and wild—

Your new-caught, sullen peoples,

Half-devil and half-child.3

The troops to whom we are introduced as Three Kings begins hardly break the mold. The three reservists who discover the map that will drive the action in the film thrash out the racial hierarchy implicit in Kipling’s poem as they discuss what to call their Arab counterparts, whether friendly or hostile. Chief Elgin (Ice Cube), an African-American baggage handler “on a paid four-month vacation from Detroit,” criticizes the language used by Conrad Vig (Spike Jonze), a white-trash Texan: “I don’t want to hear ‘dune coon’ or ‘sand nigger’ from him or anybody else.” He gets support from Vig’s mentor, Sergeant Troy Barlow (Mark Wahlberg): “The point is, Conrad, that ‘towelheads’ and ‘camel jockeys’ are perfectly good substitutes.”4 In the armed confrontation with Arab culture, the three soldiers apply a political correctness that empowers only themselves.

Still, race and national identity aside, hierarchy plays out among the Americans as well. Gates is Special Forces, an institutional cachet he uses to bully the other three into sharing the map they have found. He knows more about the map than they do, knows it will lead them to the millions of dollars in gold bullion that Iraq stole from Kuwait during the invasion. He also has the field expertise to read the map correctly, and that gives him the authority to set the terms of the mission on which the four of them will embark and the moral framework that will sanction their actions: “Saddam stole it from the sheikhs, I have no problem stealing it from Saddam.”5

As a study in leadership, these early moments in the film bode ill for the reputation of the armed services, however entertaining those moments may be. Three Kings starts from the same premise as the World War II comedy Kelly’s Heroes (1970). Clint Eastwood, Telly Savalas, Donald Sutherland, and others star as members of a reconnaissance platoon in France who learn that a cache of gold has been left in a bank behind German lines. After taking the loot and splitting it with a few cooperative Germans, the Americans under Eastwood’s command find they have inadvertently advanced the Allied line, thus serving both their personal and professional obligations. In current business-speak, they have created a win-win situation. The morality of what they do doesn’t factor into the outcome.

Under Gates’ command, the three reservists initially display only their frustration at not having really experienced the war, even as they violate the cease-fire by sneaking into Iraq. Gates schools them in the costs of war with a simulated attack that turns gory and a clinical disquisition on the effect of a bullet on the human body. Once they reach Karbala, he correctly sees through a ruse the Iraqi Republican Guard uses to hide the gold from the reconnoitering Americans, and soon they are in possession of the gold they seek. However, in the process of discovering the gold they also discover a group of rebels who are being held and tortured by the Republican Guard. Here, Three Kings departs from the comedic formula of its predecessor and turns into a highly engaging yet deadly serious exploration of human rights and the principles on which they are based.

Gates’ “no unnecessary shots” mantra for the operation does not hold when the four Americans prepare to make their getaway. In commentary on the film, much has been made of the film stock used and the way it was processed to achieve powerful visual effects. These are indeed vivid, but the first shot fired during the face-off sends a different and more visceral visual cue. A member of the Republican Guard puts a gun to the head of an Iraqi woman crying to the Americans not to leave and pulls the trigger. She is the wife of the captive rebel leader, Amir Abdullah (Cliff Curtis), but the image of her execution goes back to one of the iconic photos of the Vietnam War: “General Nguyen Ngoc Loan Executing a Viet Cong Prisoner in Saigon.” That 1968 image won the photographer, Eddie Adams, a Pulitzer Prize and became one of the symbolic bits of evidence that fed antiwar sentiment in the United States. Adams later said he regretted having taken and published the picture, given the circumstances behind the moment and the impact it had on the executioner, who ultimately settled in the United States.

In Russell’s restaging of the shot there is little doubt about the victim’s innocence. She is a wife and a mother first and a rebel second, and an unarmed one at that. She also has the virtue for an American audience of appealing to Gates and his troopers for protection, even though we know that she and her fellow rebels have been effectively set up to fail and that no help will arrive. In that evasion of responsibility, and with Gates’ “no unnecessary shots” lingering in the air, the camera dwells in slow motion on the impact of the bullet, the physics of a body that in the space of an instant goes from a pleading, sentient being to a limp corpse. In a film that will ultimately feature a host of explosions and killings, this early moment unambiguously signals the cost of armed conflict and the moral failing that has put the four Americans beyond their own lines and their country’s stated mission.

