It's not, of course, that “the troops” don’t deserve our admiration; it is that they deserve much more than these weak displays of convenient gratitude. A hero-happy treatment of the military—damning, you could say, with quaint praise—does no favors to our service members (or to the people, and the country, they serve). Not only because the world isn't a Toby Keith song, but because the easy, empty logic of “supporting the troops” gives civilians leave to do a disservice to the people we reflexively thank for their service: It allows us to be ignorant of what that service entails in the first place. We live in a world newly obsessed with the realities of otherness—headlines prefixed with “What It’s Like to Be,” questions asked and answered on Quora, Reddit’s “Ask Me Anything”—yet it rarely occurs to us to ask what it’s like, what it’s really like, to be a soldier.

As Fallows summed it up: "We love the troops, but we'd rather not think about them."

The best thing you can say about American Sniper, which enters into wide release today after an official, Oscar-contention-timed premiere in December and a long period of controversy and critical praise, is that it is, above all, complex. Painfully, productively complex. It revels in its own ambiguities, ethical and otherwise—and this, in a world of bumper-sticker morality and patriotic pablum, is itself a significant achievement.

Based on the book American Sniper: The Autobiography of the Most Lethal Sniper in U.S. Military History, the movie is simple in its form: It's a character study of a single, and singular, soldier. It tells the story of Chris Kyle—played, subtly and powerfully, by Bradley Cooper—and his path to record-breaking lethality: a childhood spent as (as Kyle put it in the book) a “regular redneck,” a young adulthood spent on the rodeo circuit. The embassy bombings of 1998— "look what they did to us," Cooper’s Kyle tells his brother, as the footage of the wreckage plays on TV—led him to enlist as a Navy SEAL, quickly distinguishing himself for his prowess with a sniper rifle.

Then came 9/11. Kyle deployed. He proved to be exceptionally skilled at the job he'd signed up for. If you were to tally it up—and Kyle became famous because many people have—Kyle officially killed 160 people over his four tours of duty in Iraq. If you include probable kills, the number jumps to 225.

If you're aiming to create a film that explores the wrenching moral complexities of war, it’s hard to imagine a better character to focus on than a sniper. A sniper, after all—an almost mythical union of man and gun, a modern-day mixture of centaur and centurion—is the closest the military has come to creating a human killing machine. The sniper may, like other soldiers, be subject to the cold anonymities of bombs and bullets. But his mission is specialized, and personalized. He finds his target, moving and warm. He aims. He “eliminates” and “neutralizes” and every other euphemism we use to separate the logic of war from the logic of murder. The result, though, is the same: The sniper ends lives. And through that work—as Kyle in his book, and Clint Eastwood in his film, repeatedly emphasize—he saves lives, too.