Rhetoric Race and Religion
Before his death in a 2012 shooting incident, Chris Kyle was famous in the United States for having personally killed 255 Iraqis during his time as a sniper deployed there. His number of recorded “kills” made him the most lethal sniper in US military history. Upon returning home, his memoir American Sniper would go on to sell more than a million copies and become a New York Times bestseller. Kyle’s popularity was enough that acclaimed director Steven Spielberg is producing a movie based on his life.
American Sniper begins with a scene describing Kyle killing an Iraqi woman whom he believed was about to attack US forces with a grenade – a woman he never knew but whom he described as having a “twisted soul” and who would be only the first of hundreds of Iraqis whom Kyle would go on to kill during his time in the country. In addition to his military prowess, Kyle was famously dismissive of criticisms of his actions as a Navy SEAL and was remarkably self-assured about the morality of his deeds:
“People ask me all the time, ‘How many people have you killed?’… The number is not important to me. I only wish I had killed more. Not for bragging rights, but because I believe the world is a better place without savages out there taking American lives.”
While he was fiercely protective of his fellow soldiers, his disdain for the Iraqis living under occupation was palpable. About them he would write in his book: “I couldn’t give a flying f*** about the Iraqis. I hate the damn savages.”
Kyle’s comments about his actions in Iraq may be viewed by some as remarkably unreflective or simply repulsive, however, they are, in many ways, the natural by-product of the dehumanizing hatred and anger that accompanies war. It is difficult to judge the effects of moral injury upon individuals who have lived for prolonged periods in an environment of daily carnage and bloodshed – a fact to which the recent video of a Syrian rebel cannibalising a government soldier attests – and there is a good argument that the ultimate outrage over the atrocities committed in Iraq should lie with the politicians and military officials who helped engineer them.
A recent New Yorker profile, however, revealed some details about Kyle that potentially make him more than a case study in the morally debasing nature of armed conflict. Of particular interest is the religious fervour which helped guide his actions in Iraq: “Like many soldiers, Kyle was deeply religious and saw the Iraq War through that prism. He tattooed one of his arms with a red crusader’s cross, wanting ‘everyone to know I was a Christian’.”
Kyle was not alone in seeing the Iraq War through such a religious prism. Indeed, his beliefs seem to place him within a disturbing collection of high-profile US political and defense figures guided in their militarism not by rational motives but by their own openly professed fundamentalism.
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