scoutsout80
08-18-2009, 12:25 PM
Stalkers and Shooters: Part I: American Snipers in WWII, Korea and Vietnam
Sniping evolved from WWII into a fine martial art by the Indochina War, producing some phenomenally lethal marksmen.
by John L. Plaster
At the time of the Pearl Harbor attack, the U.S. armed forces had not a single sniper, no sniper scopes, no schools, not even a training manual.
Though snipers had proven their worth in WWI, the armed forces afterward dispensed of such sharpshooters and their specialized weapons. By 1941, however, both the Germans and Japanese had fielded snipers by the thousands. Like so many aspects of WWII, America had to catch up—and catch up fast.
GIs first encountered enemy snipers in force on Guadalcanal in 1942, where cleverly camouflaged Japanese tied themselves in treetops or hid below ground in spider holes, lying in wait up to three days to fire one shot. Out of
necessity the Marines scrounged scoped rifles and set up their first school right there at the front, training and arming two Marines from each line company.
After Guadalcanal, the Marine Corps quickly instituted stateside scout-sniper schools near Camp Pendleton, Calif. and at Camp Lejeune, N.C. These graduates slowly filled newly created slots and trained more snipers in the Pacific Theater. For armament, both the Army and Marine Corps fell back upon the bolt-action rifle that had proven itself in WWI: the .30-caliber Springfield. Some 25,000 Springfield rifles were specially made by Remington and modified to accommodate a riflescope.
Instead of centralized schools, the Army left it up to field commanders to train unit snipers. Col. Sidney Hinds, commanding the 41st Armd. Inf. Regt., 2nd Armd. Div., a Gold Medal Olympic rifleman, set up his own sniper school in North Africa to provide six snipers for each of his infantry companies. “The ideal sniper,” Hinds said, “is a combination of eagle eyes, Job-like patience, Indian stealth, Solomon’s wisdom, and rabbit-like agility.”
Across the European and Pacific theaters, other Army units did likewise with, for example, the 511th Parachute Infantry Regiment training its own snipers for fighting on New Guinea. It was there that Pvt. Charles Zuke proved “as cool while hunting Japanese as when he was husking corn” back home in Big Rapids, Mich. “Zuke is a quiet youth who talks little but he’s a shooting fool,” his company commander told the New York Times. His commander credited the farmboy for twice having saved his life.
Like Zuke, most American snipers had rural upbringings and lots of shooting and hunting experience. “I used to be pretty good at picking off squirrels with a Marlin .22,” Army Cpl. Gordon Eoff of Clinton, Ark., told a reporter after eliminating a Japanese machine gunner with one shot through his helmet. Another scout-sniper, Army Sgt. Harold Pointer, credited with 19 kills in his first two weeks of combat, had grown up in Montana.
Sniping in Europe
It was an Army sniper, Sgt. Frank Coons, who likely fired the first American shot in the European Theater. A U.S. Army Ranger, he and 50 men of the 1st Ranger Battalion accompanied Canadian and British troops to raid the French coastal town of Dieppe on Aug. 19, 1942. Fighting alongside the commandos, Coons fired upon a battery of German guns and, according to war correspondent Quentin Reynolds, killed 20 German soldiers. The young Ranger-sniper was awarded the British Military Medal, presented personally by Lord Louis Mount¬batten.
Among the lessons learned at Dieppe, a British report noted that “a stalker with a quick and sure eye, cunning fieldcraft, and the sniper’s rifle with its telescopic sight, can do much to swing the battle against [the Germans].” That lesson was proved over and over.
At Monte Cassino in Italy in early 1944, Pfc. James McGill, a freckle-faced youth with the 34th “Red Bull” Infantry Division, expertly eliminated a German machine gunner who had pinned down his platoon, firing a single shot at 600 yards.
