At the end of the day, the team is delivering money to local schools and hospitals. The soldiers are relaxed until an IED explodes in the tail end of the convoy. Suddenly, everyone is a threat.

Assistant band director Luis Hernandez served with Operation Iraqi Freedom from 2003 to 2004. Although Hernandez has not seen the movie “American Sniper,” he has read parts of the book and said some of sniper Chris Kyle’s experiences were similar to his.

“I’ve got friends who are still in the special operations community,” Hernandez said. “They basically said that, while some of the equipment and some of the ways they trained the people in the movie is sort of off, the mindset and the mentality of the people involved in ‘American Sniper’ is highly accurate.”

Hernandez said his older brother works with two men who also worked with Kyle and said Bradley Cooper portrayed him perfectly.

“Bradley Cooper spent something like four or five hours a day listening to the way Kyle spoke and getting his dialect down,” Hernandez said. “They said he nailed his character. The way he talked and his mannerisms were portrayed with great realism and accuracy.”

In regard to Michael Moore and Seth Rogan criticizing the book and movie on Twitter, Hernandez said he is infuriated.

“It really gets me angry, these people who have never had any experience in the military service,” Hernandez said. “They have no concept of what it takes to do a job like that can sit there and not only judge a person but a dead person who doesn’t have the ability to fight back. For him to say something like that and to call a guy a coward who has probably saved more lives than we can even imagine, it’s beyond the pale.”

Hernandez said accusing a sniper of being mean or cowardly is an uninformed opinion.

“The best thing an average student can do is read anything they can, and there are a lot of books out there,” Hernandez said. “This ‘American Sniper’ would be a great start. Then, go to the Army or Marine website and look through the requirements it takes to qualify.”

The role of a sniper includes gathering intelligence and taking out threats beyond the range of the people they are protecting.

“Every time they take a shot, they probably save 10 to 15 people,” Hernandez said. “It’s that big of a trade-off between killing the bad guy and saving your own people. People who are trying to downgrade the movie just have no idea what Kyle went through. Having to maybe shoot a kid with an IED, you shoot that kid but at the same time you’ve saved 15 to 16 of your own people. You know that’s tough to do.”

Hernandez said Chris Kyle is the best sniper next to Carlos Hancock, who served in Vietnam.

“Every sniper in the American military has been pretty much top notch,” Hernandez said. “It’s not just ‘find a target and shoot.’ The wash-out rate for sniper school, if I remember right, is close to 80 percent and 90 percent. They take the smartest people, and they take the people who can perform under extreme pressure with the threat that they may lose their lives in the process.”