Issac Bailey | We need to do more than just say we support the heroic troops

He had a young boy in his sights and the ability to end his life with a pull of his trigger.

He waited.

He asked others if they could confirm what he thought he was seeing, the young boy and his mother concealing a grenade.

It’s your call, he was told.

He steadied himself and took the shot, sending the young boy into the afterlife.

He took another, sending the boy’s mother on the same journey as she angrily threw the grenade the sniper’s bullet forced from the boy’s hands.

That scene from “American Sniper” won’t leave me.

Bradley Cooper portrayed Navy SEAL Chris Kyle in the movie. I couldn’t tell if his character, at that moment, was proud or saddened by what he had done.

That’s as it should be.

Since the movie’s release, a debate has been raging, with some contending it glorifies war and deifies a man who had written that he enjoyed his job, one that made him maybe America’s most deadly sniper ever, with at least 165 kills.

Then there are those who say Kyle is a hero — full stop — no other discussion necessary, that even questioning that designation is an affront to those we send to the frontlines, that people like Kyle are solely responsible for the freedoms from which we daily benefit.

When will the debate turn to why we put Kyle, and hundreds of thousands of American men and women, in a position that they had to choose between saving fellow soldiers or shooting young Iraqi boys from afar?

The hell that is war required Kyle to pull that trigger. Had he not, maybe dozens of U.S. soldiers would have been killed or wounded.

Though Kyle took the shot, once we committed to invading Iraq, we were just as responsible for that young Iraqi’s death, as well as more than 100,000 others.

We get to deny our culpability by holding steadfast to superficial slogans about supporting our troops while the soldiers have to live with emotional war scars and lost limbs and fallen friends and broken families and the highest military suicide rate in our country’s history.

We do our part by buying a soldier a dinner or Cafè Americano or sitting in empathic silence as his body is removed from an airplane’s storage area, as happened not too long ago at Myrtle Beach International Airport.

Maybe that’s why we are committed to a lie, that Kyle’s actions made us safer.

They didn’t. Our incursion into Iraq upended the Middle East, destabilizing the entire region.

There was no Al Qaeda in Iraq before we went in. ISIS is an offshoot of that branch of Al Qaeda.

What we did in Iraq made neither the U.S. nor the world safer.

And yet, we refuse to learn that lesson, arguing for more war and using more machismo-inspired rhetoric, like that coming from South Carolina’s senior Senator Lindsey Graham, who has declared that we are in the midst of a religious war and need to open up many more war fronts.

And when we find that we can no longer duck the conversation, we fall back on empty platitudes and half-truths, declaring that we get to debate only because an expert sniper in America was forced to pick off poor Iraqis — just as human as any American — trying to survive in a world not of their making.

Soldiers protect our freedoms.

So does the public school teacher who refuses to give up on that hard-to-reach student.

So does the protester who refuses to just do whatever people in authority say.

So does the factory worker who refuses to take shortcuts while building our cars or the single mom working at Wal-mart and juggling multiple responsibilities.

So did a newspaper designer named Amanda Criswell who, largely under a cloak of anonymity, helped create the space used by countless readers of The Sun News to learn more about their community and world, allowing them to sound off, to put pressure on those in positions of power.

We seem comfortable forgetting that — and just shouting “hero” at every person in fatigues walking through Coastal Grand Mall — because that’s the easier road.

We didn’t do enough to avoid wars that have made us less safe and put too much of a burden on a relative handful of Americans to make up for our cowardice.

Kyle and others put their lives on the line because the rest of us weren’t strong enough to keep them out of situations that will haunt them for the rest of their lives.

For that failure, we should forever be haunted, too.

This story was originally published January 26, 2015 at 9:23 AM with the headline "Issac Bailey | We need to do more than just say we support the heroic troops."