Narayan Mahon
Janisch says some of his war experiences are ‘best forgotten.’
Attempts to compare real war with Hollywood's version are "bullshit," says Henry Janisch. That's why the 35-year-old veteran doesn't want to dwell on comparisons between him and Chris Kyle, the Navy SEAL whose memoir of serving in the Iraq War inspired the controversial film American Sniper. But Janisch is happy the film is stimulating debate.
"American Sniper has fostered more conversation than anything else," says Janisch, a native of New Glarus who now lives in Madison. Before it hit theaters, he adds, "[I had] never heard an actual conversation about the war -- ever."
Sniper, which has broken box-office records, has polarized and provoked: Some feel it's jingoistic, oversimplified hero worship, while others claim director Clint Eastwood accurately and beautifully captures the nuances of modern warfare and the difficulties of coming home.
The film -- which will compete on Feb. 22 for Oscars for best picture and best actor, for Bradley Cooper's portrayal of Kyle -- has aroused a deep curiosity in the public about what our soldiers really experience at war and why they do what they do.
A glut of stories has surfaced where veterans compare their war stories to Kyle's. Kyle is no longer around to field questions: In 2013, the author of American Sniper: The Autobiography of the Most Lethal Sniper in U.S. Military History, was killed at a shooting range by Eddie Ray Routh, a troubled veteran, whose trial began Feb. 11.
Janisch, who fought in East Timor, Afghanistan and Iraq and finished his final tour in 2006, says he, too, is suddenly getting requests for interviews. He's turned them all down until now.
For the record, Janisch was a sniper, but it was only for one Marine tour. He served six tours altogether; two as a Marine in East Timor and Afghanistan, and four as an Army Ranger in Iraq, where he saw more action. He has not spoken much about his war experiences since leaving active duty, but answers questions honestly and thoughtfully. For many reasons, however, he remains a reluctant interview. Some of his experiences, he says, are "best forgotten."
Leaving the farm
In American Sniper, Kyle joins the Navy SEALS after viewing footage of terrorist bombings of U.S. embassies. But Janisch simply wanted to change his destiny.
Janisch grew up poor on a dairy farm outside New Glarus. He had eight siblings. "When I joined the Marine Corps it was mainly to get away from milking and the farm," he says. "I was an insecure kid, and I wanted to be able to say I was a Marine. They could get me out of there the day after I graduated, so I took that."
He also wanted to shoot. "I wanted to make sure that infantry was in my contract. But now I know that no one signs up to be infantry."
Janisch's unit was part of the forces brought in to quell militia violence after East Timor voted for independence. The young Marine was on shore leave from his second tour in East Timor when the planes hit the World Trade Center in New York City. He was celebrating his 22nd birthday in a bar in Australia.
"We went up to get a drink, and the bartenders weren't paying any attention. I looked up at the television and saw the skyline with the smoke billowing out, and we were like, holy cow...I had no clue what happened. I didn't actually see footage [of the planes] until after the tour was over. We bought a bunch of cigarettes, got a cab back to the ship, and by the time I woke up we were headed for the Middle East."
The Marines went to Pakistan, setting up operations to cross the border into Afghanistan. According to a Dec. 2, 2001, New York Times article, Marine Sergeant Henry H. Janisch was the "first Marine off the first helicopter" when U.S. forces landed and seized a military base (owned by a drug lord) outside Kandahar. "We were well behind enemy lines at this point," Janisch remembers. "But it was isolated enough that it wasn't overwhelmingly dangerous. No one's taking a Sunday drive through that desert. It hadn't rained in that desert for seven years, and when we got there it rained for seven days straight. It was so cold and very miserable."
Janisch says before he deployed he questioned the reasons for fighting. But that ceased when he was in survival mode. "While you deploy, at least for me, I was overcome with the fear of being afraid," he says. "You are afraid, but you fake it. You create a character because the way you are now, you won't survive. You have to change who you are."
Sometimes that meant accepting the reasons his commanders gave for fighting. "They do a great job of brainwashing you," he says. "The Marine Corps does the best job of anybody, and the Rangers do a great job of teaching you why you're fighting. I was essentially a blank slate, and they got to write on it."
Janisch says he now thinks "vengeance was a very silly reason to go to war" and invade Afghanistan. But he cheered with his fellow soldiers when they heard their orders. "I was excited to go, but I didn't understand the bloodlust that was going on in the States at the time. This country went insane." That included an ex-girlfriend who once said, "We should kill them all." Regardless, says Janisch, once at war, "missions need to be completed."
