week4- American Sniper. Chris Kyle

American Sniper: 10 burning questions

Alice Vincent

19 February 2015 • 8:08am

Was Mustafa really an Olympian? Did The Butcher use a drill? How good a shot was Chris Kyle? Your American Sniper questions answered

1. Was Chris Kyle really called ‘Legend’?

Yes. As the film shows, Kyle earned the nickname after killing a number of people as a sniper. But in his memoir, American Sniper: The Autobiography of the Most Lethal Sniper in US Military History, Kyle explains that there was a particular incident which earned him the moniker: when he shot down the beachballs insurgents were clinging to to help them swim across a river in Fallujah.

2. Did he really kill 250 people?

Kyle earned his title of America’s most deadly sniper because of a recorded 160 confirmed kills from 255 probable kills. But there’s a slight discrepancy over who was keeping track of these kills anyway. A spokesman for the American Army, Wayne V Hall, told NBC news that they don’t “keep any official, or unofficial, record of confirmed kills.” This was corroborated by Ken McGraw, a spokesman for the US Special Operations Command, who said: “If anything, we shy away from reporting numbers like that. It's so difficult to prove. And what does it mean?”

But Kyle’s co-author, Jim DeFelice, counters that he had to report each kill to his commanders. Furthermore, Kyle told Time magazine that the snipers had to “fill out an assessment of what happened throughout the day. The time, the place, the caliber used, the distance he was, what exactly he was doin', where he was standin', what he was wearin'. It's all in the detail.” Plus he “personally kept track.”

As for the difference between 160 confirmed kills and 255 probable kills, the former are those which a witness has verified is dead.

3. Was a $180,000 bounty really placed on Kyle’s head?

Not quite. When Kyle was interviewed on American chat show Conan he explains that a bounty starts at about $20,000 and can reach as high as $80,000, so one worth $180,000 is rather unlikely. Furthermore, the insurgents put a bounty on any American sniper’s head, not just his. Interestingly, though, he was given a nickname by the insurgents that doesn’t crop up in the film: al-Shaitan Ramadi - which translates as ‘the Devil of Ramadi’’

4. Did Kyle kill Mustafa?

No. This was one of the most fictionalised parts of the film. Mustafa, or the rather ruder Kaiser F—in' Söze in American Sniper, was the name given to an enemy sniper who had reportedly competed in the Olympics as a marksman for Syria. The standoff between Mustafa and Kyle is one of the major events in the film, which results in the death of Kyle’s comrade Ryan ‘Biggles’ Job (Jake McDormand) and Marc Lee (Luke Grimes). However, in the book, Kyle doesn’t even encounter Mustafa, let alone kill him. There’s simply one reference: “an Olympics marksman who was using his skills against Americans and Iraqi police and soldier.” Lee was hit by enemy fire and died, as shown in the film, but Job survived his reconstruction operation after being blinded by Mustafa’s shot. He did die from surgery, but not until years later.

Furthermore, it looks like Mustafa was never an Olympic athlete - not the Syrian one, anyway. According to Quora user Nicholas Wolaver, only one of Syria’s few Olympic shooters from the past 30 years was a target rifle shooter and he was too old to fight. The screenwriter, Jason Hall, admitted to Time Magazine that the connection was made for dramatic effect.

5. Did The Butcher really use a drill to kill and torture his victims?

Depressingly, yes. The Butcher, the nickname given to Abu Deraa, an Iraqi Shia warlord who was known for his gory methods. A Telegraph story from November 2006 reads: “Deraa's trademark method of killing is a drill through the skull rather than a sword to the neck, but his work rate is just as prolific as the former al-Qaeda leader's and shows the same diabolical artistry.”

6. Did Kyle kill a child?

No. The film adaptation of his memoirs appears to have combined two separate incidents. In the book, Kyle’s first kill - the only time he killed someone who wasn’t a male combatant - was a woman who came out of a house with her child, but approaches the convoy alone to set off a grenade. On a separate occasion, Kyle encountered a child who was sent to pick up a rocket launcher in the street. However, he didn’t fire. He writes in the book: “ I wasn't going to kill a kid, innocent or not. I'd have to wait until the savage who put him up to it showed himself on the street.” In the film, not only is the child killed, but the woman leaves him for dead to throw a grenade.

7. Did Kyle’s father invent the ‘sheep, sheepdogs and wolves’ speech?

No. The motivational dinner table chat in which Kyle’s father tells him “there are three types of people in the world: wolves, sheep and sheepdogs” has a far longer history - although not in Kyle’s memoir. As Slate point out, Hall made up the scene, but the analogy comes from Lieutenant Colonel David Grossman’s 2004 book On Combat. Grossman claims he borrowed it from an “old war veteran”, and uses the phrase in relation to the 9/11 attacks and the Iraq war. It’s since been picked up by gun rights groups, military and police circles.

8. Was Kyle angered by his comrade Mark Lee’s disillusionment over war?

No. In the film, Kyle claims his best friend and fellow sniper Mark Lee caused his own death after he hears Lee express his disillusionment with war in a letter he sent his mother before he died. It causes an argument between Kyle and his wife Tyra. But this is a complete fabrication: Kyle actually speaks highly of Lee’s letter in his book.

9. Was Kyle really as big as Bradley Cooper?

Certainly. In Cooper’s words, the 16.5 stone sniper was “wasn’t ripped. He wasn’t sinewy. He was just a bear.” The quadruple-Oscar nominated actor told the Navy Times he was consuming 6,000 calories and working out for five hours a day to pack on two stone of pure muscle. It wasn’t, his trainer Jason Walsh told Men’s Health, always easy: “We had to force-feed him. His body just absorbed everything I threw at it.”

10. Why is that Metallica flag there?

Eagle-eyed cinemagoers may have noticed that a Metallica flag made its way over to Iraq too. This is because Kyle was a massive fan of the rock band.

He was so much of a fan, in fact, that he included them on his workout playlist, which Cooper listened to for motivation during his own training for the film.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/film/american-sniper/facts/

Structure of the Lead :

WHO-Chris Kyle

WHEN-not given

WHAT-10 questions

WHY- not given

WHERE- not given

HOW- not given

Keywords :

1.memoir : 回憶錄.自傳

2. moniker : 綽號

3. discrepancy : 差異

4. caliber : 口徑.直徑

5. verify : 證實

6. standoff : 僵持

7. gory : 殘酷的

8. diabolical : 殘忍的

9. convoy : 護衛

10. grenade : 手榴彈

11. veteran : 老兵

12.disillusionment : 醒悟

13. fabrication : 虛構

14. sinewy : 肌肉發達的