Reverie at Reveille

 Follow me;
and let the dead bury their dead
--Matthew 8:22 

 Holding back the years
Thinking of the fear I've had so long,
When somebody hears
Listen to the fear that's gone 
--Holding Back the Years ,
Simply Red 

 It takes very little to govern good people.
Very little. And bad people can't be governed at all.
Or if they could I never heard of it
 -- Cormac Mccarthy
______________________

A couple of weeks ago we attended the Black Hat Instructors reunion in Columbus, Ga, home of the Infantry School and Ranger's former stomping grounds. Present past and future collided.

The young soldiers have a startled-deer gaze in their eyes; that is the present. The film American Sniper played on t.v. that night, and we watched it for the first time; this depicted a version of the present. Lord help us if military service has devolved into the triteness displayed in the film. (We knew that Hollywood was already there because it sells to an audience that rejects challenge.)

As an Army-trained sniper, Ranger understands the reality of military killing. "American Sniper" made a harsh reality into a comic book-style graphic novel, laden with melodrama. The eponymous sniper was mad and mean, and shown as determined to deliver his holy vengeance upon the enemy.

Four young men were in the next motel room, and would begin Ranger training the following morning; this is the future. That day was the reunion, and thus, the past. "American Sniper" was the recent past, flowing into the future.

We are all slowly marching into the past, despite our current roles and their iterations, despite our perception of the speed of that movement. Rather than talk Old Soldier stuff, our thoughts go to humanity and military service writ large.

Ranger has known many hard, tough men, starting with those of his youth in the coal towns of Southeastern Pennsylvania. He has also known many mean men, and some mean and tough men.

As a company commander he endeavored to run a company devoid of mean-spirited leadership, focused instead on the hardness of our service. Life and service is not as depicted in the thin reality of these melodramatic films. Unlike the sentiments expressed by the sniper character Chris Kyle, meanness has no place in the military or in life.

Disappointingly, this movie, like so many others of its ilk, imparts a mean-spiritedness to American actions, as though that meanness is a natural response to being attacked, and as though that response will save us.

We hope that the young men going off to Ranger training on that day are trained to be tough, without the need to be mean. The years will be mean enough without our actions adding to the burden.

Forty-seven years from now, we wonder how they will remember those that have fallen by the wayside. With equanimity?

We hope it will not be through a callow mean lens like that through which most tough guys are depicted for us today.

Inside the Crosshairs

 It's just murder. All God's creatures do it.
You look in the forests and you see species
killing other species, our species killing all species
 including the forests,
and we just call it industry, not murder 
--Natural Born Killers (1994) 

Will ye not cease from this harsh-sounding slaughter?
Do you not see that you are devouring one another
in the thoughtlesness of your minds?
--Empedocles 

There is no hunting like the hunting of man,
and those who have hunted armed men
long enough and liked it
never care for anything else thereafter
--Ernest Hemingway (Esquire) 
_____________________

Since snipers are having their day in the sun, Ranger decided to re-visit the book, Inside the Crosshairs: Snipers in Vietnam by military historian Lee Lanning.

Since today's sniper darling Chris Kyle fairly loathed his targets, here is a representative passage from this book contradicting the idea that hatred is a military value and that snipers are stone cold killers. Lanning quotes Captain Jim Land, who formed the first Marine Division sniper school, explaining the qualities a sniper must possess:

"Honor on the battlefield is the sniper's ethic. he shows it by the standards and discipline with which he lives life in combat. By the decency he shows his comrades. And by the rules he adheres to when meeting the enemy.

"The sniper does not hate the enemy," Land continued, "he respects him or her as a quarry. Psychologically, the only motives that will sustain the sniper is the knowledge that he is doing a necessary job and the confidence that he is the best person to do it. On the battlefield, hate will destroy any man -- and a sniper quicker than most."

An implied sub-story in the movie "American Sniper" suggested there was a bounty offered for the killing of snipers, a sort of head-hunting among their kind, in particular between Kyle and his Iraqi nemesis. In Vietnam also there were urban myths that the North Vietnamese Army and Vietcong offered bounties on snipers, but Lanning says there is no hard evidence to prove this claim.

The overlay is a romantic notion of mano-a-mano combat which is not the truth of today's institutionalized warfare. Perhaps it was also an attempt to re-humanize Kyle as someone being hunted down personally, and fighting for his life. The director Eastwood may have had in mind a more metaphorical flight for Kyle, but if so this was never expounded upon, and the audience received yet  another uni-dimensional warrior stereotype.