Russell and his colleagues do not stop there, though. While Gates makes the choice for the team to intervene and save the rebels from their Iraqi captors, the gold that they carry with them becomes a significant obstacle to their escape and shows them for what they are, both to themselves and to the Iraqis they have temporarily adopted.

Amir Abdullah: You know what I think? You’re stealing gold, that’s what I think. We’re fighting Saddam and dying, and you’re stealing gold.

Archie Gates: You’re wrong.

Amir Abdullah: They have half a million men in the desert and they send four guys to pick up all this bullion? I don’t think so.6

What the four Americans do at an individual level quickly mutates into a fractal representation of global American realpolitik. As the four flee the scene of both their and the Republican Guard’s crime with the gold and their Iraqi rebel refugees, they come under fire and lose their vehicles. Gates, Vig, and Elgin are rescued by a larger group of rebels together with the gold and the refugees they have saved from the village; Barlow is captured by Iraqi soldiers and taken to a fortress. There he is interrogated by Captain Said (Saïd Taghmaoui), who speaks remarkably good street English:

Captain Said: You know, I got weapon and training from America.

Sgt. Barlow: Bullshit!

Capt. Said: Oh yeah? How you think I learn my English? Specialist guys come here to train us when we fight Iran.

Sgt. Barlow: What’d they train you in?

Capt. Said: Weapons, sabotage, … interrogation.

Sgt. Barlow: (mutters) Great.

Capt. Said: It was a total waste for your army to come to Iraq, right? …

Sgt. Barlow: Well, you invaded another country. You can’t do that.

Capt. Said: Why not, dude?

Sgt. Barlow: Because it makes the world crazy. You need to keep it stable.

Capt. Said: For what—your pickup truck?!

Sgt. Barlow: No, for stability. Stabilize the region.

Capt. Said: (wedges Barlow’s mouth open with a cd jewel case and pours motor oil down the American’s throat) This is your fucking stability, my main man!7

The theft of the gold becomes a metaphor for the U.S. presence in the Gulf, and the interrogation a commentary on America’s history of intervening in the region. The underlying identification of foot soldier with foot soldier across the national and ethnic divide only points up the degree to which they are driven by larger forces than their own individual financial need. At the same time, the Iraqi seems more aware of the ground for American interventionism than the American himself, more familiar with American culture than Barlow is of the world in which he is supposed to fight. Therein lies the deeper meaning of the contact in this story between the Americans and their Iraqi counterparts, both the rebels and Saddam’s troops.

Like Said, Amir Abdullah, the leader of the rebels, has experience with America. He informs Gates, Elgin, and Vig that he got his MBA at Bowling Green and returned to Iraq to open a chain of cafes. He notes with a combination of regret and irony that his start-up failed when the bombing started. Yet his familiarity with his American counterparts allows him both the initial insight that Gates and his team are on an illicit mission and the ability to negotiate terms of collaboration that will benefit his goal to save his people. In short, although Gates uses his superior skills to manage Barlow, Elgin, and Vig, he meets his match in Abdullah. The image of the white savior among less enlightened brown, black, or yellow people vanishes before a consistent collaborative dynamic between the two men. They move to secure their individual aims—for Gates, the gold but also, and with increasing urgency, the recovery of Barlow; and for Abdullah, an escape to Iran for the dozens of rebels he now leads—but they do so in unison.

Nothing signals this turn of events more clearly than the death and enshrinement of Conrad Vig. Initially the most unsubtle of the four Americans about his conqueror’s relationship to the Iraqis, Vig goes into action to rescue Barlow from the fortress with Gates’ advice in his ears:

Archie Gates: You’re scared, right?

Conrad Vig: Maybe.

Archie Gates: The way it works is, you do the thing you’re scared shitless of, and you get the courage AFTER you do it, not before you do it.

Conrad Vig: That’s a dumbass way to work. It should be the other way around.

Archie Gates: I know. That’s the way it works.8

For all Vig’s shame at his lack of education, he knows better than the others that he should think above his pay grade. In his search for redemption, he has already crossed the divide that appears most emphatically to separate the American soldiers from the Iraqi rebels. In an earlier scene, Vig has witnessed the ritual covering of a dead rebel in preparation for interment at a holy site and expresses delight at the idea. In the action during which the joint American and rebel force expels the Republican Guard and finds Barlow, Vig is killed. In the calm that follows the action, the Iraqi refugees wrap Vig’s body for burial.

