Clint Eastwood’s American Sniper opens with a short but intense scene that introduces us to the movie’s eponymous hero. Chris Kyle spots a woman and young child exit a residential building from his sniper’s perch during a military operation in Iraq. He soon notices that the woman is holding something, which turns out to be an anti-tank grenade. She gives the grenade to the child, who then runs towards the tank Chris is there to protect. He sets his sight on the child, and fires.

Beginning the movie in this way immediately raises profound moral questions about the nature of Kyle’s work as a sniper for the US armed forces. The killing of a child provokes an especially powerful emotional response from the film’s audience, which leaves us with ambivalent feelings towards its protagonist. At the same time, Eastwood and screenwriter Jason Hall have taken certain liberties with the true story behind American Sniper. The movie’s famous grenade scene wasn’t all it appears to be in the screen version of the story.

Unlike American Sniper, The Real Chris Kyle Did Not Shoot A Child

Kyle SH๏τ A Woman Carrying An Anti-Tank Grenade, But A Child Wasn’t With Her

Although Bradley Cooper’s performance in American Sniper has been praised for its accuracy by military experts, there are specific details of the movie’s opening scene that are fictionalized. Chris Kyle really did take out an Iraqi civilian running towards an American tank with his sniper rifle, as the scene depicts, but that civilian wasn’t a child. The true-story version of what happened is otherwise very similar, only the woman concealing the grenade was alone, and she was the only one that Kyle sH๏τ (via The Guardian).

In addition, the woman Kyle sH๏τ wasn’t holding an RKG-3 anti-tank grenade made in Russia, as American Sniper depicts. According to Kyle’s 2013 autobiography American Sniper: The Autobiography of the Most Lethal Sniper in U.S. Military History, on which Eastwood’s movie is based, she was actually carrying a Chinese anti-tank grenade. The grenade was likely a “Type 50”, a copy of the Soviet RKG-3 which was used in the Vietnam War. In his book, Kyle explained that the shooting of this woman was the only time he ever killed someone who wasn’t a male soldier.

How American Sniper’s Grenade Scene Change Affects The Movie

It Makes Us Less Comfortable With Chris Kyle’s Actions As An Onscreen Killer

The grenade scene at the start of American Sniper is the lens through which we view the rest of the movie, complicating our perception of Chris Kyle from the off. It was clearly a conscious decision of the filmmakers behind the movie to have Kyle kill an Iraqi child – something he didn’t do in real life – in his role as a sniper for the US Navy SEALs, and juxtapose this act with his killing of a deer as a child. This juxtaposition comes full circle at the end of American Sniper, when Kyle shows his son how to hunt with a rifle.

In this way, the movie first presents Kyle as a shooter taking the life of defenseless and innocent beings, in the form of a small child and a wild animal, rather than another adult combatant in the Iraq War. By doing so, it renders the act of killing as a moral conundrum about which it’s necessary to feel ambivalent.

Most of us have become desensitized to people being killed in films, as long as the death fits into a larger narrative schema that makes it palatable for us. However, the fictional killing of a child in American Sniper intentionally shakes us out of this habitual acceptance of death on camera, by showing us the death of someone who’s not supposed to die at the hands of a hero. The movie is telling us that the taking of another life should not be taken lightly, as evidenced by Kyle’s emotional reaction to this killsH๏τ later in the story.