26 January, 2015

What ‘American Sniper’ Gets Right - The Daily Beast

What ‘American Sniper’ Gets Right - The Daily Beast:

People on the left go back and forth with those on the right about
the movie’s merits. Is it pro-war? Is it anti-war? And while a platoon
of professional essayists, film aficionados and all around ‘I’m
smarter-than-you’ folks attack one another’s opinions, there seem to be a
couple items that have been forgotten along the side of the long road
we’ve traveled for 15 years—15 years!—in Iraq and Afghanistan.



The
most obvious is the lack of attention paid to the fact that only about
one percent of our population has borne the weight of war. Then there
are the families left behind while those fighting are deployed multiple
times to both theaters—Iraq and Afghanistan—breaking the military and
too often breaking those who sit state-side, worrying, waiting, while
99% of everyone around them dances through the day without any real
prospect of danger or death knocking on their door.