Graham Platner, the Maine Senate candidate running against Susan Collins, used a May 2024 podcast interview to say the image of Chris Kyle as a spotless war hero did not match what he saw in Iraq.
Platner, who deployed to Ramadi in 2006 after joining the Marines in 2004, said Kyle’s stories about how many people he was shooting tracked with the behavior he witnessed there. He said it was relatively easy to rack up high numbers if a unit was “a little less discriminating in its fire” than a more professional unit would be, and he claimed members of Task Unit Bruiser shot unarmed civilians from their position at the Government Center in Ramadi.
The remarks came in an interview on the Green Beret Chronicle Show, where Platner bristled at the idea of Kyle and his platoon being called heroes. Kyle, a former Navy SEAL and the author of American Sniper, had been widely regarded as one of the most gifted snipers in the Iraq war, and the nickname “the Devil of Ramadi” followed him for the dozens of insurgents he was credited with killing during the battle there.
Platner’s criticism lands in a race where Iraq war politics are not distant history. The Senate voted 77-23 in 2002 to authorize the war, and Collins joined the bipartisan majority. Platner has since said, “Susan Collins voted to send me to Iraq.” In recent comments to, he repeated that line, tying his own military service directly to the vote that put U.S. forces on the path to war.
The context around Kyle only sharpens the political edge of Platner’s remarks. Kyle’s autobiography, American Sniper, was published in 2012 and turned into Clint Eastwood’s 2014 film of the same name, starring Bradley Cooper and nominated for six Academy Awards. Kyle was murdered at his Texas ranch in 2013 by a former Marine he had taken under his wing while the man suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder.
That history has made Kyle a durable and deeply divisive symbol. To supporters, he embodied battlefield skill and sacrifice. To Platner, the legend was something else entirely. “I almost felt like there was like a weird practical joke being played on me by the war that, like all these years later, I’m like, having to like... People are telling me like ‘Oh, look how great this guy is, these guys are amazing heroes,’ this whole incredible thing,” he said in the interview. “The paragon of leadership, and I’m just sitting there like, ‘Am I living in like an alternate reality?’ Because this is the exact opposite of my experience.”
There is no official investigation into the allegations Platner raised about Task Unit Bruiser, and the claims remain untested in any formal military finding. Jocko Willink has denied any improper conduct and threatened to sue Seth Hettena, the Substack writer who expanded on allegations first made in now-deleted Reddit comments around 2021 by interviewing more ex-Marines in 2024. Platner himself has also given inconsistent statements about his military service, adding another layer of uncertainty around a campaign already shaped by Iraq war arguments. For Collins, the episode revives a war vote from 2002 that still shadows Maine politics; for Platner, it turns his own service into the center of the race.
