Why we fear and admire the military sniper

Since long before ‘American Sniper,’ we’ve had deeply conflicted feelings about the man who
shoots to kill.

By Graeme Wood G L O B E C O R R E S P O N D E N T J A N U A R Y 1 6 , 2 0 1 5

CHRIS KYLE, the Navy SEAL in the new film

“American Sniper,” is a guardian angel: He
picks off Iraqi insurgents from afar, saving his
comrades before they even realize they were in
the enemies’ sights. In real life, Kyle, who
wrote the 2012 memoir on which the movie is
based, is confirmed to have killed at least 160
enemy fighters, many in exactly this scenario,
and it’s possible that a similar number of
Americans owe their lives to him.

Kyle is the dark hero of Clint Eastwood’s

Paul Moseley/The Fort Worth Star-Telegram Via AP
movie, which opened today in Boston. But that
The new Clint Eastwood film, “American Sniper,” is
is an upgrade to military snipers’ historical
based on the life of now-deceased Navy SEAL Chris reputation, even among those fighting on the
Kyle. same side. In past wars, snipers’ fellow
soldiers and Marines have viewed them with
suspicion, turning cold shoulders to the men widely perceived to have the coldest hearts
in the US military.Snipers, who make up only a small percent of men in combat units,
are in some ways the opposite of ordinary infantrymen. Modern combat training has
taught soldiers to aim and fire their weapons, but there is some evidence that until
recently the average soldier rarely fired his weapon accurately or killed anyone. Snipers,
by contrast, aim to kill with every pull of the trigger. When other soldiers kill—especially
with artillery or air strikes—their victims are often too far away to see clearly; snipers
watch through scopes and can sometimes see the blood spill and the victim collapse as
he dies. Together, these differences have made nonsnipers view snipers as homicidal,
soulless robots flagrantly violating the rules of fair military play.

But one consequence of the last decade of war has been to modify the bad reputation of
snipers, which Clint Eastwood’s film seems ready to wash away for good. There’s a
tension in the title—a proud “American” next to the still-menacing word “sniper”—but
experts on the history of military snipers and our treatment of them say the military has
undergone a cultural shift around this tactic of war. One thing worse than having a
sniper on your side, after all, is facing one who’s working for the enemy.

“BACK IN VIETNAM, our own people called us ‘Murder Inc.,’” says Jack Coughlin, a
retired Marine sniper and author of “Shock Factor: American Snipers in the War on
Terror.” “They thought we were psychopathic killers. But the whole point of our
existence is to be there on overwatch to minimize the threat to our own men.”

Only in the last two decades, experts say, have snipers’ reputations turned from reviled
to heroic.
Snipers for the United States military are, without question, exceptionally efficient
killers. According to one estimate, in Vietnam it took an ordinary infantryman 25,000
rounds per confirmed enemy kill. Snipers killed once every 1.3 rounds. A recent report
from Afghanistan claimed that two US Special Forces soldiers killed 75 Taliban with 77
rounds. Exceptional snipers count their victims in the hundreds—the Finnish World
War II sniper Simo Häyhä registered over 500, the most ever—whereas in most wars,
ordinary soldiers often kill no one at all, and in many cases never even fire their
weapons. Snipers often become the stuff of legend and nightmares for enemy soldiers:
In the 1990s in Chechnya, Russians traded stories of the White Stockings—beautiful
Estonian female biathletes, paid by Chechens per kill. They allegedly aimed for the
genitals, and took heads as trophies. (No White Stocking was ever captured, so it’s likely
that the group was only a legend.)

This sort of comfort with gruesome violence is something snipers are known for. They
don’t have the luxury of averting their eyes while someone else does the killing. “They
can see their victims, even the wrinkles around the eyes,” says Neta Bar, an
anthropologist who studied snipers in Israel in the early 2000s. “But then they’d have to
stay in their hiding spot for the rest of the day and see the victim’s wife and kids crying
over the body.”