Hollywood's war
American Sniper alternates between scenes from the Iraq War and Kyle's home in Texas. Relationships with his wife and kids are rocky, but when it comes to war, Kyle is an expert. He was nicknamed "The Legend" for his unmatched record of 160 confirmed kills (he may have killed more than 250 people altogether).
Critics say Eastwood presents a simplistic justification for the invasion of Iraq in 2003. In the movie, Kyle enlists after seeing TV footage of the terrorist bombings -- a fact that doesn't match up with his autobiography. And many have criticized American Sniper for reinforcing a good-guy, bad-guy dichotomy. Kyle faces down Iraqi insurgents in Fallujah, including a black-clad enemy sniper -- and he shoots a child carrying a grenade. Michael Moore caused an uproar when he tweeted, "My uncle [was] killed by sniper in WW2. We were taught snipers were cowards. Will shoot you in the back. Snipers aren't heroes. And invaders are worse." Seth Rogen has compared American Sniper to Nazi war propaganda films.
From Janisch's perspective, American Sniper's war scenes were "spot on." If anything, he thinks it downplayed the insurgents' use of women and children as combatants, which he witnessed repeatedly.
But Janisch says some perspective is in order: Snipers are only one type of soldier, and lying on rooftops and aiming at targets is a rare assignment. "The movie and story do not depict the experience of an average soldier," says Janisch. "They depict an exceptional soldier."
Janisch was shot, but experienced few firefights in his years in service. "For us, firefights meant that we did something wrong or we were betrayed by intelligence. They were rare, but very intense and frightening," says Janisch. After his first Marine tour he volunteered to be a sniper. He declines to provide details about his experience, simply saying the movie accurately depicts the sniper's role. When asked how many people he killed, Janisch says, "I have no idea; not many."
After the two Marine tours, Janisch entered the Army Rangers, an elite infantry unit, in order to serve with his brother Joe. "Rangers are not cool," says Janisch. "Your life sucks, and they make no bones about it. They made it abundantly clear that they are just looking for people that want to fight. They don't want us to write a tell-all book, they don't care if you look like Steven Seagal or not. You're just there for one purpose."
Janisch says his missions in Afghanistan and Iraq involved more capturing than killing. He served in the "breach element," which ran nighttime missions to clear out houses and capture enemy targets. "The objective is to not have anyone die. And we were extremely good at this. I think almost everyone we went after, we captured," says Janisch. "You just got them out of bed: grab them, zip-tie them, throw a bag over their heads, put them in the vehicle and then go. Most of the time we never fired a round."
Janisch says he never had to face down a child the way Kyle does in the film. (In real life, Kyle killed a grenade-wielding woman holding a toddler.) But he found himself in situations where there is "no right answer." On one mission in Iraq his team entered a compound through the front and heard gunfire presumably aimed at other members of his team. Janisch saw a woman holding an AK-47 surrounded by children. He and his partner were both in the open. "But it's at night, and I know she can't see us," he recalls. "So I'm aimed in on her, and [he] says take her out, and I'm like, man, this is going to destroy those kids. The correct answer would have been to shoot her, but I didn't. She put the gun down." Looking back, Janisch says there is no "correct answer." But, he adds, "If she had gunned down [my partner], I would probably be a complete wreck right now."
In the end, Janisch believes that "dumb luck" often determines who gets killed or not. His unit once watched seven rockets rain down and blow up their truck. "The eighth one came down right at our feet between us, and it was the only dud," says Janisch.
Even though Janisch kept signing up for return tours, he worried about whether his luck would hold out. "You can only dip your hand in the cookie jar so many times."
Lucky guy
Janisch says he never had illusions about leaving the battlefield unscathed. "The odds of you making it through two tours and not getting wounded are minuscule."
In fact, Janisch was injured twice in explosions and once by gunfire. "It hurts like crazy," says Janisch, smiling, because he considers himself lucky. "I have my legs. I'm devastatingly handsome. The scars I have are sexy."
In one of the incidents, when helping to track down an associate of the militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, Janisch almost drowned in human excrement in an open sewer outside a compound in Afghanistan. "We'd been hunting him for a year. This was a mission to go get someone that was close to him, someone that could lead us to him," says Janisch. The Rangers snuck in and placed charges against the compound's doors. "I hear like a metallic click, a bang on the other side, and in my head I'm [thinking] that sounded like a grenade, but even before I could think 'grenade' it blew up and the wall exploded, spun me around, and my wrist was killing me. And I looked up and I saw a muzzle flash."