Chief Elgin: He said he wanted to go to one of those shrines.

Sgt. Barlow: Did he mean that?

Sgt. Elgin: That’s what he told me.

Amir Abdullah: Qom in Iran—we can take him with us.

Sgt. Barlow: Then take him.

Major Gates: All right. Take him there.9

Christians and Muslims pray side by side, a moment of spiritual convergence. More importantly for everyone in the film, the scene confirms the evolution of a new vision for leadership: it is now relatively flat within the American group, with Gates following a lead set by Elgin and Barlow, and fulfills the joint leadership that has been developing between Abdullah and Gates. As the scene ends and the decision about Vig has been made, the two men bow their heads in unison over his body.

With Three Kings we see both an invitation to a late-20th-century affirmation of the “white man’s burden” and a conscious rejection of it. One could read the film as a pious, politically correct reformulation of America’s now-stereotypical relation to the rest of the world. This take extends to the key role a female reporter, Adriana Cruz (Nora Dunn), plays in the conclusion to the action: Not only do our white male heroes bridge the gap to the “native” people they have gone forth in our nation’s interest to exploit but they also include women in the initiative. Still, to the very end, the film emphasizes the crooked origins of a mission that almost in spite of itself delivers on the founding ideological assertion that “all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights,” etc.

How do we reconcile these opposites and resolve the tension? The legal scholar and novelist Stephen Carter, in The Violence of Peace: America’s Wars in the Age of Obama, says that we don’t; we simply ignore it. Carter dubs our 21st-century version of the white man’s burden “the American Proviso”—the apparently necessary belief that

attacking America is morally different from being attacked by America. … The moral equivalence argument holds that whatever the ethics of war allows us to do in war, our adversaries can do as well. The American Proviso says this is not so. On the contrary. If one accepts the Proviso, then the reason that there is no moral equivalence between “our” forces and “their” forces is that “we” are better than “they” are.10

And that, Carter argues, is how Barack Obama, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, has become another wartime president and how he has struggled to define what we could agree is a “just war.” Despite the feel-good ending that Three Kings offers us, the moral ambiguity with which Gates, Elgin, Barlow, and Vig confront us frames and constrains the virtue of their and our actions and signals the need for more encompassing leadership at both the individual and the national level in both the military and the civilian world it serves. The ethical challenges to America in the Middle East and elsewhere beyond our borders have only grown more extreme since this film’s release, as Carter’s analysis a decade later demonstrates. The most significant impact of the American Proviso may also prove largely homegrown, though, a fact amply illustrated by Chris Kyle’s book American Sniper: The Autobiography of the Most Lethal Sniper in U.S. Military History and Clint Eastwood’s film adaptation of it.

Middle East, Wild West

Despite the pain registered in Kyle’s autobiography, it is hard not to read the book as an act of provocation. One might suppose that the difficulties Kyle had reintegrating into domestic life during and after four tours of duty testify to a challenge we must all face as a result of the wars that have dominated the first years of the new century. The occasional sections in the book labeled “Taya” (Kyle’s wife), written in her voice, point toward a deliberate strategy of balancing the author’s experience of conflict abroad with snapshots of home. Moreover, those snapshots make no pretense of weighing the slaughter in Iraq against some theoretical domestic bliss: the demands of, and tensions at, home in some ways challenge both the protagonist and the reader as much as the scenes set in the real war zone. Kyle and Eastwood also chronicle moments where the two worlds blend: in the wars of the late 20th and early 21st centuries—Three Kings captures similar moments in Barlow’s desperate cell phone exchanges from captivity with his wife—the two spill over into each other on a routine basis. The upside of easy, technology-mediated communication becomes the downside of a constant, real-time dissonance between family at home and warrior abroad.