Another “Red Bull” sniper, Pfc. Gordon Bondurant, performed phenomenally in several engagements. When German machine-gun fire blocked his unit’s advance, he coolly shot the gunner, then the assistant gunner, then another three Germans in succession who manned the gun—each a one-shot kill at an estimated 450 yards. On another occasion, Bondurant “kept such accurate fire on 40 entrenched Germans that they were surrounded and captured.”
When a German 88mm gun blocked advancing GIs at an Italian mountain pass, Lt. J.K. Maupin of the 41st Armd. Inf. Regt., 2nd Armd. Div., led a group of snipers and riflemen up a steep cliff until they could see the Germans, some 500 yards away. After eliminating a machine gun crew, Maupin’s men (and supporting mortar fire) forced the artillerymen into retreat, too, clearing the way without losing a single man.
A Sniper’s Medal of Honor
It was amid the Marines’ amphibious assault at Tarawa in the Gilbert Islands in November 1943 that a sniper earned our nation’s highest decoration. Landing just minutes before an avalanche of 5,000 Marines hit the island, 1st Lt. William D. Hawkins and his 30-man scout-sniper platoon wrested control of a 500-yard-long pier.
“The first to disembark,” his Medal of Honor citation reported, “1st Lt. Hawkins unhesitatingly moved forward under heavy enemy fire at the end of the pier, neutralizing emplacements in coverage of troops assaulting the main beach positions.”
Hawkins and his snipers fired hundreds of yards up and down the beaches, providing precision fire as Marine battalions stormed ashore. “Spectacu¬larly heroic,” the Marine Corps called them. “It is not often that you can credit a first lieutenant with winning a battle,” said Col. David Shoup, the regimental commander and a future Marine Corps commandant, “but Hawkins came as near to it as any man can.” The young lieutenant was killed Nov. 21, his gallant sacrifice so respected that Tarawa’s airstrip was named after him.
Sniper Foes
Sniping was hardly an American monop¬¬oly. At Normandy in June 1944, wrote famed war correspondent Ernie Pyle, “the Germans have gone in for sniping in a wholesale manner. There are snipers everywhere. There are snipers in trees, in buildings, in piles of wreckage, in the grass.”
On multiple occasions, Audie Murphy, America’s most highly decorated serviceman of WWII, was targeted by German snipers. On Oct. 2, 1944, Murphy single-handedly stalked a German sniper who’d killed several of his comrades. Stripping off all his gear but his helmet and M-1 carbine, Murphy crept to within 20 yards of the hidden gunman, shot him, and brought back his rifle. Two months later it was reversed, with Murphy severely wounded by another German sniper. Yet he returned to combat to earn his Medal of Honor.
By the war’s close, Army and Marine Corps ranks included thousands of snipers. But America’s atomic monopoly fostered a belief that ground wars had become obsolete. Just as after WWI, sniper schools went away, sniper slots were eliminated and there was no further development of sniper weapons or tactics.
Korea: .50-Cal. Innovation
Reporting from Korea in late 1950, respected historian and U.S. Army Brig. Gen. S.L.A. Marshall wrote, “There is minimal use of sniper tactics among American forces. … It is never systemically done by our side, and such actual sniper tactics as employed are usually an improvisation of the moment by one or two individuals.” A Marine report had similar conclusions, finding that “sniper rifles issued to a Marine division are not employed as intended.”
Although the U.S. Army authorized one sniper per infantry squad, or 27 per battalion, the Army offered no training, no manuals, not even the criteria for selecting a sniper. One frustrated private wrote to American Rifleman magazine from Korea: “Each Army squad ends up with a piece of equipment that no one can use. The sniper rifle has a telescopic sight, though no soldier or officer receives training in the use of this complicated gadget.”
By early 1952, the 5th Marine Regi¬ment at last created a sniper school in Korea, with the 1st Marines soon following suit. These courses, conducted just behind the lines, gave students plenty of opportunity to practice on real targets. Gradually, Army units, too, set up their own schools in Korea.
