“Everyone likes Rambo because he can do anything, he’s a badass, but he’s a fictional character,” Coughlin explained. “When you can put a face to a job that creates the kind of havoc that Rambo could, and it’s real, people will gravitate to that.”

Un-American sniper

Ironically, it’s Kyle’s complicated record that exposes the facile nature of the hero sniper myth maintained by the American public. Even beyond his medal inflation, Kyle’s autobiographical bluster and swagger seems antithetical to the ethos captured by Hathcock. While it’s true that U.S. special operators are increasingly discussing their experiences in a modest departure from the “quiet professional” ethos (and that’s not necessarily a bad thing), Kyle profited off a hard-charging persona based on outright, discernable lies and meticulously crafted exaggerations to satiate the two-dimensional patriotism of American civilians.

But in some ways, the embrace of the sniper among civilians reflects the domestic experience of American war abroad experienced through the sanitizing filter of the mass media: death delivered cleanly and precisely from an impersonal distance, not unlike the drone strikes and clandestine special operations raids that currently define the tactical landscape of the Global War on Terror. Rather than confront the human costs of war — the bloodshed and injuries, both physical and moral, endured daily — the civilian world valorizes the super soldier, hooked on the gritty details of SEAL Team 6 missions or the cool, collected sniper dispatching terrorists from a safe distance.

Indeed, the moral and psychological trauma of war may actually be more pronounced among the sniper. “If you’re an infantryman, you’re spraying and praying, and maybe you can see the shadow of the enemy you’re actually shooting at,” Coughlin said. “But when we shoot, we can see the expression on our enemy’s face. It’s very personal for us. There isn’t a person I’ve hit who I don’t have a physical memory of. Some people have a music playlist in their brain, a memory that’s triggered when someone puts on a song … I have a kill playlist in my brain.”

This is the dark side of the sniper’s life lost in America’s intense valorization of Kyle’s: In imagining the sniper as a perfect instrument of war, we see them only as singular avatars of the U.S. military’s lethality rather than ordinary men tasked with doing a gruesome job. For some veterans, the cult of the American sniper is an extension of the SOF hero-worship that glosses over the everyday experiences of war, the grime and sweat and blood that captures the reality of a firefight, have become “background noise,” as Washington Post reporter and Iraq War veteran Alex Horton put it in 2014. “We rarely see intel soldiers piecing together insurgent networks, or low-ranking officers meting out local grievances in rural Afghanistan,” he wrote. “People under 40 no longer ask what war is like; they ask if it’s like Call of Duty.”

Iraq made Chris Kyle a legendary marksman, sure, but it did not make him the inviolable, unimpeachable, uncontestable super soldier — America did. And its snipers like Coughlin who fully understand that the role of the sniper isn’t some patriotic calling — it’s just another set of orders.

“There’s a dark side to all war, but it’s a little bit darker on the sniper’s side of things,” says Coughlin. “I know what I did. I am 100% sure where every bullet I fired ever went. On the flip side, I know that I never inflicted collateral damage, but that comes with a heavy price. That stuff won’t leave your head, ever. Stuff you can’t ever forget about.”

Jared Keller is a senior editor at Task & Purpose and contributing editor at Pacific Standard. Follow Jared Keller on Twitter @JaredBKeller.

This article originally appeared at Task & Purpose. Follow Task & Purpose on Twitter.

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