I just finished "Through the crosshairs....snipers in Vietnam". I also read recently "dear mom... letters from a sniper" by Joe Ward.

It was very interesting. We used snipers sparingly in ww2 and Korea. The enemy in both cases used them pretty routinely. Both sides used them a lot in ww1. In Vietnam we had maybe 1200 snipers total in the conflict combining Army and Marines. They accounted for 13,000 kills with an average expenditure of 1.7 shots per kill.

Some commanders did not believe in using snipers at all, others used them but didn't like talking about it. Many folks who thought nothing of pilots painting a plane on their plane each time they got a kill didn't think it was right to keep score if you were a sniper.

So that combined with the fact that many or our records were lost when positions were overrun or abandoned means that records are skimpy about the precise numbers.

And I can only imagine that most snipers who came home spoke little about it. As most vietnam vets that I know speak very little about it unless they have had a few beers....or not at all.

My dad had shot competitively before ww2 and always felt had he gone to the military instead of working in war industry he would have been made a sniper. He used to say the average life of a sniper in the field was something like 13 minutes. So he was glad he didn't go at all. Also he was a bit too old at 22 in 42 with two children and a wife.

Some of the snipers in Vietnam used the same equipment as they did in ww2...30 06s with bolt action, but they also used scoped M1 garands and m14s with scopes. They had a starlight scope with which they could see very well at night too. They generally had more kills at night.

Our guys had pretty good accuracy over 1000 meters. The enemy snipers were considerably less... up to 800 meters.

Occasionally industrious snipers fitted their scopes to 50 cal machine guns for killing accuracy over 1500 meters, using single shots.

Today we have special 50 caliber sniper rifles. I think they are semi automatic.

Tom W

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