American Sniper

When asked to write an entry on the BGSP blog site about the film American Sniper memories of my time in the service, unexpectedly, came back to me.  I recalled the moment I was handed my M1 rifle and how the drill instructor shouted a chant we all had to repeat.  “This is my rifle this is my gun, one is for killing the other for fun” and then the Rifleman’s Creed.

This is my rifle. There are many like it, but this one is mine.

My rifle is my best friend. It is my life. I must master it as I must master my life.

My rifle, without me, is useless. Without my rifle, I am useless. I must fire my rifle true. I must shoot straighter than my enemy who is trying to kill me. I must shoot him before he shoots me. I will…

My rifle and I know that what counts in war are not the rounds we fire, the noise of neither our burst, nor the smoke we make. We know that it is the hits that count. We will hit…

My rifle is human, even as I, because it is my life. Thus, I will learn it as a brother. I will learn its weaknesses, its strength, its parts, its accessories, its sights and its barrel. I will keep my rifle clean and ready, even as I am clean and ready. We will become part of each other. We will…

Before God, I swear this creed. My rifle and I are the defenders of my country. We are the masters of our enemy. We are the saviors of my life.

So be it, until victory is America’s and there is no enemy, but peace!

That creed, a powerful prayer-like chant is one of the first experiences a young marine has and it is followed by many such injunctions and testaments to a new way of life. Yet, no matter how many others follow the rifleman’s creed, the rifle gets embedded into one like nothing else.

In the Marine Corps, no matter what eventual MOS (military occupation specialty) you draw, at heart you are a rifleman.  On the sands of Iwo Jima during the Second World War, a veteran of that invasion told me that his duty as a supply sergeant made no difference as Japanese fighters attacked; he was called to be part of a defensive effort that had him firing his rifle all through the night till the attack was repelled.

In boot camp, once you are issued your rifle it goes everywhere with you and cannot be more than 12 inches from where you sleep.  Sometimes, if you messed up in training, those 12 inches would disappear and it became your bunkmate.

In those arduous months of training as you are being molded into a new person, one whose life is reduced to a part of a whole, you become, not an individual but a warrior who is dedicated to the survival of the man next to him. You are inculcated with a commitment to the unit, never to yield to the interest of any one person except if a marine is wounded and must be brought back into the fold of his comrades.

With the rifle as the central aspect of training marksmanship is held at the highest premium.  Instruction and classes on the use and care of your rifle is intense.  Once on the rifle range the Marine is guided and trained to develop a high degree of accuracy. Hours and days and weeks are spent firing rifles at targets 500 yards in the distance.  Standing, Sitting, and Prone positions make up the scenario while drill instructors that are specialists in weapons hover over the new recruits as they work to attain qualification.

The levels of qualification are, Marksman, Sharpshooter, and Expert, each with a related medal that is pinned on the uniform when qualification is attained. I remember well how on the rifle range and in subsequent times when the rifle is fired that the feelings of that action is something that gets embedded in the body and mind.  The feel of the rifle, its weight, the power it exudes is part of the dance that goes on between it and the shooter.  The touch of the stock against your chin, held there as steady as you can, the exquisitely slow squeeze of the trigger, while holding your breath so there is absolutely no movement that would alter the aim. Then there is the eventual explosion and sound when the hammer slams into the cartridge sending the round through the barrel and out to the target.  The sound of the extraction of the shell and the smell of the gunpowder is an emotional and physical experience that remains a part of one’s memory forever.

In boot camp the person with the best score on the rifle range would be promoted meritoriously to Pfc. Each platoon had its best rifleman as well as its best leader and the most promising Marine.

When the best marksman is identified, frequently he is asked if he wishes to go further to train to be a sniper.  Many turn it down because it is a solitary killing assignment and removes you from the comradeship of the brotherhood that basic training inculcates. But there are those that choose the route of a sniper  despite experiencing disdain from the remaining trainees. Having the shared experience of the commitment to each other, it was generally felt that a person who would take the assignment of being a sniper, would mean giving up that essential quality of being a Marine. He would be alone killing alone without the comfort of the brotherhood.

So it is with such memories that I offer a review of this acclaimed motion picture.

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In the film, the cataclysmic event of 9/11 sees Chris Kyle (Bradley Cooper) motivated like so many others to volunteer to serve his country against the menace of its enemies.  He takes the very arduous route of becoming a Navy Seal .  At the recruiting station he is told how difficult it is to become a Navy Seal and that many quit before qualifying; he responds by saying “I am not a quitter.”

True to that statement, the film takes the viewer to scenes showing the intense hardship that the training brings to the young volunteers. And, although he’s the “old man” in his platoon at 30 years old he qualifies unlike those who walk away because of the intense hardship of the training.

