World: The 13-cent Killers

Like competitors on a rifle range, the two Marines discussed their target. “About 900 yards,” whispered the man with the binoculars. The man with the rifle checked through his telescopic sight and nodded in agreement. Then both men tested the wind. About 5 m.p.h., they decided. The rifleman adjusted his sight. Slowly he stretched out into a prone firing position; he rested his rifle barrel on his helmet and sighted through the scope, allowing just enough Kentucky windage to compensate for the breeze. Then he began the gentle, steady trigger pull of the expert marksman. The exact moment of firing came as a surprise—which it often does when a good rifleman has squeezed off a proper shot.

The moment he recovered from the jolt of his rifle’s recoil, the Marine squinted once more through his sighting scope. Across the valley, he saw a black-uniformed Viet Cong crumple, as a bullet bludgeoned his chest. Just to make sure, the Marine pumped another round into the V.C. and watched the body twitch. The spotter put down his binoculars, took out a notebook, and recorded the details of the kill.

Sudden Death. In the past year, that lethal game of “Charlie zapping” has been played by snipers of the U.S. Army and Marine Corps with steadily increasing efficiency. Sudden death from an unheard and unseen source has become a daily danger for the V.C. At a time when most new infantry weapons are designed to deliver rapid-fire streams of bullets, when a firefight sprays the jungle with thousands of unaimed rounds that do little more than force the enemy to keep his head down, the snipers are demonstrating the deadly value of the single well-aimed bullet. They are reminding their buddies that the good foot soldier has always been primarily a rifleman, that the good marksman makes every shot count.

Today there are about 500 American snipers in the field—trained on ranges both at home and in Viet Nam. They use finely balanced target rifles, so prized that they are carried around in well-oiled leather cases when not in use. The Marines prefer the bolt-action Remington 700 with a variable power scope; the Army leans toward the National Match M-14 with a similar sniper scope. Both rifles fire a 7.62 mm. 173-grain competition round with a flatter, more accurate trajectory than normal 150-grain military ammunition, and both are deadly at ranges well beyond 1,000 yards.

The snipers are almost all youngsters —teen-agers, or in their early twenties —who grew up with a squirrel rifle in their hands. Most of them are not many months away from a time when they had to buy their own ammunition. It is part of their philosophy to be miserly with bullets. There are snipers in Viet Nam who have waited as long as six months to fire as few as four or five shots. But then they were sure of their targets, and they killed four or five of the enemy. Last month two Marine “dingers”* killed seven North Vietnamese and wounded five, with no more than 13 rounds fired at a range of 1,200 yards.

If casualties can ever be considered a bargain, the snipers provide the biggest bargain of the war: the cartridges they use cost only 13¢. Appropriately enough, they thus call themselves “the 13¢ killers.” In the past eight months, the 90-odd snipers of the 1st Marine Division have recorded over 450 confirmed kills, against four dead of their own—an astonishing kill ratio of better than 100 to 1.

Skillful Riflery. Marine snipers are organized in 37-man platoons, one of which is attached to each of the corps’s seven regiments in Viet Nam. Once in the field, the platoons break down into pairs: one man spots with binoculars, the other handles the rifle. Their favorite stakeouts are the edges of heavily wooded areas with a clear field of fire in front. And there they wait, hour after lonely hour, day after tiring day, camouflaged to their very helmet tops, always on the alert for the slightest distant movement.

The payoff comes in brief and skillful bursts of riflery. Last week a Marine sergeant spotted a V.C. officer addressing a group of his men some 1,600 yards, or almost a mile, away. Since his sight was not calibrated for that distance, the Marine estimated the necessary high trajectory, worked in some Kentucky windage to allow for the breeze, and squeezed off three rounds. The third hit the Viet Cong officer in the head. He was dead before the crack of the rifle ever reached his ears. “A lucky shot,” the sergeant conceded. But he and his sniper buddies have learned to make such luck commonplace.

*Crack shots—an old expression taken from competition shooting, in which a bell was rung to announce a bull’s-eye.