Janisch took a round in the chest and fell into the open cesspool. "When you get hit it knocks the wind out of you, so I was gasping and essentially drowning in shit and pee. It's horrible, and my buddy, thank god, didn't do what he was trained to do, which is eliminate the threat and then help. He assessed that I could not breathe, grabbed onto my legs and pulled me out."
Janisch remembers nothing about his events leading to an injury from a roadside IED (improvised explosive device) in Afghanistan. "It just went off and I just woke up later and we were in a ditch when I came to," Janisch says. "I didn't know what happened, and you're trying to figure out what happened, and things are lying everywhere and things are on fire. You're like, I guess we got blown up."
Coming home
Eastwood and Cooper have both defended American Sniper as an authentic depiction of the difficulties veterans face when returning to civilian life. If anything, Janisch thinks the film downplays the intense depression he felt when he came back. "You leave the war zone so quickly. I came home after my first deployment and showed up at my mom's front door in the BDUs [fatigues], still covered in human shit, my arm in a cast because I'd gotten blown up, and still had my rucksack with me," says Janisch.
Janisch says with little money and debilitating health problems, there was not much in the way of a joyous homecoming for him. "You're pissed about everything. There's nothing society can do, short of giving me a ton of money."
He eventually received disability pay due to intense and debilitating migraines. In a moment of desperation, he emailed his representatives because he was having trouble accessing health care at the VA hospital in Madison. Then-Rep. Tammy Baldwin's office replied within minutes, and got him an appointment with the VA. It turned out he had fast-growing brain tumors, likely related to toxins burned in open pits in Iraq. He had successful surgery. "[Left untreated], it would have killed me," says Janisch.
Janisch was able to work, but found his infantry training did not transfer to a profession. "When I got out, I had a high school diploma. That sucks. You are qualified to do essentially nothing."
He also missed the bonds he had formed with other soldiers and the sense of a shared purpose. Janisch says the military provided a "level playing field" where racial, regional and class backgrounds mattered little. There was also the adrenalin rush of surviving a fight: "If it could be bottled, it would be the most popular drug ever."
The most difficult challenge, says Janisch, was seeing how psychologically disconnected most Americans are from war. People have thanked him for his service, but he says it is "without any comprehension" of what he is being thanked for. He is dismayed at how little discussion and news coverage from actions overseas reaches the U.S. public. "I cannot remember the last time I saw news coverage of our troops overseas, but I cannot avoid glimpses into the inner workings of the Kardashian family."
Due to this lack of knowledge, Janisch feels he and other veterans have made sacrifices that go unappreciated. "Chris Kyle, like many of us, went on multiple tours," says Janisch. "It is only because we have an exceptionally small portion of our population willing to go and fight on so many tours that we don't have a draft. That has saved many from the nightmare of what deploying is."
Moving on
Today, Janisch is happily married to Kristin Keough and is a homeowner on the east side of Madison. He is studying international relations at UW-Madison and considering a career in public relations.
Janisch stands out among his fellow students because of his age, height and signature attire. "I enjoy wearing suits. It's a uniform way to express yourself," says Janisch, who once used a three-piece suit as camouflage to crash an elegant wedding he and Keough stumbled upon while visiting the Louvre in Paris. "You get to push boundaries while still looking nice," he says. Until recently, he worked at a men's suit store, amassing a collection of 60 suits, which takes up an entire room in the couple's small house. "I took advantage of that employee discount," says Janisch, laughing. "Mission accomplished."
Most of Janisch's classmates are too young to remember much about the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, which he says is okay with him. "There are few if any conversations about the war for me to have to get through, thus few ill-conceived opinions on the issue," he says. "It makes the experience of school easier for concentrating on studies and less time thinking about those days."
Janisch doesn't identify strongly with a political party, saying he's more "middle of the road" and doesn't support "far-right weirdoes." He strongly favors civil and marriage rights for gay and lesbian couples, and draws the line at any candidate who opposes them. "I can't vote for someone who doesn't see other people as citizens," he says. But he thinks people sometimes misread his politics, too. "Liberals think I'm a Nazi and Republicans think I'm a bleeding-heart liberal," he says. Hillary Clinton is the only candidate he has supported financially.
Janisch is slowly working on a memoir of his war experiences, but doesn't spend much time reminiscing with other veterans. He belongs to the VFW and the American Legion and briefly attended meetings of a student veterans' organization. "I stopped going primarily due to the endless stories of various experiences overseas," he says. "I don't know why, but I just don't like to have those conversations."
Perhaps because of this need for privacy, Janisch chose to stream American Sniper and watch it at home: "It just doesn't seem like a movie you'd watch with a bunch of strangers."