Serving tour after tour in combat, it becomes apparent that his relationship with his wife is deeply strained. She says with anguished emotion “I want my husband back” as she feels the changes taking place in him.

In flashbacks, we see the young Chris – a fledgling Rodeo wrangler, and a marksman at an early age – with his father who teaches him to shoot and hunt and conveys pride in Chris’ ability to hit his mark.

The movie is broadened to show his combat tours and reveals the steady disengagement he has with the “real world,” the world inhabited with family, friends and the relationships that seem ordinary and mundane in comparison to the experience he has when in a theater of war.

As he pulls his trigger time and again taking the life from his enemies he seems to be extinguishing his own humanity.  “Why does he keep doing it?” we ask ourselves?  We know that Moses brought us the Ten Commandments, one of which said, “thou shall not kill” but Chris is excused from that commandment, as is every warrior in combat.  The commandment is negated by the political reasons for that war. Yet in some ingrained way, that dictum is recorded in the synapses of memory and while it is put aside, the need established by combat doesn’t remove the distress in carrying out killing orders.

Kyle uses humor to deny his inner angst and suffers his duty with great cost. So good is he at his assigned task of sniping he becomes a hero to those he protects and because no sniper before him has ever scored so many kills he is call “Legend”. He laughs it off. Throwing food at a buddy in the mess halls he’s ribbed for his new found fame, but his wry smile gives away the enjoyment he has in knowing he has the respect of his comrades. There is one point in the film when Kyle leaves his sniper lair to be among the Marines going house to house to clear out enemy fighters. It is this moment when you understand the tension he must experience, alone with his spotter, killing person after person. The relationship with other warriors is lost to him and he suffers that loss along with the obvious loss of life he masters.

It is interesting to note that throughout the entire film he expresses no anger or rage at the enemy. It is as if he is without negative feelings, absent of anger or destructive feelings. His job is done efficiently and with mechanical accuracy. Human beings that cease to exist as his bullets tear through their bodies are targets and have no emotional quotient to Kyle. They become mere targets seen through his scope.

But there is one scene that reflects an emotional response in him. He sees a young boy, hardly old enough to pick up a rocket launcher fallen to the ground after Kyle killed the insurgent who planned to use it on a Marine combat vehicle. He has the boy in his sights and with finger on the trigger that would kill the him, he whispers to himself “don’t do it”… “don’t aim that weapon on my Marines.” Tears filling his eyes when the boy drops the weapon and runs away he exhales a depth of emotion that shows his humanness that is very powerful to see and not seen in any of the executions that are depicted.

As a veteran of the Marine Corps, I remember vividly the sense of power I felt when armed with weapons I was trained to use to be able to kill.  The arousal of those memories when it comes to this film has me remembering the way the rifle felt against my cheek when I fired a round, as well as the aroma of gun powder and the sound of the explosion of the bullet itself as it left the barrel of my rifle.  Very exciting stuff. But that is nothing in comparison to the arousal when that bullet snuffs out a life.  Being alive in that way cannot compare with the ordinary experiences of the life that our sniper went home to. An experience of emptiness when it is absent is the by-product of such stimulation and back Kyle goes, unable to adjust to a level of experience that seems hollow and unreal to him.

This film reveals the relationship he has with his rifle. He becomes an executioner, and each time he takes a life he creates a new memory and new pathway to repetition.

The neural networks that are created in the experiences described make it understandable that there is a great potential for habituation to happen.

We know that in the film that Kyle continues to volunteer for assignment in the war zone.  He serves four tours of duty putting him in harm’s way, and allowing him to perform his duty as an expert, killing so many of his enemies that he becomes famous and given a name that glorifies his accomplishments.  He is so alive with the experience of his job and the approbation makes the comparison to civilian life seem drab and empty.  It is no wonder that the return to that life time after time destabilizes him leading him to seek to return to the aliveness of his combat duty.

From a psychoanalytic viewpoint we can surmise that the intense gratification of the destructive drive facilitated through the permission to kill he is given is a drug that he seeks more and more. He is not alone as other veterans of combat frequently describe combat as a drug.

It is no wonder that the Sniper becomes a victim of a repetition that has no bounds.  The very expertise supported and rewarded in the military system he resides in, has no brake, no modulation and therefore leaves him a victim in his difficulty to relate to others in an ordinary human relationship in the “World”.  His wife lacks the ability to surmount the difficulties he has and there is a slow accretion of his ability to remain open to the vulnerability and connection that his relationship to her would need.