The poignancy of these moments is only heightened in Kyle’s case by the fact that he died at the hands of a troubled fellow veteran in 2013, a little over a year after the book was published and a day after Jason Hall, the screenwriter and producer for the film, delivered the first draft of the screenplay that became Clint Eastwood’s American Sniper. The book ends, of course, without any indication of Kyle’s fate, and that happy unawareness lends Kyle’s story a resonance it could not otherwise have. The text has since acquired three brief postscripts: an author’s biography that registers Kyle’s death, a narrative of the making of the movie by Taya Kyle, and an even more succinct note from Hall, all chronicling the gap in time between the final pages of the book and the release of the film. With the advantage of hindsight, the film version stages a brief glimpse for Taya of the man who we know will end Kyle’s life, but after all of the violence documented in the film, we never see that final moment. Instead, we track the funeral procession from the public memorial service at the Cowboys Stadium in Arlington, Texas, to the funeral in Austin. Thousands of mourners stood along the highway in the rain to pay their respects, and that is the note on which Eastwood chooses to end his version of Chris Kyle’s story.

With that choice of closing content, the film directs us to a more pious view of the man and his deeds than he himself might have wished. In the opening pages of the book, he doesn’t so much tell us who he is as take a position on how we might judge him:

People try to put me in a category as a bad-ass, a good ol’ boy, asshole, sniper, SEAL. … In the end, my story, in Iraq and afterward, is about more than just killing people or even fighting for my country.

It’s about being a man. And it’s about love as well as hate.

I was raised, and still believe in, the Christian faith. If I had to order my priorities, they would be God, Country, Family. … I’ve always loved guns, always loved hunting, and in a way I guess you could say I’ve always been a cowboy.

I don’t remember when I started hunting, but it would have been when I was very young. My family had a deer lease a few miles from our house, and we would hunt every winter. (For you Yankees: a deer lease is a property.) …

I also got some attention from the buckle bunnies, rodeo’s version of female groupies. It was all good. I enjoyed going from city to city, traveling, partying, and riding.

Call it the cowboy lifestyle.11

For all his opening resistance to labels, Kyle crafts an image of himself that feeds naturally into the work he carried out during his time in the military. His parenthetical explanation of a deer lease for “Yankees” may simply register as his authorial recognition of cultural difference across regions of the United States. In the context of his stated values, though, it implicitly recasts the conflict in which he was engaged abroad as a lingering conflict or series of conflicts at home: Gun control, gun violence, and the Second Amendment of the Bill of Rights; the Pledge of Allegiance and prayer in schools; feminism and sexual assault in the military; the “1 ­percent” (in this case both the 1 percent of the population that controls a disproportionate share of America’s wealth and the 1 ­percent of America that serves in the military)—all of these debates seem to be on the table for him, and for us.

In Kyle’s version of himself, he becomes the Marlboro Man and confronts “the best and the brightest,” code since Vietnam for the graduates of elite schools like Harvard who, according to Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist David Halberstam, shaped our engagement in that earlier war.12 Kyle offers instead a populist vision of America and builds it into his vision of his own service. He is proud to be a SEAL, but he is deeply skeptical of what he refers to on multiple occasions as the “head shed,” short for the officers who were running the war in Iraq and the civilians behind or above them. For him, the measure of a man is his ability to face up to, and master, the challenges that boot camp and various stages in SEAL training put before him. As mentioned in the previous chapter, we have seen similar material in such classics as Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket. Kyle devotes significant space to this ideal in the book, and Eastwood’s team goes the same route in the film.

The authority Kyle can accept lies in the role he plays most often as a sniper. The key term here is “overwatch,” the protective function that he performs for the marines who operate at street level in various urban battles in Iraq, clearing streets and buildings of the enemy during the counterinsurgency. In his articulation of that role, he establishes a continuity with the person he became after he left the service, helping veterans at home come to terms with their experience and, in many cases, their loss of friends and comrades or their own mental and physical well-being. On this, he is quite clear:

My regrets are about the people I couldn’t save—Marines, soldiers, my buddies.13

The fellowship that Kyle evokes here factors into the veneration that some viewers have felt for him and his story, but it doesn’t quite align with the individual agency on which his military expertise depends. When the film came out, commentators noted the shift in the status of snipers that Kyle’s story reflected, given a historic distaste in and out of the armed services for personnel in that role. Kyle becomes the “Legend,” a designation that updates a long line of fictional figures from American westerns, loners who have a keen sense of justice but can deliver on it only by standing a little outside (or above) their fellows.