(As an aside, Lanning and Ranger were classmates in Infantry Officer Basic Course (IOBC) in 1968, and last crossed paths in the 90th Replacement Battalion in Long Binh RVN in April 1970. Lee was headed back to the United States while I was an incoming replacement; we were both 1st Lieutenants at the time.)

Inside the Crosshairs is an interesting and dispassionate study of the efficacy of U.S. snipers in Vietnam by considering both their materiel and how they integrated the traditions of centuries of expert shooters that came before them.

A Modest Proposal

 --this table is not really for sale

I'm looking out for the two of us
And I hope we'll be here
When they're through with us
--Long, Long Way from Home,
Foreigner

For the Lord thy God is a merciful God;
he will not forsake thee
--Deuteronomy 4:31
 ________________________

Subtitle: For want of a table.

The trial of Eddie Lee Routh, shooter of American Sniper Chris Kyle, concluded recently with a "guilty" verdict. Sentence: Life, with no possibility of parole. “We’ve waited two years for God to get justice for us on behalf of our son,” Judy Littlefield, Chad Littlefield’s mother, told reporters after the verdict. “And as always, God has proven to be faithful.”

Littlefield's's brother piled on, calling out in the courtroom that Routh was an "American embarrassment" -- the loser, to Kyle's feted heroism.

The NYT reported, "After serving in the Marines, Mr. Routh received a diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder and psychosis, and relatives testified that he had been suicidal and paranoid in the months before the shooting."

Surely there is nothing commendable in Routh's actions, but did he get fair consideration? He had been recently released from a Veterans Administration healthcare facility where it is reported he was taking nine different medications including Risperdal, a drug for schizophrenia -- the devil's drug if ever there was one.

Routh is reported to have told authorities that he knew "right from wrong," but he also said evil strode the earth and that he needed to do more killing.

The prosecuting attorney said that Routh could not suffer Post Traumatic Stress Disorder as "he lacked the 'T'". Routh, a former Marine, worked behind enemy lines in a protected zone. Because he was not a shooter, the reasoning goes, he could not have PTSD. While understood that Marines aren't supposed to show anything that smacks of weakness, I feel traumatized when passing a television broadcasting violence such as he program "The Walking Dead", so perhaps trauma need not come from the muzzle of a gun.

On his way to the shooting range on the day of his killing, Kyle texted Little field that Routh was "straight-up nuts." What sort of discernment does it show to tote such a person to a live fire exercise? What was Routh's mental condition upon entering and exiting the Marine Corps? What was his diagnosis at the VA hospital? One does not just develop schizophrenia, one is born with it. Are the pickings for today's volunteer Army that slim?

If Routh's sister and mother had already reported they were afraid of him, how did Routh get on the roster for Kyle's non-profit shooting rehab program?

When we send troops to fight we know many will return suffering reintegration issues, so why is their trip home so piecemeal? Why are there mostly shooting and hunting and extreme sports type of programs for these returning veterans? Why not something like a VA creative arts campus where rehabilitation could be effected via artistic construction?

Something which allows the soldier to give voice to or transform his angst would seem a more constructive outlet. The gun is a mute tool which can only explode and cause damage. With this veteran population, the damage needs to be mitigated.

 --this one's not for sale, either

Eleanor Roosevelt developed a similar program to what we are suggesting at her Val-Kill campus in upstate New York to teach furniture making and various crafts to the unemployed of the Depression era. Why not a WPA-type program for those veterans more inclined to the visual or language arts? Why must vets poke around willy-nilly in the hopes of stumbling upon a vet-friendly program on a college campus, or something like the Combat Papermaking Project?

Why not a Veterans Administration initiative creating a woodworking campus in North Carolina, to re-create the once thriving and quality American furniture-making tradition? It's not an unreasonable thought to impart a marketable skill to a returning contingent; why should creativity be so hard?

In the past weeks I have unsuccessfully attempted to source a small, well-made small table from several outlets. The company All Modern has featured a stylish 28" square model on both the NYT and Slate's homepage, but when contacted the company admitted they did not carry the table (they would be happy to sell you the stools at $325 a pop, however.)

Next was a rustic cross-leg model featured in the recent Grandin Road catalog. No go, as it was "privately-owned" and the company explained they sometimes featured private items which complemented their stock. They admitted several people had inquired of the table before me. Why can't we get nice, American-made things if one cannot afford a bespoke item or make it oneself?

If we were an optimally-functioning society, we would take up John McCain's idea of two years of mandatory post-secondary school service in an area of one's choosing. Americorps/VISTA or Peace Corps would be as valid as joining the armed forces. Of course, the "S" word (socialism) is verboten in the United States and war is our racket, so young people must join the Armed Forces to earn their educational benefits, even if being an artist is ultimately what the soldier wishes to pursue.