Marine Staff Sgt. John Boitnot, a sniper with the 5th Marine Regt., developed a novel tactic for picking off Chinese snipers. This “deadly game,” as the New York Times put it, involved Pvt. Henry Friday of Nekoosa, Wis., purposely exposing himself to draw fire—which Boitnot returned with uncanny accuracy. In two days, the deadeye Boitnot killed nine Chinese snipers with nine rounds, at distances from 670 to 1,250 yards. Once this hit the newspapers, of course, their commander put a stop to it. A great pre-war competitive marksman, Boitnot was thought to be the most accomplished Marine sniper of the war.
The greatest sniping innovation of the Korean War was placing riflescopes atop .50-caliber machine guns and firing these massive slugs in single-shot mode. This proved especially effective late in the war, when fighting stabilized along facing ridgelines with enemy positions beyond the range of ordinary rifles. The mighty “fifty” readily penetrated enemy bunkers at 1,500 or more yards.
Vietnam: Honing a Skill
As quickly as the guns fell silent on the 38th Parallel in 1953, sniping again fell by the wayside. When U.S. combat forces deployed to South Vietnam 12 years later, neither the Army nor Marine Corps had snipers or sniper schools. There had been no improvement in sniper weapons or optics since 1953.
As the need for snipers developed, the 3rd Marine Division created a 14-day course near Da Nang in November 1965. Some 78 snipers soon were trained, with plans for one scout-sniper platoon in each Marine infantry regiment.
The 1st Marine Division followed suit, its school set up by 1st Lt. Edward “Jim” Land, a longtime competitive rifle shooter. One of Land’s instructors, the soon-to-be-legendary Staff Sgt. Carlos Hathcock, a year earlier had won the Wimbledon Cup at the National Rifle Association’s annual matches, making him the country’s top 1,000-yard rifle shooter. Initially, Marine snipers used Model 70 Winchester target rifles with target scopes.
An early Marine graduate, Lance Cpl. Ronald Bundy of Decatur, Ill., soon demonstrated the kind of shooting for which scout-snipers are famous. While supporting a Marine company, Bundy spotted two Viet Cong sniper-sentries 800 yards away. With two shots he dropped both, which sent a third VC running, and he dropped him, too, at 500 yards—three rounds, and three one-shot kills.
In 1967, the Marine Corps fielded a new sniper rifle, a modified version of the Remington Model 700 bolt-action, which soon proved a reliable and accurate long-range weapon.
Army divisions, too, set up sniper schools, with early courses run by the 1st Air Cavalry, 101st Airborne and 25th Infantry divisions. For lack of better weapons, these Army snipers were issued obsolescent bolt-action Spring¬fields and M-1D Garands or 3x scopes on ordinary M-16s.
Finally, in 1968, the 9th Infantry Division commander, Maj. Gen. Julian Ewell—who had commanded a paratroop battalion at the 1944 Battle of Bastogne—brought in the Army’s finest rifle instructors from the Army Marks¬manship Training Unit at Fort Benning, Ga.
The resulting course produced 72 formally trained snipers who were armed with a new weapon, a specially accurized version of the semi-auto M-14 rifle and a scope that instantly reset for dead-on shooting from 100 to 900 meters.
Called the XM-21 System, 9th Divi¬sion snipers employed it across the Mekong Delta’s flat, open paddies and wetlands to rack up impressive scores, not simply by sniping but by employing silencer-equipped rifles and night vision devices, too.
In April 1969 alone, Ewell’s snipers achieved 346 confirmed kills. “The most effective single program we had was the sniper program,” he later wrote with justifiable pride. The 9th Division sniper program soon was replicated by the 25th, 101st and 23rd divisions, which fielded hundreds of XM-21-armed snipers across the country.
The Vietnam War generated three especially accomplished American snipers. The best-known was Marine Gunnery Sgt. Carlos Hathcock, whose combat achievements and continuing legacy place him among history’s greatest snipers. In Vietnam, the keen-eyed Arkansan achieved 93 confirmed kills, thought by many to have been the most of the war (see chart at left).