In addition to natural human revulsion at killing, snipers have had to overcome social
conventions that stigmatize attacking people by surprise. The military historian Martin
Pegler traces this attitude to a more gentlemanly age of war: “It was an officer-class
attitude,” he says. “The British thought shooting an enemy from great distance in cold
blood was unacceptable, in a way that blasting them to pieces with artillery was not.”
Snipers, who were generally enlisted men, tended to aim for officers, which
compounded the feeling of unfairness; killing above one’s class rankled some of the
more status-minded soldiers. Pegler says snipers in one British Army unit in the 1980s
were called “The Leper Colony” because of their colleagues’ aversion to socializing with
them.

The reluctance to snipe goes back to the earliest days of sniping, in the late 18th-century.
(It was about this time when the specialty got its name, after the game-bird known as
the snipe, which required expert marksmanship to hit.) During the American
Revolutionary War, a Scottish marksman named Patrick Ferguson spotted an American
officer on horseback and reckoned he could shoot the man half a dozen times. He
decided not to, he later said, because “it was not pleasant to fire at the back of an
unoffending individual, who was acquitting himself very coolly of his duty.” That
individual was George Washington, and Ferguson acknowledged that he did not regret
letting the enemy commander get away.

Up through World War II, snipers were so loathed that they were generally executed on
sight, rather than taken captive. Only in the last two decades, experts say, have snipers’
reputations turned from reviled to heroic. For the United States, that transformation
owes something to the particular geography of the Iraq war—not rural and heavily
covered with foliage, like Vietnam, but urban and multi-level. “Everybody hates snipers
until you go to combat,” Coughlin, the Marine sniper, says. “This was a city
environment, and that’s like Disneyland for a sniper.”
Retired US Army Lieutenant Colonel Dave Grossman, an authority on the psychology of
killing, says another reason for the change is that snipers have simply been integrated
better into the larger military. In Vietnam, he says, “we didn’t have many snipers. The
sniper was a tool we pulled out of the box and used, then shoved back in the box.” Now,
ordinary infantry have sophisticated gunsights that can make every soldier with a rifle
capable of shots that might have been accessible only to snipers a few decades ago.
“Long-range shots were very rare then. Now they are very common.”

TODAY, THE SNIPER is a trained professional who generally plies his trade with pride.
Eastwood’s film is in some ways a public acknowledgment of the resuscitation of the
sniper’s reputation.

During World War II, snipers were often country boys blessed with perfect sight, who
were experienced at hunting deer. Now the military trains snipers over the course of
months to conceal themselves and stalk targets, making sketches of buildings
sometimes days beforehand. Coughlin, the Marine sniper, has trained over 75 snipers,
and he says the best marksmen are often those who have never fired a weapon in their
lives. “They don’t have any ego, and you don’t have to train bad habits out of them”—like
poor timing, body position, and ability to compensate for wind.

Grossman adds that having an all-volunteer force makes it much easier to convince
soldiers and Marines to kill. “That’s now the norm of this war,” Grossman says. “Getting
a random kid to kill is hard. But getting a volunteer warrior to kill someone who is
preparing to do harm to others—that’s easy. Chris Kyle wasn’t particularly troubled by
shooting the enemy.” After his first kill in Iraq, Kyle wrote in his memoir, he felt he
“could stand before God with a clear conscience.”

‘Everybody hates snipers until you go to combat.’

Jack Coughlin, retired Marine sniper and author

Some snipers share that comfort with killing-at-a-distance. For his book “Out of
Nowhere: A History of the Military Sniper,” Martin Pegler interviewed many snipers
who spoke only with reluctance, because of the ambivalence of other people about their
work. One of the top US snipers eventually talked to him (“I lured him with beers,”
Pegler says), and he claimed not to have suffered any guilty feelings over the hundred-
odd men he had killed.

One of the top British snipers, however, had lost sleep. “That is a man,” Pegler says,
“who lives with ghosts.”

Graeme Wood is a contributing editor at The Atlantic.