But why risk the medical damage which will have to be treated on the taxpayer's dime if the enlistee would actually have preferred another line of service in the first place?

Apprenticing would be recognized as the legitimate good that it is, and needful work could be undertaken both for the good of society and of the individual. PTSD could be bypassed, and lots of meds could not be prescribed. Of course, everything is political, and following Clinton's administration his civic improvement program, AmeriCorps, was soon gutted.

Mrs. Littlefield was "elated" that Mr. Routh will be locked away for life, but is she elated that her tax dollars will be housing and feeding him for the rest of his days which will be spent doing nothing of benefit to his society? Will anything good come of this incarceration? Will he be a lesson to anybody?

Unlikely, as all sane people know that murder entails a prison sentence.

Primer Therapy

 ~We gotta play with more bullets
~How many more bullets?
~Three. That means we gotta play each other 
--The Deerhunter (1978)

 Some day you'll return to
Your valleys and your farms
And you'll no longer burn
To be brothers in arms 
--Brothers in Arms,
Dire Straights 

 She went to Berkeley, did primal therapy
She wrote the music for a series on the TV
She studied Rumi and Ibn'Arabi
She meditated every summer in a teepee
--The Girl's Got no Confidence,
 Gerry Rafferty
_____________________

So that we would feel good about the protagonist of the film American Sniper, Chris Kyle's killing back home by a brother in arms on the shooting range was omitted from Eastwood's film. However, Kyle's killing is perhaps the most poignant part of his story.

At Eddie Ray Routh's trial last week, his father testified that he had smoked dope with his son earlier in the day of the killing; it seems that the participants in Kyle's non-profit veterans program were not observing good range etiquette. Perhaps the only requirements for participation were having worn BDU's and knowing how to fire a weapon, and having some vague need for rehabilitation.

And what was Kyle's qualification to run this wounded warrior non-profit? Why are there so many shooting therapies for returning veterans? It seems like every town has one. Some are run by well-meaning people while others are strictly cash cows, but what does putting a gun into the hands of a traumatized soldier do for him aside from validating his skill in the killing arts?

Ranger can guarantee you there was no shooting therapy for him and his fellow Vietnam veterans. The American public did not seem to think that would have been a great idea.

The questions is simple: If shooting caused the trauma, why would shooting be a fix? Yes, it will reinforce a sense of expertise, but in a destructive skill. Going a step further, shooting is a skill which was exploited by and for governments, leaving the soldier to cope with the trauma earned via his expertise.

The zeitgeist of the time affects public attitude. In the late 1960's, National Guard riflemen opened fire on United States citizens who were exercising their 1st Amendment Rights, and the public distrusted the image of the returning drug-addled, alienated Vietnam vet. Even the most highly-decorated ones might go Rambo on them (the character "Rambo" was a Vietnam veteran Medal of Honor recipient.)

Then, the threat for the average American was not the small yellow people oceans away. When the U.S. left, they did not follow in vendetta. The Vietnamese who did come to the United States hoped to relocate peaceably here.

Today, the threat is vague, ambiguous, terrifying and omnipresent, and the media is complicit in forefronting it. In a commonly held view, when the U.S. failed to retaliate for the 1979 Iranian Embassy takeover a cascade of various Islamic extremist attack scenarios against the United States and its citizens followed, culminating in the second attacks on the World Trade Center (2001). The threat came to get us, having been heartened by their success against a nation which seemed to have lost its heart for the fight.

Post 9-11-01, the U.S. is more sensitive to acts of Islamic violence worldwide. Despite the fact that our society has grown more violent in terms of random indigenous shooting events, arming the "right" citizens does not seem as scary as it once did. Our society seems to be growing more tolerant of even open carry laws, presuming that the licensed gun bearer is not the source of mayhem and his vigilance might provide a mayhem deterrent quotient.

"Shooting therapy" makes sense in such a climate. Of course, the gun will not protect us from the threat, which is random acts of terrorism.

Today's veterans seem a more known quantity as they are self-selected and presumably do not hold the grudges of the draftees. Enter Mr. Routh -- the troubled combat vet on trial now for Kyle's killing. Routh said he shot Kyle because he felt he was not being listened to and felt marginalized, perhaps exploited yet again, this time as just another screwed up vet being used by a non-profit to justify its existence.

All the facts will not be known as the two witnesses are now dead, but if Routh felt as though he was not being listened to, perhaps a different sort of therapy might have been more appropriate. Why not something like "Non Violent Communication" (NVC), which fosters empathetic listening and communication skills?