Years later, however, it was realized that another Marine sniper, Sgt. Chuck Mawhinney, an Oregon native, had scored 10 more confirmed kills, plus another 216 “probables.”
However, the overall highest number of confirmed kills went to an Army sniper, Staff Sgt. Adelbert Waldron, one of Ewell’s Mekong Delta snipers. In addition to being credited with 109 kills, Waldron also was the war’s most highly decorated sniper, twice receiving the nation’s second highest award, the Distinguished Service Cross.
For all that was learned in Vietnam, a familiar pattern followed: Marine and Army sniper slots, sniper schools and all the institutional knowledge simply went away after our war ended in 1973. This pattern, however, soon would change.
Next Month: Part II: Afghanistan and Iraq snipers show their skills.
John L. Plaster, a retired Army major and three-tour vet of the Studies and Observations Group in Vietnam (1969-71), is the author of two books on that elite unit. He also instructed snipers.
Editor’s Note: Information for this article was drawn from John Plaster’s new book, The History of Sniping & Sharp¬shooting, available directly from the author at www.ultimatesniper.com or 1-888-258-0626, or the publisher at www.paladin-press.com, 1-800-392-2400.
Sidebar: Top 9 Snipers in Vietnam
Name---Service---Confirmed Kills
Adelbert Waldron III---Army---109
Charles B. Mawhinney---Marine Corps---103
Carlos Hathcock---Marine Corps---93
Dennis Reed---Army---68
Joseph T. Ward---Marine Corps---63
Philip G. Moran---Army---53
Tom Ferran---Marine Corps---41
William Lucas---Army---38
Gary J. Brown---Navy---17
Source: Sniper: Training, Techniques and Weapons by Peter Brookesmith, p. 43.
Part 2 is at http://www.vfw.org/resources/levelxmagazine/0908%20Snipers%20in%20Afghanistan%20and%20Iraq.pdf
Sniping evolved from WWII into a fine martial art by the Indochina War, producing some phenomenally lethal marksmen.
by John L. Plaster
At the time of the Pearl Harbor attack, the U.S. armed forces had not a single sniper, no sniper scopes, no schools, not even a training manual.
Though snipers had proven their worth in WWI, the armed forces afterward dispensed of such sharpshooters and their specialized weapons. By 1941, however, both the Germans and Japanese had fielded snipers by the thousands. Like so many aspects of WWII, America had to catch up—and catch up fast.
GIs first encountered enemy snipers in force on Guadalcanal in 1942, where cleverly camouflaged Japanese tied themselves in treetops or hid below ground in spider holes, lying in wait up to three days to fire one shot. Out of
necessity the Marines scrounged scoped rifles and set up their first school right there at the front, training and arming two Marines from each line company.
After Guadalcanal, the Marine Corps quickly instituted stateside scout-sniper schools near Camp Pendleton, Calif. and at Camp Lejeune, N.C. These graduates slowly filled newly created slots and trained more snipers in the Pacific Theater. For armament, both the Army and Marine Corps fell back upon the bolt-action rifle that had proven itself in WWI: the .30-caliber Springfield. Some 25,000 Springfield rifles were specially made by Remington and modified to accommodate a riflescope.
Instead of centralized schools, the Army left it up to field commanders to train unit snipers. Col. Sidney Hinds, commanding the 41st Armd. Inf. Regt., 2nd Armd. Div., a Gold Medal Olympic rifleman, set up his own sniper school in North Africa to provide six snipers for each of his infantry companies. “The ideal sniper,” Hinds said, “is a combination of eagle eyes, Job-like patience, Indian stealth, Solomon’s wisdom, and rabbit-like agility.”