The type is perhaps best captured by Will Kane in Fred Zinneman’s High Noon. Kane (Gary Cooper) has rousted a gang of thugs from a town of right-thinking citizens, but when the gang returns for revenge no one will stand with Kane to fight them off. Like Kyle, Kane has the help of a good woman (Grace Kelly), but more than anything, he has a way with guns; his expertise is his—and his adoptive but reluctant flock’s—salvation. In one notable dramatic departure that Eastwood’s film makes from the book, Kyle faces off against an enemy sniper—an Olympic medalist—who has acquired the same notoriety among the Americans that Kyle has acquired among the Iraqis in Ramadi. In the book, “Mustafa”14 gets a paragraph; in the film, the two of them have the sniper’s equivalent of a shootout in the sun, one that Kyle wins with an impossibly long shot. That moment, perhaps more than others, makes it obvious why Eastwood directed American Sniper. Whether by inclination or conditioning, from the “spaghetti westerns” in which he starred for Sergio Leone relatively early in his career to his Oscar-winning tale of revenge and the seamy truth beneath cowboy legends, Unforgiven, Eastwood has made a career interpreting the American cowboy archetype. In that sense, American Sniper may only be his most recent take on the genre.

The emotional and intellectual connection between Kyle and Eastwood also surfaces in the former’s stated views on the enemy he was assigned to subdue in Iraq. As much as he and his comrades-in-arms fought to unseat a dictator, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq also formalized our encounter with the suicidal determination of Islamic fundamentalism. The combination of violence, ruse, and selective moral rectitude that characterizes Eastwood’s films also inhabits Kyle’s book as he reflects on his mission to defeat the jihadis:

I have a strong sense of justice. It’s pretty much black-and-white. I don’t see too much gray.15

One might argue, from this line alone, that Kyle meets fundamentalism with fundamentalism. He talks at length in the book about his Christian beliefs, but a Crusader element creeps into his later views of himself in action, and he makes no bones about the pleasure he takes in executing his mission, having dismissed the enemy’s rationale for resisting the invader as demented fanaticism:

The first time you shoot someone, you get a little nervous. You think, can I really shoot this guy? Is it really okay? But after you kill your enemy, you see it’s okay. You say, Great.

You do it again. And again. You do it so the enemy won’t kill you or your countrymen. You do it until there’s no one left for you to kill.

That’s what war is.

I loved what I did. … I’m not lying or exaggerating to say it was fun. I had the time of my life being a SEAL.16

It is conceivable that had Kyle not served four tours of duty in Iraq, he would speak in less absolute terms than he does here. Post-traumatic stress takes many forms, and self-justification plays a part in many of those cases. At the same time, his formulation of the act of killing echoes the unconflicted testimony that Hutu génocidaires offered after they and their fellows slaughtered 800,000 Tutsi and moderate Hutu in 100 days in 1994; we will return to these events in the next chapter. Here, Kyle goes beyond the psychological mechanism that allowed him to do his job and ends American Sniper with speculation about his Judgment Day:

I believe the fact that I’ve accepted Jesus as my savior will be my salvation. … Everyone I shot was evil. I had good cause on every shot. They all deserved to die.17

As is the case for any human being, it is hard to disentangle the motives that drove Kyle to his four tours in Iraq. Religion, patriotism, the thrill of combat, the discipline and self-discipline, the opportunity to hone a talent, the camaraderie that he experienced in the service, and the opportunity to protect his kind both at home and abroad—all of these seem to have played a part in his devotion to duty. At the same time, we are miles from the recognition of the Iraqis as human beings that gradually works its way into the consciousness of the adventurous foursome in Three Kings. In the film version of American Sniper, Bradley Cooper does a plausible job of conveying the soul of the man who wrote the autobiography, in part because he muscled up to look like the kind of man who could deliver on Kyle’s embrace of nonstop action. Still, under Eastwood’s careful direction, Cooper often has the gaze of a man who doesn’t really grasp the larger implications of the circumstances in which he finds himself at home or abroad. The same incipient helplessness that characterized his performance in Silver Linings Playbook (2012), where his character suffers bipolar disorder, haunts his assumption of Kyle’s persona in American Sniper.

To Think or Not to Think (Stop-Loss)

The phrase “stop-loss” refers to the policy of redeploying troops up to the end of their contractual obligation to serve to ensure adequate boots on the ground. The practice was legislated after the Vietnam War, applied in the first Gulf War, and continues into the new century, despite controversy and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates’ insistence during President George W. Bush’s second term on limiting its use. If the United States has employed it with an eye to fulfilling its perceived obligations in the Middle East, it seems equally clear that, compulsively or not, both Archie Gates and Chris Kyle did what they did—stole the gold, re-upped for an additional three tours—in order to maintain their individual sense of purpose. The question remains whether that purpose justified what they, and we, did there.