Now Ranger loves guns and shooting, but shooting guns is not the therapy of choice for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). In fact, it is not until the PTSD is resolved that any of the former pleasures can be enjoyed again with the proper gusto. Ranger has some training in counseling education and never encountered vocational rehabilitation for combat trauma that involved rifle range activities.

What qualified Kyle to counsel troubled veterans with the tool of the gun? Was anyone involved with his non-profit credentialed to provide counseling services?

We should be wary of how we counsel fragile and fractured vets. Putting them on the firing line is counter-intuitive; why resurrect traumatic memories to no useful purpose? While there is a modality of therapy which involves re-creating the traumatic scenario in the safety of the of the counseling room, that is a safe re-creation, sans live rounds.

A soldier is more than a shooting automaton. We need to reach the troubled soldier on a level deeper than recognition of his skill with a weapon.

While Kyle might have been a killing machine in the military, he was also just another damaged soul looking to turn a profit trading on his "warrior" title. We are not ancient Greece, Rome or Japan and our society does not support a cadre of full-time warriors on the home front. Effective counseling involves integrating the returning soldier back into his human incarnation.

But none of this translates well into two hours of a red-white-and-blue Hollywood honorarium.

--Jim and Lisa

The Duke of Death

 People seldom go to the trouble of
the surface of things to find the inner truth 
--The Shop Around the Corner (1941)

Informers inform, burglars burgle,
murderers murder, lovers love 
--Breathless (1960)

The way your head works
is God's own private mystery 
--Wild at Heart (1990)
________________________

[We said we were done with American Sniper; never say "never".]

Pity that American Sniper director Clint Eastwood took the advice of Kyle's widow to omit the sniper's killing at the hands of a fellow soldier on the gun range. It would have been a Hollywood-perfect wrap and would have provided far more nuance than the final cut allowed, but Mrs. Kyle wanted the happy, if not correct ending ("This is going to be how my children remember their father, so I want you to get it right.") Presumably, she will leave out the means of Kyle's demise from her family lore, as well.

Eastwood has long explored the ideas of revenge and reconciliation. His most recent films chasten the  braggarts and he is not kind to the too-proud gunman-for-hire, the Chris Kyle's of the world.

His first foray into complexity began with The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976). The protagonist Wales must reckon with his enemies, lest his life become one of relentless murder ("...the war is over. I reckon we all lost a little bit in that damn war.") A life of revenge is supplanted by one of necessary reconciliation. It was a message to a war-weary nation which did not win in another war.

In Unforgiven (1992), Eastwood's gunman William Munny returns to killing to avenge the knifing of a prostitute. The past always creeps up, and Munny cannot holster his guns for long. Despite the aging gunman's desire to leave his murderous ways, the film ends in an orgy of violence.

Instead of a simple matter of avenging one wrong, he becomes caught in a spider web requiring the final revenge killings for the killing of his friend. The viewer is left to wonder if the best that can be hoped for in this Old Testament eye for an eye world is that someone might avenge Munny's death one day.

An interesting side story in Unforgiven is that of Richard Harris's English Bob ("The Duke of Death"). He is a foreigner of vague British background who repurposes himself in the American West after writing a book embellishing his prowess in the art of killing. His bragging earns him a serious whipping by the town's sheriff (Gene Hackman), as Bob must be taken down a notch for his braggadocio.

The Duke does not realize his hypocrisy:  "A plague on you. A plague on the whole stinking lot of ya, without morals or laws. And all you whores got no laws. You got no honor. It's no wonder you all emigrated to America, because they wouldn't have you in England. You're a lot of savages, that's what you all are. A bunch of bloody savages." The irony is that English Bob is the same as "the savages", though he imagines himself otherwise.

In Flags of Our Fathers (2006), Eastwood follows the stories of the men who raised the flag at Mt. Surabatchi on Iwo Jima in World War II. The character singled out for censure is the money-grubbing Rene Gagnon, who attempts to exploit his chance appearance in Joe Rosenthal's iconic photo to raise his social and economic position . 

Eastwood's sympathy is reserved for Ira Hayes, who was unable to surmount his combat trauma and could not reckon that with the celebrity thrust upon him. Hayes died drunk in a ditch of water some years after the war and his exploitation as a U.S. Bond salesman.

His treatment of gun fighters Josey Wales, William Munny, English Bob and Gene Gagnon differ from that of Chris Kyle. Kyle is every bit the self-promoter as English Bob or Gene Gagnon, but there is no repercussion that accrues to him because of Eastwood's restricted ending.

If Eastwood had shown the death of Kyle at the hands of another soldier, he would have been consistent in his message -- the past catches up with you. Unfortunately, in his decision to omit the story's end he delivers a film lacking in his previous gravitas.