Across the European and Pacific theaters, other Army units did likewise with, for example, the 511th Parachute Infantry Regiment training its own snipers for fighting on New Guinea. It was there that Pvt. Charles Zuke proved “as cool while hunting Japanese as when he was husking corn” back home in Big Rapids, Mich. “Zuke is a quiet youth who talks little but he’s a shooting fool,” his company commander told the New York Times. His commander credited the farmboy for twice having saved his life.
Like Zuke, most American snipers had rural upbringings and lots of shooting and hunting experience. “I used to be pretty good at picking off squirrels with a Marlin .22,” Army Cpl. Gordon Eoff of Clinton, Ark., told a reporter after eliminating a Japanese machine gunner with one shot through his helmet. Another scout-sniper, Army Sgt. Harold Pointer, credited with 19 kills in his first two weeks of combat, had grown up in Montana.
Sniping in Europe
It was an Army sniper, Sgt. Frank Coons, who likely fired the first American shot in the European Theater. A U.S. Army Ranger, he and 50 men of the 1st Ranger Battalion accompanied Canadian and British troops to raid the French coastal town of Dieppe on Aug. 19, 1942. Fighting alongside the commandos, Coons fired upon a battery of German guns and, according to war correspondent Quentin Reynolds, killed 20 German soldiers. The young Ranger-sniper was awarded the British Military Medal, presented personally by Lord Louis Mount¬batten.
Among the lessons learned at Dieppe, a British report noted that “a stalker with a quick and sure eye, cunning fieldcraft, and the sniper’s rifle with its telescopic sight, can do much to swing the battle against [the Germans].” That lesson was proved over and over.
At Monte Cassino in Italy in early 1944, Pfc. James McGill, a freckle-faced youth with the 34th “Red Bull” Infantry Division, expertly eliminated a German machine gunner who had pinned down his platoon, firing a single shot at 600 yards.
Another “Red Bull” sniper, Pfc. Gordon Bondurant, performed phenomenally in several engagements. When German machine-gun fire blocked his unit’s advance, he coolly shot the gunner, then the assistant gunner, then another three Germans in succession who manned the gun—each a one-shot kill at an estimated 450 yards. On another occasion, Bondurant “kept such accurate fire on 40 entrenched Germans that they were surrounded and captured.”
When a German 88mm gun blocked advancing GIs at an Italian mountain pass, Lt. J.K. Maupin of the 41st Armd. Inf. Regt., 2nd Armd. Div., led a group of snipers and riflemen up a steep cliff until they could see the Germans, some 500 yards away. After eliminating a machine gun crew, Maupin’s men (and supporting mortar fire) forced the artillerymen into retreat, too, clearing the way without losing a single man.
A Sniper’s Medal of Honor
It was amid the Marines’ amphibious assault at Tarawa in the Gilbert Islands in November 1943 that a sniper earned our nation’s highest decoration. Landing just minutes before an avalanche of 5,000 Marines hit the island, 1st Lt. William D. Hawkins and his 30-man scout-sniper platoon wrested control of a 500-yard-long pier.
“The first to disembark,” his Medal of Honor citation reported, “1st Lt. Hawkins unhesitatingly moved forward under heavy enemy fire at the end of the pier, neutralizing emplacements in coverage of troops assaulting the main beach positions.”
Hawkins and his snipers fired hundreds of yards up and down the beaches, providing precision fire as Marine battalions stormed ashore. “Spectacu¬larly heroic,” the Marine Corps called them. “It is not often that you can credit a first lieutenant with winning a battle,” said Col. David Shoup, the regimental commander and a future Marine Corps commandant, “but Hawkins came as near to it as any man can.” The young lieutenant was killed Nov. 21, his gallant sacrifice so respected that Tarawa’s airstrip was named after him.
Sniper Foes
Sniping was hardly an American monop¬¬oly. At Normandy in June 1944, wrote famed war correspondent Ernie Pyle, “the Germans have gone in for sniping in a wholesale manner. There are snipers everywhere. There are snipers in trees, in buildings, in piles of wreckage, in the grass.”
