Snipers and War

Karen Spears Zacharias, our friend:

(CNN)“American Sniper” stormed the box office this past weekend with $105 million in ticket sales. Not since the Rambo movies have so many farmers and ranch hands buddy-upped to the popcorn counter. As much as I adore Bradley Cooper, I won’t be seeing the movie. I can’t see it.

And my reluctance to see it has nothing to do with Michael Moore’s flippant assertion that snipers are cowards (although he said he wasn’t talking about the movie). I was always taught that cowards are those who refuse to serve their country.

Friends who’ve seen the movie say I’m missing out. They say it is an accurate portrayal of what happens in war. One friend, who declares herself as a pacifist, urged me to go. “Far from glorifying war, it made war look brutal, and a means of destroying people for life,” she said.

What I keep wondering is why all these moviegoers weren’t lining up to volunteer for war.

Before his ironic death, Chris Kyle, on whom the movie is based, denounced Hollywood’s version of war. “Hollywood fantasizes about it and makes it look good. It — war sucks,” he told Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly in 2012.

Here is Karen’s dense line:

When you have experienced firsthand the multitude of ways war wreaks havoc on families, you have little tolerance for the mythmaking that war always seems to invoke.