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The movie American Sniper is a surprise box-office hit, but it has also become a lightning rod. Some critics say the film, based on the life of the late Navy SEAL Chris Kyle, glorifies war. Others say it doesn't accurately portray the real Kyle. Still others say the movie — and the reactions to it — are an example of the deep disconnect between civilians and the military.

The vitriol has been ugly, the story complicated. There is no one truth. But when it comes to war, the most credible sources are often people who've experienced it firsthand.

Former Marine Jacob Schick is a warrior relations specialist with the Brain Performance Institute in Dallas. He has a small part in the movie as one of the veterans Kyle mentors. When Schick was in Iraq in 2004, the Humvee he was riding in hit a tank mine. "It blew right underneath me and then blew me through the top of the Humvee," he recalls. "Their guesstimation is 30 feet, and [I] stuck the landing on my head."

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Former Marine Jacob Schick (at right) has a small part in American Sniper as one of the veterans mentored by Chris Kyle Keith Bernstein/Warner Bros. hide caption

itoggle caption Keith Bernstein/Warner Bros.

Former Marine Jacob Schick (at right) has a small part in American Sniper as one of the veterans mentored by Chris Kyle

Keith Bernstein/Warner Bros.

Schick lost part of his hand, part of his arm and part of his leg. But he says his most debilitating issues were post-traumatic stress and traumatic brain injury. "Physical pain lets you know you're alive; mental pain will test your will to stay that way," he says.

And that is one reason Schick believes the movie American Sniper is important. He says it shows the effect combat has on someone who lives through it — in this case, Chris Kyle. Kyle did four tours in Iraq, fighting in some of the war's bloodiest battles.

In his memoir, Kyle wrote about his experiences in Iraq with direct, unvarnished language. The book was a best-seller. It was also condemned by critics for its callous tone: He calls Iraqis "savages" and says he "loved killing bad guys" to protect Marines.

"Chris Kyle's story is an uneasy story," says Nicholas Schmidle, staff writer for The New Yorker. Schmidle wrote an extensive article about Kyle — and the former Marine who killed him while they were at a shooting range near Glen Rose, Texas. He says Kyle wasn't the only soldier to be crass when talking about the enemy. "He did dehumanize the enemy," Schmidle says. "That is something, however, that is part of training. That's part of preparing young men and women to go to war."

Movie Interviews

Bradley Cooper And 'American Sniper' Widow Team Up To Tell SEAL's Story

Another reason for the backlash against American Sniper is the fantastical stories Kyle told about himself after he left the Navy. He said he killed two men who tried to carjack him in Texas. He said he went to New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and shot people from the roof of the Superdome. On the radio Opie & Anthony Show, he claimed to have punched former Minnesota governor (and Navy veteran) Jesse Ventura at a bar after Ventura supposedly made disparaging remarks about soldiers.

It never happened, and Ventura won a defamation suit against Kyle. The other stories have also never been proved. Actor and producer Bradley Cooper has said that American Sniper is a "character study," but there's no mention of this part of Kyle's character in the movie.

That's a problem for Alyssa Rosenberg, a cultural columnist for The Washington Post. Rosenberg says omitting Kyle's fabrications — as well as his bragging about things like bar fights — makes the movie incomplete.

"By sort of stripping away a lot of details of Chris Kyle's views, he becomes less the man he was, and less the man he was trained to be, and less the man the American government and populace asked him to be," she says. "And so the movie isn't willing to make the case for Chris Kyle as he was."

But foreign affairs writer Alex Horton says American Sniper is just a movie, "and you can't include everything in the book, and you can't include everything in the universe about Chris Kyle."

Horton is an Army veteran who fought in the Iraq War. He believes the backlash against American Sniper has less to do with the movie than it does with people's feelings about that war. "It shows that we're still not ready to have an adult, clear-eyed conversation about the Iraq War. The wounds are still fresh. It's still heavily politicized," he says.

And, Horton adds, few Americans experienced the Iraq War, either firsthand or through friends or family.