On multiple occasions, Audie Murphy, America’s most highly decorated serviceman of WWII, was targeted by German snipers. On Oct. 2, 1944, Murphy single-handedly stalked a German sniper who’d killed several of his comrades. Stripping off all his gear but his helmet and M-1 carbine, Murphy crept to within 20 yards of the hidden gunman, shot him, and brought back his rifle. Two months later it was reversed, with Murphy severely wounded by another German sniper. Yet he returned to combat to earn his Medal of Honor.
By the war’s close, Army and Marine Corps ranks included thousands of snipers. But America’s atomic monopoly fostered a belief that ground wars had become obsolete. Just as after WWI, sniper schools went away, sniper slots were eliminated and there was no further development of sniper weapons or tactics.
Korea: .50-Cal. Innovation
Reporting from Korea in late 1950, respected historian and U.S. Army Brig. Gen. S.L.A. Marshall wrote, “There is minimal use of sniper tactics among American forces. … It is never systemically done by our side, and such actual sniper tactics as employed are usually an improvisation of the moment by one or two individuals.” A Marine report had similar conclusions, finding that “sniper rifles issued to a Marine division are not employed as intended.”
Although the U.S. Army authorized one sniper per infantry squad, or 27 per battalion, the Army offered no training, no manuals, not even the criteria for selecting a sniper. One frustrated private wrote to American Rifleman magazine from Korea: “Each Army squad ends up with a piece of equipment that no one can use. The sniper rifle has a telescopic sight, though no soldier or officer receives training in the use of this complicated gadget.”
By early 1952, the 5th Marine Regi¬ment at last created a sniper school in Korea, with the 1st Marines soon following suit. These courses, conducted just behind the lines, gave students plenty of opportunity to practice on real targets. Gradually, Army units, too, set up their own schools in Korea.
Marine Staff Sgt. John Boitnot, a sniper with the 5th Marine Regt., developed a novel tactic for picking off Chinese snipers. This “deadly game,” as the New York Times put it, involved Pvt. Henry Friday of Nekoosa, Wis., purposely exposing himself to draw fire—which Boitnot returned with uncanny accuracy. In two days, the deadeye Boitnot killed nine Chinese snipers with nine rounds, at distances from 670 to 1,250 yards. Once this hit the newspapers, of course, their commander put a stop to it. A great pre-war competitive marksman, Boitnot was thought to be the most accomplished Marine sniper of the war.
The greatest sniping innovation of the Korean War was placing riflescopes atop .50-caliber machine guns and firing these massive slugs in single-shot mode. This proved especially effective late in the war, when fighting stabilized along facing ridgelines with enemy positions beyond the range of ordinary rifles. The mighty “fifty” readily penetrated enemy bunkers at 1,500 or more yards.
Vietnam: Honing a Skill
As quickly as the guns fell silent on the 38th Parallel in 1953, sniping again fell by the wayside. When U.S. combat forces deployed to South Vietnam 12 years later, neither the Army nor Marine Corps had snipers or sniper schools. There had been no improvement in sniper weapons or optics since 1953.
As the need for snipers developed, the 3rd Marine Division created a 14-day course near Da Nang in November 1965. Some 78 snipers soon were trained, with plans for one scout-sniper platoon in each Marine infantry regiment.
The 1st Marine Division followed suit, its school set up by 1st Lt. Edward “Jim” Land, a longtime competitive rifle shooter. One of Land’s instructors, the soon-to-be-legendary Staff Sgt. Carlos Hathcock, a year earlier had won the Wimbledon Cup at the National Rifle Association’s annual matches, making him the country’s top 1,000-yard rifle shooter. Initially, Marine snipers used Model 70 Winchester target rifles with target scopes.