After Seal team member Robert O'Neill decided to go public about his killing of al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden (following Matt Bissonette's firsthand account of the operation in his book, "No Easy Day"), Rear Admiral Brian Losey, head of the Naval Special Warfare Command, condemned the pair's decision. He warned serving members of special operations forces that Navy leaders "will not abide willful or selfish disregard for our core values in return for public notoriety and financial gain."

Director Eastwood has detracted from his oeuvre's message that braggadocio in killing is neither noble nor an action without consequence. Had he hewed to the actual storyline, he would have maintained his consistent and solid position.

--Jim and Lisa

Shooting Protection

 He was a most peculiar man
He lived all alone within a house
Within a room, within himself 
--A Most Peculiar Man,
Simon and Garfunkel 

They seek him here, they seek him there
In Regent Street and Leicester Square
Everywhere the Carnabetian army marches on
Each one a dedicated follower of fashion 
--Dedicated Follower of Fashion,
The Kinks

He didn’t say boo in confession
He wasn’t the least judgmental
If you didn’t kill your ma or your da
He could be exceedingly gentle 
--Uncle Jim, Black 47
____________________

Ranger's last observation from the film American Sniper, by way of the t.v. series, "Justified":

Hollywood depictions of violence do not usually parallel those events in real life. Take the case of breaking a 2 x 4 over the back of federal agent Givens by his opponent in a fist fight. In Hollywood, the Good Guy victim rolls over and gets up to fight another day. In real life, that would probably have been a killing blow.

In a now-iconic scene from American Sniper, Kyle is shown poised to make a kill with his sniper rifle which shoots high intensity cartridges and has considerable muzzle blast, yet he is wearing neither ear protection nor protective glasses. He is wearing the iconic American baseball cap with bill turned backwards -- the primary accoutrement of the American man-child -- steely eyes not of a killer but of a patriot doing his duty, sans lust and with a bissel of sadness, or perhaps isolation. The soldier next to him is wearing a helmet.

People viewing the film may think this is how a professional shoots, but that is not correct. One's hearing and eyesight are valuable assets not to be squandered, even in the service of killing Iraqis, but a helmet and goggles would have prevented a close-up on Kyle's inscrutable eyes.

We are exposed daily to noises below that of a rifle blast that can damage hearing. But sixty million Americans own firearms, and many people do not use appropriate hearing protection devices.

Power tools, leaf blowers and even the volume in movie theaters can exceed 85 decibels, the level at which hearing is damaged. So not only does the film perpetrate a scene not true-to-life, but the very act of sitting in the theater viewing the scene may damage the viewer's ears -- the supreme irony.

Rangers suffers tinnitus from blast damage, as do many soldiers. The damage is permanent and the consequences are incessant buzzing and ringing. According to Shands/UF Medical School, the second most common combat injury is ear damage. Coming home healthy is more important than confirmed kills.

We understand that Clint can't come out and deliver a Smoky the Bear public service announcement so Ranger is doing it for him: only you can prevent damage to your ears and eyes.

Body Counts

 You can't kill your way out of an insurgency
--General David Petraeus 

For days and nights they battled
the Bantu to their knees
They killed to earn their living
and to help out the Congolese 
--Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner, 
Warren Zevon

'T ain't what you bring
it's the way that you bring it
'T ain't what you sing
  it's the way that you sing it 
--Taint What You Do, 
Ella Fitzgerald
 ____________________

In our continuing series of running jumps off of the much-lauded film, American Sniper:

The dark subtext to this erstwhile patriotic film is, "In lieu of a successful hearts and minds counterinsurgency (COIN) operation [something which has never been and probably never will be], we are left to celebrate the prodigious human husks left in the wake of a patriotic sniping machine (= Mr. Kyle), our views confined to those seen through the cross hairs of his sniper rifle scope."

Whiz kid Robert McNamara, former Secretary of Defense through much of the last United States' COIN operation in Vietnam, was fond of "body counts" as a metric for measuring success in that endeavor. It was a failed concept then, and it remains a failure today, yet good Americans get whooped up over the story of Mr. Kyle, the "killingest sniper ever."

Of course, body counts can be inflated, and even had he killed twice his 160 supposedly "confirmed kills" [who ARE these "kill confirmers", anyway?] that would not turn the tide of war. The Islamic State has garnered far more success with their brute, time-intensive Middle Age-style staged killings than Kyle could with his high-tech sniper rifle.

But from this tiny diameter of the sniper scope on celluloid, it's all good. From here, FLOTUS Obama can praise the film and its subject, a stone cold killer who admittedly also shot underage persons. Meanwhile her husband the President holds forth about the injustice of killing young black men in the U.S. by uniformed officers in the line of duty. Decrying the killing of our own underage youths without understanding the reciprocity abroad, the U.S. shows its callow and bigoted nature once again.