Web Resources

Nicholas Schmidle: 'In the Crosshairs'

Alex Horton: 'American Sniper feeds America's hero complex, and it isn't the truth about war'

Jacob Schick's 'Open Letter to Warriors'

Republican heavyweights Mitt Romney and Jeb Bush are already out shaking the money trees for possible 2016 presidential runs, and now Florida Sen. Marco Rubio is putting out the word that he is, too.

His Reclaim America PAC has hired prominent fundraiser Anna Rogers. His major donors are gathering in Miami Beach Friday and Saturday for a "Team Rubio 2016" political update and finance committee meeting. Rubio is featured Sunday at the billionaire Koch brothers' "American Recovery Policy Forum" in Palm Springs, along with fellow senators and presidential hopefuls Ted Cruz and Rand Paul. Then Rubio will spend next week in California attending fundraisers, and a big part of February on a book tour that will take him to all the early voting primary states.

Of course, actively jumping into fundraising doesn't necessarily improve Rubio's odds — or even the likelihood that he will ultimately run.

He's still in his first term in the Senate after serving two years as Florida House speaker. He faces a crowded field of rivals, led at the moment by 2012 nominee Romney and former Florida Gov. Bush. Romney has proven he can raise $1 billion for a presidential run, and Bush has set upon an aggressive fundraising push that will include 60 finance events by the end of March.

Given those challenges, the obvious question arises: Why would Rubio run? In reality, though, a better question might be: Why wouldn't Rubio run?

A full year before the first voters are set to cast ballots, there are a number of good reasons for Rubio to go ahead with a presidential bid right now, at least for the coming months.

Here are five:

Practice makes perfect

Running for president isn't easy. It's a big country, and even when focusing on the early voting states for campaigning and the big money states for fundraising, a presidential bid is a costly, time-consuming, difficult production – which help explains why many of those who have won their party's nomination have only done so after trying and failing in previous attempts. Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bob Dole, Al Gore and Mitt Romney all come to mind. Running now, even in the likely event that Rubio falls short, still adds to his email and fundraising lists – way more than just running for re-election does.

The money is just as green for a Senate run

Money raised by Rubio's leadership PAC can be used by Rubio as he explores a presidential run – or it can be used as he contemplates a run for re-election in 2016. If Rubio gets to the point where he creates an actual presidential campaign account and then winds up not running, Federal Election Commission rules allow any money left over to be transferred to Rubio's Senate account (subject to individual contributor limits). Similarly, if Rubio's allies were to create a superPAC that's not technically under his control, presumably they would be in sync with his goals and switch over to support his run for re-election, should he ultimately do that. As to his statements that he will not pursue both offices at once – he wouldn't have to. He could run for president now, decide later this year to give up on that goal...and then some months later announce that an outpouring of support from Floridians has persuaded him to seek re-election, after all. Florida's filing deadline for federal candidates is not until May 2016. Rubio would have plenty of time for a graceful transition.

David Rivera

The former Florida congressman is facing a federal investigation into his 2012 re-election bid. A friend of Rivera has already been convicted of steering money to a sham candidate in the Democratic primary that year, and that friend has been talking to prosecutors about Rivera's role. Unfortunately for Rubio, Rivera was his closest confidante and top lieutenant during Rubio's years in the Florida House. The two even co-owned a home in Tallahassee, on which a bank started foreclosure proceedings after they missed a number of payments over a dispute over the mortgage terms. Rubio has not been implicated at all in Rivera's 2012 problem, but their association will no doubt be an issue Rubio's opponents will use in a presidential run. But on a subsequent presidential run, Rubio could shrug off queries about Rivera as old news – as a topic that's been thoroughly vetted previously.

Sell, sell, sell

Rubio is out with his new book, American Dreams. And while someone like Romney, whose net worth is in the neighborhood of a quarter-billion dollars, may not need the money, Rubio probably could. He's only 43, and has spent most of his years since leaving law school in elective office. The $174,000 salary for members of Congress is more than triple the median household income, but it must pay for running two households, one in pricey Washington, D.C., and one in almost-as-pricey Miami. Which book is more marketable: one by a senator who's already settled on seeking a second term? Or one by a presidential aspirant? (Granted, most books don't make a ton of money. But $4 a book selling, say, 20,000 copies? That's not so shabby.)

