For Patrick Morrison and Lynn Kilroy, the movie “American Sniper” wasn’t escapist entertainment, it was a pretty good depiction of a life they know well.
Morrison, 49, is a retired Green Beret lieutenant colonel who did four tours in Iraq and one in Afghanistan.
Kilroy, 44, is the spouse who dealt with an oft-absent partner, a distance that doesn’t close merely by proximity.
More than most people, the Tampa couple can relate to the issues raised in the Clint Eastwood-directed movie. “American Sniper” tells the story of Chris Kyle from the time he was a young boy in Texas through a stint as a traveling rodeo rider to becoming a Navy SEAL, where thanks to four tours in some of Iraq’s most brutal and target-rich environments, he became the military’s most lethal sniper. But the movie also shows the harsh toll multiple deployments and constant death and destruction can have on those who serve and those who are left behind to hold together a family never sure they will see their loved one again. It offers a stark view of how hard it is to truly come back home.
And it shows Kyle’s ultimate demise on Feb. 2, 2013, at the hands of a fellow veteran he was trying to help.
“They did an excellent job,” says Morrison moments after the credits came up on the big screen at the Westshore AMC, where the movie was screening in the area for the first time last week.
Morrison says Eastwood and the actors as accurately as possible in a Hollywood movie captured both life on the battlefield and back home, where the aftermath of seeing things that most people don’t and few people want to leaves those who experience it unable to reconnect.
“The movie was quite good at showing the impact of multiple special operations deployments since 9/11,” says Morrison, who retired last February after 23 years. “This lifestyle has a significant toll on the individual and the family. The movie depicts this in the right way. I can relate to this having been in Iraq during the same deployments in the same Special Operation Task Force although in different areas.”
Morrison says that what really hit home was the tempo of operations shown in the movie.
“What really resonated was the amount of exposure that you get when you are deployed with a special operations task force,” says Morrison. “You are trying to get out the door every night as many bad guys as you can, trying to beat the previous tour. It is in a bizarre way a competition to see how many operations you can do, how many bad guys you can roll up, doing it every night,”
Of the many scenes that touched a nerve, Morrison recalls one in particular, in which Bradley Cooper, who plays Kyle, has returned from deployment, but instead of being home, is sitting in a bar.
“I remember coming back, I got on a military aircraft, we did an operation the night before,” says Morrison. “Then basically did a change of command, got on the plane and in hours I was in Kuwait. Then I walked over to the commercial terminal, got a plane home. There was no reintegration, no decompression. Nothing. That scene resonated, because hey, you need to take a minute. You needed to take a break before you walk in the door at home.”
For most of his tours, Morrison was single. But from both personal experience and from those of his fellow commandos, Morrison knows that war can take a toll on marriage.
“Married guys had a lot of trouble when they come home,” he says. “They are thrust into home life kids and everything. You just didn’t have any time to adjust. Then you have a dynamic where, the spouse is at home, been doing all the work while he was gone, now he was home. She expected him to start helping out,”
It’s a dynamic, says Morrison, that led Bill McRaven to stand up the Preservation of the Force and Family effort when he commanded U.S. Special Operations Command at MacDill Air Force Base.
Aside from the pace of combat, the battle scenes realistically depicted the brutality and horror of urban warfare.
One scene in particular, involving an insurgent leader, a young child and a power drill brought back some dark memories, says Morrison.
“I witnessed scenes of drilling people, hanging guys up to the roof, that kind of stuff,” says Morrison. “It was horrible. Acid is another one they used, The hard part for us was seeing what a human being can do to another human being. It is brutal.”
Kilroy says she can’t even imagine what takes place in combat. But she does know what takes place after.
She and Morrison met after his 2007 tour and married in 2012. They were together for two tours, one in Iraq and one in Afghanistan.
“They did a nice job of capturing how the wife felt whenever she received phone calls,” says Kilroy, a working mother who owns Kilroy Communications, a PR agency that among other clients reps Locale, the new upscale gourmet market in St. Petersburg.
Kilroy says she can relate to the way Taya Kyle, played by Sienna Miller, reacted.
“Whenever she received phone calls, she would always answer,” says Kilroy. “That was the same way for me when Patrick was deployed. The phone was attached to my hip.”
The content of those phone conversations between the screen couple were also familiar moments, says Kilroy.
“The feeling of him being so far away,” says Kilroy. “I would get two sentences on his end. He couldn’t tell me anything. I didn’t know where he was calling from.”
Kilroy says she never experienced hearing combat in the background, but she did have several conversations with her husband that ended abruptly.
“I didn’t hear action going on in the background,” she says, “but I did regularly hear, ‘gotta go.’” That was it. As his wife I was glad to hear from him, but it was always unsettled.”
Also unsettling, says Kilroy, was watching her husband struggle with life back home, where few people know war and fewer know the life of a commando.
“The other thing they did a really good job of, was when Chris Kyle came home, he tried to integrate into family life. It was very similar to what I experienced watching Patrick come back in and going to Starbucks and listening to other people complain about the temperature of coffee,”
After months of hell, hearing people whine “really ticked him off,” says Kilroy. “I would sort of say, “that’s just people, take a deep breath.’ But from his perspective, he had guys over there dying, so how hot your coffee is doesn’t matter. Nobody is shooting at you.”
Then there were times, Kilroy says, that Morrison, like Kyle, was distant and unable to connect at home. While that mostly faded over time, the totality of those situations, says Kilroy, highlight the almost unbroachable schism between those who know combat and those who do not.
“It’s hard for me to understand why it was so hard for him,” she says. “That is the difference of a wife not fully knowing or fully getting it. You can’t really get it unless you have been there, done that. Unless you are one of those guys or gals. You just have to be supportive.”
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Last week’s hijacking of U.S. Central Command’s Twitter and YouTube sites by a group called the CyberCaliphate, which claims allegiance to the Sunni insurgent group Islamic State, may or may not have been a jihadi psychological operation.
But at the very least, it serves as a reminder of the importance of cyber security (even if that means nothing more than better passwords).
Against that backdrop, the Tampa-based National Center for Cyber Studies is offering full-tuition scholarships for center courses at both the undergraduate and graduate level to qualified Tampa-area veterans who want to enroll in the online Cyber Foundations pilot program.
Though coincidental to the hack, the program builds on the Information Security and Information Security Management Certificate Programs already in place at Saint Leo University, says Michael F. Shapiro, Executive Director of the National Cyber Partnership, the parent organization of the National Center for Cyber Studies. The new scholarship covers the center’s courses, he says. Qualified veterans can use Veterans Administration benefits and other financial aid sources towards the Saint Leo University portion of the program.
The program is scheduled to begin March 2, says Shapiro. Registration deadline is Feb. 25. For more information, go to www.national-cyber.org.
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The Pentagon announced no new deaths last week in its ongoing operations in the Centcom region.
There have been three U.S. troop deaths in support of Operation Inherent Resolve and none in support of Operation Freedom’s Sentinel.