RAW the art critic asks: "Should not great art and film take the viewer to a transcendent place and help elevate his soul?" We could say that a great war should do the same, and so should a movie about such a war. Some examples are Sergeant York, Paths of Glory, All Quiet on the Western Front and Flags of Our Fathers.

These movies show men who grew in the execution of their duties, unlike Kyle, who shrinks as a person. Where does American Sniper take us? How are we elevated and what do we take when we leave the theater? In the absence of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) or linkage of Iraq to the the U.S. events of 9-11-01, what makes this movie a work of art versus simple "war porn"?

Invading countries cause the indigenous people to resist the invading forces, so why would we celebrate killing Iraqis at all?

Through a rifle scope at 100 yards you have an 80 feet field of vision. General Petraeus, on the other hand, saw the entire spectrum of the conflict and for him, killing was not the metric of success.

The U.S. took an entire country and turned it into a rifle range sans safety officers. That is not very uplifting.

Calling the Shots

Smokey, this is not 'Nam. This is bowling.
There are rules 
--The Big Lebowski (1998)

The essential American soul is
hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer.
It has never yet melted
--D. H. Lawrence  

What right have you to be morose?
You're rich enough 
--A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens
_______________________

The recent film American Sniper brings Ranger to the idea that the entire Phony War on Terror (PWOT ©)  has been about "chasing a zero" -- a losing proposition if one is aiming to be an effective sniper and make one's shot.

Some background: in Army rile marksmanship training, soldiers learn to "call their shots". Calling one's shots is essential in order to zero one's rifle. Zeroing one's rifle is what allows for the shooter to hit his mark with accuracy and consistency. When shooting at the range, it allows the shooter to achieve a tight shot grouping.

If one does not achieve a zero one fires "scattershot", which implies throwing everything you have downrange and hoping that something will hit the target. It shows a lack of discipline and skill.

Riflemen used to be taught to record and thence learn from every shot. For example, after firing the round and before the primer would send the round on its way, Ranger would note mentally: "seven ring, three o'clock." After practice noting where the trigger breaks and where the shot impacts, the shooter can then put a zero on his rifle's sights. The gun and its shooter are then well-adjusted and in accord. A zero is an adjustment which compensates for any peculiarities of the weapon.

If one fails to zero one's rifle one will be forever "chasing a zero", meaning that the rounds hit the target in an unpredictable fashion -- helter-skelter, like the efforts in the War on Terror. If one cannot call one's shots one cannot hit the center of the target with any surety, and such willy-nilly placement does not make for effective sniping.

Today soldiers use expensive sights with fancy range finders, but if one cannot zero without a scope, one cannot zero with a scope. A scope on one's rifle does not a rifleman make. Only training and experience will produce riflemen, and riflemen grow up to be snipers.

Like a rifleman unable to zero his rifle, the United States is fighting wars that cannot be accurately zeroed. Even if you inadvertently hit something not aimed at, you cannot count that an intentional hit on the range. Likewise, you cannot call the occasional winging of the target a foreign policy on the national level.

If you cannot zero your rifle, you will be an ineffective shooter. Likewise, if you can't zero your foreign policy -- whether because you lack absolute control of your weapons of state or the target keeps moving -- it, too, will be ineffective.

Instead of calling the shots the U.S. has been chasing a zero in its War on Terror.

Do You Love Me?

Those that I fight I do not hate,
Those that I guard I do not love 
--An Irish Airman Forsees His Death, 
W. B. Yeats

Uzi like a metal d*ck in my hand,
Magazine like a big testicle gland 
--Uzi Lover, Fur Q.

In every job that must be done
There is an element of fun 
You find the fun and snap! 
The job's a game 
--A Spoonful of Sugar, 
Mary Poppins
___________________

The film American Sniper based on Chris Kyle's eponymous book did better than it deserved to based upon some fortunate confluences.

In addition to its propitious opening date (the Martin Luther King holiday weekend), the recent murders by Islamist gunmen at the Paris office of the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo added a bump of renewed outrage in the viewing public. Clint Eastwood, the aging film gunman who had softened in his recent cinematic depictions of bad versus good (The Unforgiven, Flags of Our Fathers, Grand Torino) has gotten right back on that black hat /white hat horse with Sniper, and that simplicity is what an angry and confused audience craves.

The pairing of Eastwood and Kyle -- the two outlaws for good -- provides a uniquely American antidote to evil. The pairing is as perfect as Fred Astaire with Ginger Rogers -- a pas de deux where each understands the dance executed from the pull of the trigger to the hit of the target. It is a ballet, and a love song.