The Naval Observatory isn't so bad

Running to be the chief executive of the United States when still in your first term in the Senate might be a stretch – particularly when your party has made President Obama's similar inexperience a major critique. But the number two job on the ticket? Some of the features that make Rubio so attractive as a presidential candidate – his Cuban-American ethnicity, his youth, his presumed strength in a key swing state – might be just as attractive as a running mate. (That is, if the nominee is anyone other than Bush. Bush has a Mexican-born wife, is fluent in Spanish and is arguably a stronger statewide candidate in Florida than Rubio.) And then, win or lose, Rubio would be considered a top contender either 4 or 8 years later. So if 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue is out of reach this time, the house a couple of miles to the northwest maybe isn't a bad second choice.

2016 Republican presidential nomination

Sen. Marco Rubio

"Making aliyah," or returning to Israel, is usually a cause for celebration among Jews. But recently fear has pushed many Jews to leave France – a record 7,000 departed last year.

And that was before the recent Paris attacks that included the killing of four Jews at a kosher grocery store.

Jean Marc Illouz, a former senior correspondent for French television, who is also Jewish, says he's been pushing back against what he calls ridiculous comments on the Internet about anti-Semitism in France. He says Americans seem to think it's a resurgence of Nazism.

"You see people are thinking of anti-Semitism in terms of World War II and coming from the French," says Illouz. "It has nothing to do with the French. It has nothing to do with the mainstream Muslim French thinking. It has to do with imported terrorism."

Illouz believes today's anti-Semitism stems from radical Islam brought to France by imams and jihadists espousing a hardline doctrine from places like Saudi Arabia.

He says the vast majority of French Muslims want to be integrate into French society, and many are. But, he says the radicals' message is corrupting a small, angry minority.

"You have a number of poor young people who have a problem much bigger than money," he says. "It's a problem of identity. Because they're neither Algerian, nor do they feel they are full fledged Frenchmen. So in that gap, the jihadis found the way to put their lever."

Illouz, whose family comes from Algeria, says Jewish families like his lived there peacefully with Muslims for centuries. His family came to France in the late 1950s, among the nearly 1 million Europeans who fled the violence of the Algerian war of independence.

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Today, these Sephardic Jews from Algeria and other North African countries, make up 70 percent of the Jewish population in France.

American Rabbi Tom Cohen has been in France nearly 25 years. His synagogue helps to bridge what he calls the cultural gap between French and American Jews, who are 95 percent Ashkenazi, meaning their origins are in eastern Europe.

Today there are soldiers guarding Cohen's synagogue around the clock. They even sleep there. He says his congregation feels confident the French government wants to protect them.

After the Paris attacks, Prime Minister Manuel Valls urged French Jews not to leave, saying France would not be France without them. Cohen agrees.

"There's some inherent anti-Semitism that's been in France, just like in the United States. And there are inherent philo-Semites, people who love Jews," he says. "This is, after all, the first country that enfranchised Jews with citizenship."

That was in 1791, during the French Revolution. Cohen says since then there has been good and bad, but Jews have always been part of the fabric of French society. France has the world's largest Jewish population after Israel and the U.S. He says today's threat is something completely different.

"We're dealing with a part of the Muslim community, and it's a small percentage," he says. "But it's a very large community, so even a small percentage is a large number of people, who have been radicalized, and this is the new anti-Semitism that has infested some of the Muslim world unfortunately."

Back at his apartment, Jean Marc Illouz plays a video of his son's recent bar mitzvah on his cell phone.

"I do not see why a few people with an imported ideology inside of France, inside of Islam, French Islam itself, would push us out," he says. "I think this is ridiculous."

Illouz says he understands why some Jews may be feeling anxious, but he sees no reason to leave France.