The counterpoint to the combat he engages in is the apparent love feelings they share.  The tenderness and feeling that he gives to her is so different than the cold calculated duty of taking lives.

We frequently hear the diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) used to describe the trauma of service members that generates stress interfering with the ability to experience satisfaction in relationships.  The Sniper does not suffer this diagnosis and what he has would be more difficult to treat than the P’TSD other veterans suffer.  In PTSD the treatment addresses the trauma and in time reduces the stress related to it and improvement would follow. The Sniper’s disturbance goes way beyond that of PTSD because he cannot be accessed in the same way.  The gratification derived from his experience of killing has altered him to the extent that he cannot be approached in the ways traumatized soldiers can.

From the psychoanalytic developmental viewpoint a child passes through stages in which his or her needs initially are met automatically in utero, and significantly in the first months and years of life.  These needs must be met in relative ways once the baby is postpartum.  One can envision a child, when it needs something, screaming out cries that it is in need.  The caretaker comes and satisfaction is attained and quietude is the result.

As easy as it sounds it doesn’t go that way all the time. The context, the ability of the caretakers, the environment in which the child lives and a myriad of other possibilities in which the scenario plays out makes need gratification a variable thing.  All developmental issues are conditional in unique ways and there is no perfect dyad.  We grow and acquire our abilities and defenses in the field of imperfection.  The psychoanalyst and pediatrician Donald Winnicott and others suggested that we should view the needed experience, not as perfect, but as a “good enough” mothering experience.

It is hard to determine whether “good enough” mothering occurred when working with the grown person because all of the very early exchanges between the growing, developing child go on during times that are lost to consciousness.  They are not remembered at a level that they can be recalled. But for the purpose of this review, the point is made that drive gratification is extreme when its presentation is at a “killing“ level.  The fury you see in the baby’s distress shows what it would do if it could when aroused to such a level of unhappiness and distress.  This is what we are referring to when we say “we are all killers.”

The scene in the film that captures this best is where we see Kyle looking at the crib that his newborn daughter is in as he looks through the nursery window.  She cries and screams in her desire to have some need met and the nurse who is carrying another infant seems not to even hear or notice her distress.  This is the only time that Kyle expresses rage in the movie.   He pounds on the window screaming words that cannot be heard by the moviegoers or the nurse.  He and his child are connected in a rageful experience with no gratification for either.

At her level of development this baby girl can only express her rage in a global, full-body experience.  In doing so she is ridding herself of the tension her body experiences and at the same time laying down memories in her unconscious that will make future experiences reminiscent of this primary one.

In conclusion one other element, a very important one, must be addressed. For this film to be such a blockbuster it has to hit a deep place in the psyches of those who see it. Like any masterpiece, it must resonate at very deep levels and be universal in its appeal.  The American Sniper is both an antiwar and pro-war film, thereby creating potential for discussion and debate and an exploration of emotional signifiers that reside in all of us.

The film poses imponderable questions such as: Can I kill someone? Are we all killers? Can our destructive impulses, as natural as they are, be ignited to allow us to cross a moral line and end someone’s life?  A soldier is given permission to kill at some personalcost, as I indicated, but an ordinary person who has innate passions that can be expressed for good or ill, is challenged at times and at times goes the killing distance.

The curious ending of this film, with Kyle playfully pointing his gun at his wife, wryly telling her to drop her pants brings in the universality of our dual drives.  Libidinal and destructive forces that guide our living experience are vividly portrayed in that moment. Sex binds us and destructive impulses split us apart.

When Kyle leaves for the firing range with a traumatized Marine veteran, the gaze of his wife on the face of the man that will kill her husband brings us to recognize the gaze of the Mother.  The viewer knows that she apprehends the fatality that will follow.

This ending poignantly celebrates the difference between men and women.  The armed services do not have women snipers. They are not expected to take up arms in that way.

When the towers fell on 9/11 men, women and children died. Outrage and horror saw no gender difference, yet wives and mothers suffered the departure of their husbands and sons.  Their sorrowful gaze was likely to be the last thing seen by their men when they went off to that war.

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Dr. Theodore Laquercia, Ph.D., Cert. Psya. Is a psychoanalyst in New York and Boston. He is Professor Emeritus at the Boston Graduate School of Psychoanalysis and a faculty member at the Center for Modern Psychoanalytic Studies in New York. In the early 1980s Dr. Laquercia was President of the Boston Center for Modern Psychoanalytic Studies, BGSP’s predecessor, and has served on the board of BGSP and in various other administrative positions at the school. He is currently the President of the Society of Modern Psychoanalysts. Prior to becoming a psychoanalyst, Dr. Laquercia served in the Marines and was an educator and educational administrator.