However, a conflict sits in the heart of the solution. For every "American" sniper, there is a Syrian, or Iraqi, or an endless array of other nationalities, thus making sniping a zero-sum game. Moreover, the sniping has no forseeable end-point either in time or place, and Kyle can't be everywhere, so what began as a bromidic story of bravado and sacrifice becomes one of ultimate failure.

Moreover, the "Good" Bad Guy archetype in American films (from Zorro to the Outlaw Josey Wales and Dirty Harry Callahan) has been trounced by the level of brute violence demonstrated by the Islamic fighters. In a reversal of Crocodile Dundee's dictate to not bring a knife to a gunfight, now the knife or the scimitar wields more terror than the surgical strike with the grandest destructive materiel.

It seems the late Mr. Kyle was something of a fabulist who claims to have killed 150, and maybe 225 enemy. But even had Mr. Kyle killed twice as much, he did not make the American public safer, for the enemy is like a hydra. Each head cut down generates two more. The murders we commit lead to an animation of the rising generation.

We are like Utah's Kaelin Clay, dropping the ball one yard short of the field goal and calling it a win. The celebration and elation does not make it so.

Kyle apparently took glee in finding his life's profession, having failed at some early life projects. The origin of braggadocio can often be found in failure. The author presents a pure Horatio Alger story, but being a sniper is neither glorious nor especially patriotic, though that seems to be the emotion elicited in the average viewer of the film.

A sniper is a member of a military unit who executes a job, but does not single-handedly win a battle. The military does not bestow medals prodigiously to snipers.

Ranger has known several Army snipers of repute, and they all demonstrate humanity and humility. They do not brag, nor do they express a diminution, disdain or hatred of the enemy (unlike Mr. Kyle.) The qualification for the job is to be calm, steady and reliable. 

Perhaps the reason a film like American Sniper does so well is that tries to compensate for decades of lost American wars. Since World War II, America has not enjoyed a win. So we take the small story and pump it up, telling ourselves that at least we have heart. But in his book, Mr. Kyle reports that he would have liked to have killed everyone he saw carrying a Koran (though he did not), and, “I only wish I had killed more,” of which neither statement demonstrates heart.

Among Ranger's sniper associates, after their lethal engagements they spoke with respect for their former enemies. They do not brag nor do they express hatred for the enemies with whom they were formerly lethally-engaged, in fact, they speak with respect for them. Many have formed personal reconciliations with them. 

Killing was a job to do, and it was neither fun nor enjoyable. Mr. Kyle's stated enjoyment of killing belies the truth behind winning hearts and minds with a military. His attitude is neither fully human, nor is it necessary for the execution of his job. 

Watching the film gives the viewers a false sense of participation in a war we largely ignore. The true believers come as they do to Lourdes, deifying their savior (for few bucks and a couple hours.)

For the faux patriots, "Kyle, save us!" may be 2015's version of  "E.T., come home!" And just as unlikely. 

--by Jim and Lisa

Blood Simple

 Now Jesus don't like killin'
No matter what the reason's for,
And your flag decal won't get you
Into heaven any more
--John Prine 

But what I know about is Texas,
an' down here... you're on your own 
--Blood Simple (1983) 

There are few things more fundamentally
encouraging and stimulating
than seeing someone else die 
--Paths of Glory (1957)
_____________________

Why our current fascination with snipers? 2013 brought us Marcus Luttrell's "Lone Survivor" (which grossed three times its budget), and 2015 brings Clint Eastwood's film based on Chris Kyle's "American Sniper" released earlier this month (which has already outearned "Lone Survivor" in its first month of release.)

Since the inception of the Phony War on Terror (PWOT ©) the SEALs have undertaken a tremendous public relations campaign aimed at propagandizing the U.S. taxpayer into thinking their dollars have been well-spent. For sure, one group of capitalists did benefit handsomely from the propaganda spawned by Luttrell's Lone Survivor, Matt Bissonnette's No Easy Day and Kyle's American Sniper: the video gaming industry. It is unlikely these men considered if or how their missions were relevant to the concept of fighting terror, but their stories are being bled for all they are worth.

Does the impulse to view such films arise from our need to make meaning, or the need to not admit that men's lives are spent often too cavalierly, in the service of projects which reap little if any benefit? Is it an offshoot of the father archetype and the sniper is the Big Daddy who will protect you and keep you safe? Is a tit-for-tat on life's treadmill, an urge to escape the claustrophobic feeling that if they have you in their cross-hairs, at least you have someone on your side whose weapon is trained on them, too? A cosmic Mobius strip of death.

