Even given the buffer of the tremendous distance at which snipers work, some snipers can rationalize their actions by killing only enemy leaders. One marine sniper told D. J. Truby “you don’t like to hit ordinary troops, because they’re usually scared draftees or worse…. The guys to shoot are big brass.” And just as a remarkably small percentage of World War II fighter pilots were capable of doing the majority of the air-to-air killing, so too have a few carefully selected and trained snipers made a tremendous and disproportionate contribution to their nation’s war effort by remorselessly and mercilessly killing large numbers of the enemy.
From January 7 to July 24, 1969, U.S. Army snipers in Vietnam accounted for 1,245 confirmed kills, with an average of 1.39 bullets expended per kill. (Compare this with the average fifty thousand rounds of ammunition required for every enemy soldier killed in Vietnam.)[16] In the course of calculating confirmed sniper kills, no enemy was counted as a kill unless an American soldier actually was able to physically “place his foot” on the body.
Yet for all its effectiveness, there is a strange revulsion and resistance toward this very personal, one-on- one killing by snipers. Peter Staff, in his book on snipers, notes that after every war “the United States military rushes to distance itself from its snipers. The same men called upon to perform impossible missions during combat quickly find themselves to be peacetime pariahs. World War I, World War II, Korea. It was the same.”
World War II-era fighter pilots, firing their battery of heavy machine guns at the enemy, would probably fit into the long-range category, but they are hampered by lack of group absolution and their powerful identification with an enemy who is so remarkably similar to them. Colonel Barry Bridger of the U.S. Air Force described to Dyer the difference between air combat (long range) and ground battle (medium and close range):
I would draw one distinction between being a combat aviator and being someone who is fighting the enemy face-to-face on the ground. In the air environment, it’s very clinical, very clean, and it’s not so personalized. You see an aircraft; you see a target on the ground — you’re not eyeball to eyeball with the sweat and the emotions of combat, and so it doesn’t become so emotional for you and so personalized. And I think it is easier to do in that sense — you’re not so affected.
Yet even with this advantage, only 1 percent of U.S. fighter pilots accounted for nearly 40 percent of all enemy pilots shot down in World War II; the majority apparently did not shoot anyone down or even try to.
CHAPTER THREE
Midrange: Denial Based “on the Thinnest of Evidence”
We will call midrange that range at which the soldier can see and engage the enemy with rifle fire while still unable to perceive the extent of the wounds inflicted or the sounds and facial expressions of the victim when he is hit. In fact, at this range, the soldier can still deny that it was he who killed the enemy. When asked about his experiences, one World War II veteran told me that “there were so many other guys firing, you can never be sure it was you. You shoot, you see a guy fall, and anyone could have been the one that hit him.”
This is a fairly typical response by veterans to those who ask about their personal kills. Holmes states, “Most of the veterans I interviewed were infantrymen with front-line service, yet fewer than half of them believed that they had actually killed an enemy, and often this belief was based on the thinnest of evidence.”
When soldiers do kill the enemy they appear to go through a series of emotional stages. The actual kill is usually described as being reflexive or automatic. Immediately after the kill the soldier goes through a period of euphoria and elation, which is usually followed by a period of guilt and remorse. [17] The intensity and duration of these periods are closely related to distance. At midrange we see much of the euphoria stage. The future field marshal Slim wrote of experiencing this euphoria upon shooting a Turk in Mesopotamia in 1917. “I suppose it is brutal,” wrote Slim, “but I had a feeling of the most intense satisfaction as the wretched Turk went spinning down.”
After this euphoria stage, even at midrange, the remorse stage can hit hard. One Napoleonic-era British soldier quoted by Holmes described how he was overcome with horror when he first shot a Frenchman. “I reproached myself as a destroyer,” he wrote. “An indescribable uneasiness came over me, I felt almost like a criminal.”
If a soldier goes up and looks at his kill — a common occurrence when the tactical situation permits — the trauma grows even worse, since some of the psychological buffer created by a midrange kill disappears upon seeing the victim at close range. Holmes tells of a World War I British veteran who was a seventeen-year-old private when he viewed his handiwork: “This was the first time I had killed anybody and when things quieted down I went and looked at a German I knew I had shot. I remember thinking that he looked old enough to have a family and I felt very sorry.”
Hand-Grenade Range: “We Heard the Shrieks and Were Nauseated”
Hand-grenade range can be anywhere from a few yards to as many as thirty-five or forty yards. For the purposes of the physical range spectrum, when we use the term “hand-grenade range” we are referring to a specific kill in which a hand grenade is used. A hand-grenade kill is distinguished from a close kill in that the killer does not have to see his victims as they die. In fact, at close range to midrange, if a soldier is in direct line of sight when his grenade explodes, he will become a victim of his own instrument.
Holmes tells how in the trenches of World War I one soldier threw a grenade at a group of Germans, and terrible cries followed its explosion. “Although we had been terribly hardened,” said the soldier, “my blood froze.” Not having to look at one’s victim should make this a killing method that is largely free of trauma, if the soldier does not have to look at his handiwork, and if it were not for these screams.
The particular effectiveness of these psychologically and physically powerful weapons in the trenches of World War I is told of in detail by Holmes:
Both sides habitually bombed [hand-grenaded] dugouts containing men who might have surrendered had they been given a chance to do so. A British soldier, newly captured in March 1918, told his captor that there were some wounded in one of the dugouts: “He took a stick grenade out, pulled the pin out and threw it down the dug- out. We heard the shrieks and were nauseated, but we were completely powerless. But it was all in a melee and we might have done the same in the circumstances.”
In the close-in trench battles of World War I hand grenades were psychologically and physically easier to use, so much so that Keegan and Holmes tell us that “the infantryman had forgotten how to deliver accurate fire with his rifle; his main weapon had become the grenade.” And we can begin to understand that this is because the emotional trauma associated with a grenade kill can be less than that of a close-range kill, especially if the killer does not have to look at his victims or hear them die.
CHAPTER FOUR
