There’s a lot of ongoing controversy about the effect of the rifle in battle, but there’s no question that in certain times and places an individual rifleman can have a powerful effect. One such example comes to us from Afghanistan:
During the battle, the designated marksman single handedly thwarted a company-sized enemy RPG and machinegun ambush by reportedly killing 20 enemy fighters with his devastatingly accurate precision fire. He selflessly exposed himself time and again to intense enemy fire during a critical point in the eight-hour battle for Shewan in order to kill any enemy combatants who attempted to engage or maneuver on the Marines in the kill zone. What made his actions even more impressive was the fact that he didn’t miss any shots, despite the enemies’ rounds impacting within a foot of his fighting position.
“I was in my own little world,” the young corporal said. “I wasn’t even aware of a lot of the rounds impacting near my position, because I was concentrating so hard on making sure my rounds were on target.”
A word of explanation is in order here about the exploits of this modest rifleman, who declined to be named. First, he was not a sniper but a designated marksman, which is a soldier with an upgraded weapon (in this case, although it’s not identified, an M-14 rifle) who stays with his unit and does not operate separately as a sniper would. In other words he’s a good shot with some extra marksmanship training and a very accurate weapon who’s handy to have around in a firefight. Both the Army and Marines now use designated marksmen, who are in high demand both in urban areas like Iraq and in Afghanistan. Most now use a modified 7.62mm M-14 rifle, which is enjoying a new lease on life, instead of the standard 5.56mm M-16/M-4 series rifle.
The Marine corporal joins the ranks of other distinguished American riflemen like Alvin York (also a corporal when he won his Medal of Honor) and Timothy Murphy. Although he doesn’t quite match York’s record of killing 28 German soldiers in a single engagement, he’s close.
During the last few years, during the campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan, rifle marksmanship has come back into vogue, both as a force protection measure and a way to reduce civilian casualties in built-up areas.
The Civil War equivalent to the designated marksman was the sharpshooter, especially those in the Army of Northern Virginia’s sharpshooter battalions. With a few notable exceptions, most of these men operated as light infantrymen rather than as snipers in the modern sense. Like the Maine corporal mentioned above, they could on occasion be quite deadly. There is an unfortunate tendency today to characterize any rifleman as a “sniper” whether he actually acts like one or not. In fact, if the Army and Marines were to combine their designated riflemen into distinct units, they’d have something very much like what the Confederates came up with in the 1860s.
One of the arguments made in the 1850s against the use of long-range rifles with adjustable sights (and repeated today) was that in the smoke and confusion of combat a rifleman would never have the necessary sang-froid to adjust the sights for long range shots. That may have been true of the average line infantryman, but it’s also obvious from reading the accounts that some men were “cool” enough to do it, particularly when in a position, as behind breastworks, where they were not in great danger.
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