Jews

France

When the U.S. Olympic hockey team upset the Soviet Union in 1980's "miracle on ice," President Jimmy Carter called coach Herb Brooks to congratulate him on the win: "Tell the whole team that we're extremely proud of them. ... " Carter said. "I think it just proves that our way of life is the proper way to continue on."

The other way of life, the Soviet way — which produced some of the best hockey players in the world — only went on for another decade or so.

In his new documentary Red Army, Gabe Polsky profiles the Soviet athletes and political turmoil surrounding them. "They were incredible," Polsky tells NPR's Robert Siegel. "They, basically — for almost two decades — were almost unbeatable."

Interview Highlights

On Anatoli Tarasov, "the godfather" of Soviet hockey

He took a very creative approach to the game and studied chess and ballet and applied these principles to hockey. And he really made it a very fun, creative, artistic game to watch with a lot of puck possession and weaving and just beautiful playmaking.

On hockey being a source of pride in a society that was in other ways very dysfunctional

Josef Stalin in the '40s ... wanted the Soviet Union to be number one in sports in the world. And he wanted that to be because, one, it creates a sense of national pride — and when a team is doing well, people unify inside the Soviet Union. And it also makes other countries think, "What are they doing there in the Soviet Union? It must be a more superior culture in certain ways." And it was a propaganda tool for the Soviet Union to show how dominant and superior their society was.

More On 'Red Army'

Movie Reviews

The Tale Of The Hockey Players For Whom 1980 Was No Miracle On Ice

'Leviathan' And 'Red Army' Deliver A Peek Inside Russia, Now And Then

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On Viacheslav "Slava" Fetisov, who is at the center of the film

He is a defenseman and he was captain of the Soviet National team for many years and was considered one of the greatest defenseman ever to play the game, and one of the most decorated athletes in Soviet history. As a person, he's a lot the same way he is on the ice. He's always keeping you on your toes. He's unpredictable. He's a little bit aggressive, but he's an intelligent guy. And that's how he was on the ice.

On Soviet players being "sold" to NHL clubs at the end of the Cold War

During the Perestroika times in the late '80s, the Soviet Union was changing and they were feeling a lot of pressure economically. And there was some stagnation, and the government could no longer afford to fund the sports programs in the Soviet Union. So they started to think about about allowing some of the older Soviet players to go and play in the West. And they would sell them to NHL clubs for a lot of money, and then basically take all that money for the government. So the players would make, let's say, $1,000 a month and then the rest of that money would go to the government.

And some of the players were so eager to get out of [Russia] that they would take that deal. But Fetisov held out, and didn't want to be treated like a slave and basically work and be sold like a slave to the U.S. and then give all the money back to the Soviet government. And he fought this very powerful system that threatened him and, ultimately, withstood all this pressure.

“ "Russia was a country that needed heroes. I think they suffer from a lack of people for young people to look up to. It was, still is, a country that was rebuilding itself from the collapse of the Soviet Union, and still trying to find itself."

- Filmmaker Gabe Polsky

On how Fetisov ended up playing in the NHL, but later returned to Russia

He was ... making quite a bit of money and has lived the American dream, won two Stanley Cups and was actually coaching. ... His life could've been great and fruitful — but, he got a call from Vladimir Putin. And Putin asked him to be the Minister of Sport in Russia. And I assume it was a difficult decision but I think when you have a guy like Vladimir Putin asking you to do that, it's difficult to say "no" to, first of all.

Second of all, Fetisov is probably one of the most famous people in Russia, and with that comes a lot of responsibility. Russia was a country that needed heroes. I think they suffer from a lack of people for young people to look up to. It was, still is, a country that was rebuilding itself from the collapse of the Soviet Union, and still trying to find itself. I think Fetisov felt a sense of responsibility for his country, his people, and he considers Russia his home. I think he wants to help make the country as good as it can be. ...

I think that the story basically brings to life the difficulties that Russia has had after the collapse of the Soviet Union and finding its place in the world, being prideful and finding its national identity, and regaining the prestige that it had during the Soviet years.