But the recent apotheosis of the sniper belies the fact that no soldier is irreplaceable, nor does any battlefield outcome rest on the scoped rifle of any one participant. Sniping is as old as the U.S. Army. One could even say characters like Robin Hood were snipers, as they were selective marksman. The current sniper movie genre probably began with the 1980's Tom Barringer films featuring modern-day Natty Bumpos -- James Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking Tales adopted for Hollywood.

Whether it is Enemy at the Gates or Saving Private Ryan in a theatre Army scenario, or Luttrells' Lone Survivor in a godforsaken valley somewhere in Afghanistan, Hollywood creates the aura that the sniper creates fear and terror in the enemy, but this is not military thinking.

The most common misconception is that a sniper can, by killing the leaders of an enemy unit, destroy the unit's will to resist. But if this were so, why not call in artillery and fire a "battery five" killing them all?

In fact, the Infantry's mission is clear and simple: to close with and destroy the enemy through fire and maneuver. Nowhere does our mission entail fear or terror. We either shoot, move or communicate, or we don't. The idea of the mission being to create fear or terror is a myth.

American Sniper's director Clint Eastwood is that rare conservative Hollywood bird whose head space and timing seem to be a few degrees off judging by his surreal performance at the 2012 Republican convention. But that does not keep a patriot in his dotage from turning out a good cowboy film, even if it is in the Arabian desert and the punks are hajjis.

Eastwood cut his teeth on "The Outlaw Josey Wales," "Heartbreak Ridge" and "Dirty Harry", finding his groove in romanticizing the unglamorous life of the executioner. Chris Kyle's book does not deviate from this hoo-ah approach. For him, his targets were "savages" and "terrorists" (stating in his book that he would like to kill everyone toting a Koran, a sentiment which Eastwood cannily decided to omit from his film.) Surely Kyle saw himself as an instrument of God's hand, every bit as much as those he shot saw him.

However, as Ranger has discussed before, terrorists do not attack hard targets, an example of which would be the U.S. military. The men Kyle was killing were insurgents, soldiers, militants or guerrillas -- take your pick -- but not terrorists. Of course, since the terrorist menace was the casus belli for the PWOT, the longest U.S. war, it pays to play the term for all it's worth.

Unfortunately, when your film's subject has matters so terribly confused, it is hard to make of him a hero archetype. In Chris Kyle's and Clint Eastwood's world, things are black and white, and do not admit of nuance, and it is he who has the fistful of dollars who calls the tune.

The American Sniper's claim to fame is his 165 confirmed (and possible 225) kills, but how did kills become a metric for achievement? The Vietnam War, despite its hopeful and often inflated body counts, showed that "body count" was a meaningless concept when Saigon fell.

Even had Kyle killed 250 insurgents -- did we win the war? The U.S. is no safer because of the violence men like Kyle visited upon the Iraqi nation, and possibly less so. It could be argued that Islamist State (ISIS/ISIL) is the godchild of the relentless violence wrought by the U.S. military.

Killing without a meaningful military objective is simple murder, whether issuing from Kyle's muzzle of an ISIS executioner's knife. Mr. Eastwood can wrap his movie in a flag and overlay bagpipes playing "Amazing Grace", but the map ain't the territory. 

When Kyle and his actions are apotheosized, it is akin to raising the entire PWOT © to some noble, nation-saving enterprise. Unfortunately, like most of the U.S.'s Counterinsurgency efforts, it was naught more than a bloody game of whack-a-mole. You can put lipstick on a pig ...

Is a film like American Sniper a mass catharsis for the viewing audience eating popcorn and drinking soda? Does it whip up the patriotic fervor that enables a nation to stay in the warfighting game for the long haul? Or is it just another way to shoot two hours of a life being wafted away on the fantasy of some good, clean red-white-and-blue fun?

Hollywood likes to call these fictions "biopics", which is like saying John Tesh's "infotainment" was the news. Viewers leave the theater feeling perhaps proud after the gorefest done in the name of guns, football, hunting, Bibles, beer and cowboys. Eastwood offers up this "heartland bingo", and hopes the cards he has thrown down will constitute a winning hand.

And in the parlance of the Awards that matter, it probably does. But really, it is just another bad movie based upon a juvenile view of life. The director would have done better to have stopped after his film The Unforgiven, for that title explains the plight of the gunfighter best.

America is not about killing people. If it is, then we have morphed into a tawdry version of the Marvel superheroes The Avengers.

--Jim and Lisa

(In an interesting aside, American Sniper is poised to out-earn the previous highest-grossing U.S. release, 2012's The Avengers. The Avengers are a Marvel comic Superhero creation with whom Chris Kyle symbolically associated himself.)