An early Marine graduate, Lance Cpl. Ronald Bundy of Decatur, Ill., soon demonstrated the kind of shooting for which scout-snipers are famous. While supporting a Marine company, Bundy spotted two Viet Cong sniper-sentries 800 yards away. With two shots he dropped both, which sent a third VC running, and he dropped him, too, at 500 yards—three rounds, and three one-shot kills.
In 1967, the Marine Corps fielded a new sniper rifle, a modified version of the Remington Model 700 bolt-action, which soon proved a reliable and accurate long-range weapon.
Army divisions, too, set up sniper schools, with early courses run by the 1st Air Cavalry, 101st Airborne and 25th Infantry divisions. For lack of better weapons, these Army snipers were issued obsolescent bolt-action Spring¬fields and M-1D Garands or 3x scopes on ordinary M-16s.
Finally, in 1968, the 9th Infantry Division commander, Maj. Gen. Julian Ewell—who had commanded a paratroop battalion at the 1944 Battle of Bastogne—brought in the Army’s finest rifle instructors from the Army Marks¬manship Training Unit at Fort Benning, Ga.
The resulting course produced 72 formally trained snipers who were armed with a new weapon, a specially accurized version of the semi-auto M-14 rifle and a scope that instantly reset for dead-on shooting from 100 to 900 meters.
Called the XM-21 System, 9th Divi¬sion snipers employed it across the Mekong Delta’s flat, open paddies and wetlands to rack up impressive scores, not simply by sniping but by employing silencer-equipped rifles and night vision devices, too.
In April 1969 alone, Ewell’s snipers achieved 346 confirmed kills. “The most effective single program we had was the sniper program,” he later wrote with justifiable pride. The 9th Division sniper program soon was replicated by the 25th, 101st and 23rd divisions, which fielded hundreds of XM-21-armed snipers across the country.
The Vietnam War generated three especially accomplished American snipers. The best-known was Marine Gunnery Sgt. Carlos Hathcock, whose combat achievements and continuing legacy place him among history’s greatest snipers. In Vietnam, the keen-eyed Arkansan achieved 93 confirmed kills, thought by many to have been the most of the war (see chart at left).
Years later, however, it was realized that another Marine sniper, Sgt. Chuck Mawhinney, an Oregon native, had scored 10 more confirmed kills, plus another 216 “probables.”
However, the overall highest number of confirmed kills went to an Army sniper, Staff Sgt. Adelbert Waldron, one of Ewell’s Mekong Delta snipers. In addition to being credited with 109 kills, Waldron also was the war’s most highly decorated sniper, twice receiving the nation’s second highest award, the Distinguished Service Cross.
For all that was learned in Vietnam, a familiar pattern followed: Marine and Army sniper slots, sniper schools and all the institutional knowledge simply went away after our war ended in 1973. This pattern, however, soon would change.
Next Month: Part II: Afghanistan and Iraq snipers show their skills.
John L. Plaster, a retired Army major and three-tour vet of the Studies and Observations Group in Vietnam (1969-71), is the author of two books on that elite unit. He also instructed snipers.
Editor’s Note: Information for this article was drawn from John Plaster’s new book, The History of Sniping & Sharp¬shooting, available directly from the author at www.ultimatesniper.com or 1-888-258-0626, or the publisher at www.paladin-press.com, 1-800-392-2400.
Sidebar: Top 9 Snipers in Vietnam
Name---Service---Confirmed Kills
Adelbert Waldron III---Army---109
Charles B. Mawhinney---Marine Corps---103
Carlos Hathcock---Marine Corps---93
Dennis Reed---Army---68
Joseph T. Ward---Marine Corps---63
Philip G. Moran---Army---53
Tom Ferran---Marine Corps---41
William Lucas---Army---38
Gary J. Brown---Navy---17
Source: Sniper: Training, Techniques and Weapons by Peter Brookesmith, p. 43.
Part 2 is at http://www.vfw.org/resources/levelxmagazine/0908%20Snipers%20in%20Afghanistan%20and%20Iraq.pdf