American Sniper Feeds America's Hero Complex, and It Isn't the Truth About War

Found on Alternet on Saturday, 27 December 2014
Browse Various

The stories I came back with don’t really look like anything in the new breed of Hollywood war films, where central truths about war have all but vanished, even though they’re mostly based on real life.

Lone Survivor, the highest grossing war film of this era, portrays Navy Seals so adept at killing the Taliban that it seems their only weakness is mercy on goat-herders. In Zero Dark Thirty and Captain Phillips, Seal teams emerge only at the climax, with the long tail of logistical support from conventional aviation, infantry and intelligence units obscured by the shadow of the elite.

For every film or bestseller or PlayStation blockbuster about that tiny minority of commandos, the public misses another shot at the larger experience of soldiering in Iraq and Afghanistan. People under 40 no longer ask what war is like; they ask if it’s like Call of Duty.

Simply put, it's propaganda. People would not like movies which end like they do for most of those involved: with a trauma or maybe even with lost limbs; or you don't come back at all. Picturing the war like it really is would wipe those heroes off the screen and replace them with pain, agony and war crimes on both sides; and by doing that, the support for going to war would crumble and be replaced with a demand for peaceful solutions; something that an entire industry delivering the tools does not want.