With Three Kings and American Sniper, we have moved along the trajectory from the frustrated agency that characterized Sergeant James’ role in The Hurt Locker and Roy Batty’s situation in Blade Runner to a sense of opportunity and, with it, responsibility. Both Archie Gates and Chris Kyle, the first a fictional, the second a real-life elite warrior, serve America’s military aims in the Middle East, and that experience allows them to step into leadership roles. Each has his team, displays expertise, and produces results that some segment of their audience will regard as positive. Kyle counters the disappointment Gates feels about U.S. efforts with an apparently unquestioning belief in the good he does. Gates counters Kyle’s apparent indifference to his enemy’s humanity with a concerted effort to distinguish the good from the evil and turns the war to both American and Iraqi advantage.

However, they exercise their leadership on radically different terms relative to the organization that has brought them to Iraq. Gates has effectively gone rogue, and while his and his companions’ adventure produces positive outcomes for the rebels they rescue and for three of the “kings,” he does so in defiance of the system that has given him his authority. He knows enough to ask questions, but the answers he gets (or fails to get) lead him to a place outside the narrowly determined role he and his fellow combatants have been assigned. By contrast, Kyle plays by the rules, with an allowance for minor high jinks that seems to be part of his status as a SEAL, and turns that embrace of convention into his guiding principle. Where Blade Runner’s Captain Bryant tells Deckard, “If you’re not cop, you’re little people,” Kyle replies, ‘I am both cop and little people, and that’s how I lead.’ His stature with his colleagues and his organization appears to derive from his technical expertise, not his ability to ask questions: His is a strong case of not thinking above one’s pay grade. Where Gates is socially liberal to the point of insubordination, Kyle prides himself on his social conservatism and delivers with the assurance of his own rectitude.

In both cases, the relation of the military to the civilian population becomes a key factor in how we evaluate the characters’ success as values-driven leaders. In Three Kings, the home front consists of Barlow’s wife and two embedded news reporters, both women. The gender differentiation is significant, albeit undeclared: the first woman reporter puts Gates onto the story of the Kuwaiti gold, Barlow’s wife ultimately supplies the coordinates that save her husband, and Adriana Cruz bears some responsibility for Gates’, Elgin’s, and Barlow’s success in seeing the Iraqi refugees across the border into Iran and protects the three from military justice and ultimately ushers them into a better place in the working world at home. Beyond that, the film’s civilian population is all Iraqi, and it is given a role sufficiently substantial to erase the “white man’s burden” as a way of framing American intervention in the Gulf.

For Chris Kyle, Iraq exists as a place where one cannot distinguish civilian from warrior. All Iraqis are at least potentially assailants and therefore targets. One could argue that this improves on the isolation of the bomb-disposal team in The Hurt Locker, but the benefit seems marginal at best. The civilian here can exist only in the protected environment of home. Kyle gives his wife room to contribute to his autobiography and Eastwood and his team do the same in the film, but the two spouses’ relationship is fraught with misunderstood signals and misaligned objectives.

As we think about the relation between the values of the military and those prized in the larger society, Kyle has the advantage over Archie Gates that he really existed and at first blush, therefore, doesn’t raise the potentially distracting question of authorial intervention. Yet his autobiography comes fully equipped with a series of postures that we have identified here, and his “true” story raises if anything more questions about the military’s relation to society than Archie Gates’ flagrant disregard for the rules of engagement, as defined by both those above him in the military hierarchy—Chris Kyle’s “head shed”—and the society on whose business Gates and the rest of the military in Kuwait embarked for Desert Shield and Desert Storm.

What did we do in Kuwait, Iraq, and Afghanistan? The idea of defense is enshrined in Kyle’s provision of “overwatch” to countless marines and soldiers, and they may well owe him their gratitude. Even against the backdrop of the attacks on 9/11, though, it isn’t clear that the homeland needed that kind of protection, and in Iraq, the history of the war almost from the beginning suggested that we had a mission other than self-­protection, however one chooses to define national security. For both Kyle and Gates, a coherent statement of “what we did here” is the only corrective to their individually flawed assumption of leadership, one that would make it meaningful for all parties to the engagement.