My Point of View by Jennifer Vogt-Erickson

In the film “American Sniper,” Chris Kyle’s father tells him there are three kinds of people: sheep, wolves and sheepdogs.

The movie, borrowing this analogy from David Grossman’s book “On Combat,” defined sheepdogs by their capacity to use violence to protect fellow citizens, but that’s not the only way to perform this important role.

Every day, firefighters, police, rescue workers, aid workers, doctors, nurses and others put themselves in harm’s way for public safety and health. With the exception of police, they usually don’t carry arms.

The greatest sheepdogs, in fact, aren’t recognized for acts of violence at all. They are celebrated for their scientific achievements, often closely related to fights against invisible enemies and hunger.

Louis Pasteur, who proved the germ theory of disease in the mid-1800s in France, is credited with developing both vaccinations and pasteurization. These advancements have saved hundreds of millions of lives and counting.

Robert Lewisohn, an immigrant from Germany, discovered how to store blood without coagulation for blood transfusions in the early 1900s. This development has also saved over 100 million lives.

Norman Borlaug, father of the Green Revolution, was raised in Iowa and educated at the University of Minnesota. He has saved hundreds of millions of lives in developing countries, especially those of children, through improved nutrition as a result of his work with plant genetics and yields.

Speaking of Hawkeyes, a bow should also go to Borlaug’s fellow Iowan Claire Patterson, a geochemist. In the process of being the first to date Earth’s age at 4.5 billion years (a calculation which still stands), Patterson accidentally discovered we were poisoning our environment and our bodies with lead. Due to his tireless lobbying efforts to pull lead from products such as paint and gasoline, our children have a better quality of life.

Besides overstating the role of violence in protecting people, the book “American Sniper” also focuses too simplistically on good versus evil.

Of course, there will never be a sniper book or movie called “Fifty Shades of Grey.” An effective sniper pretty much has to dichotomize the world into good and evil because ambiguity makes people pause on the trigger. Kyle saw Americans and their allies as “good guys,” and the Iraqi insurgents as “bad guys” or “savages.”

I haven’t seen the movie yet, but I’ve read Kyle’s book. Kyle said the insurgents wanted to kill him because he was an American. Did they hate the Polish troops he patrolled with because they were Poles? The British troops because they were Brits?

It’s more likely the insurgents targeted the coalition forces because they viewed them as invaders. If American men and women were placed in similar circumstances on their own soil, it would likely motivate some of them to take up arms, and many would consider their rebellious actions heroic. Furthermore, we would probably call foreign snipers who shoot Americans outside their doorsteps barbarians, would we not? This thought experiment casts Kyle’s moral absolutism into doubt.

It’s even murkier because Iraq was, after all justifications failed to stick, a war of choice. Unfortunately for Kyle, who sincerely wanted “payback” for the 9/11 attacks and believed that he got it, the Iraq War was far wide of the mark in striking the actual culprits. He was a highly-trained and loyal sheepdog whom the “game-players” (his word for politicians) used foolishly.

Another sheepdog who recently gained national attention is Kayla Mueller, an American aid worker who helped impoverished people in a number of countries in her short life, most recently working with children on the Turkish border who are refugees of Syria’s civil war.

Both Mueller and Kyle died tragically due to consequences of the Iraq war. A fellow Iraq veteran murdered Kyle and his friend in 2013 while in the grip of a psychotic episode and is currently standing trial. Officials believe Mueller died earlier this month while being held captive by ISIS, a terrorist group which sprang out of the insurgency in Iraq and gained strength after U.S. troops withdrew.

Mueller and Kyle have earned respect for their courageous service, but Mueller has inspired goodwill among broader groups of people. While Mueller and Kyle both worked selflessly to make the world a safer place, Mueller succeeded where Kyle, despite his record number of confirmed kills, could not. Kyle is a more divisive figure, inadvertently motivating the same insurgency he was fighting. Mueller is a more bridging figure between Christians and Muslims, Americans and our neighbors around the globe.

If we teach our children about sheepdogs, we should also tell them this: Science in service to humanity has saved vastly more lives than violence. Compassion and understanding are more powerful tools than a .300 Winchester Magnum.

Albert Lea resident Jennifer Vogt-Erickson is a member of the Freeborn County DFL Party.