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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.