ANTHOLOGY AND ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY                                    41


In these articles Henry Allen,   himself a former Marine,  writing for The
Washington Post,  captures the outlook and idiosyncracies of the frontline
Marine.  The first article describes the most self reliant of all modern warriors,
the sniper. In the second article, Allen shows how Marines, having spent months
in the desert away from their families, and with the prospect of war looming,
celebrated Christmas.

Squinting at Death:              The Desert Snipers.

by Henry Allen

The Washington Post, 28 December 1990.

   Of course, when you are a sniper there is shooting.
   In the Marine Corps this shooting is done with a custom-made 14-pound
.308-caliber rifle with a glass-bedded bull barrel, a Remington action and a
10-power Unertl telescopic sight. It has a bolt that doesn't so much load the
bullet as insinuate it into the chamber to be fired, a kind of smug perfection.
It has the heft of one single piece of metal, like an ingot.
   You ask if you can lift it to your shoulder and look through the sights.
   A circle of Saudi Arabian desert reels in the lens, with a bit of scrub
hovering there in magnified silence. There is something about it that is intimate
and unreal at the same time, as if you were aiming at a thought inside your own
mind.
   "The first impression people get when you tell them you're a sniper is you're
the guy in the tree," says Sgt. Dave Cornett as he puts the rifle, called an
M4OAl, back in a sealed and cushioned carrying case.  "But you'd never shoot
from a tree."
   On the other hand, there are all those stories your Uncle Louie told about
Japanese snipers in palm trees, and there is the ongoing concept of man as the
murdering ape, too, so the tree thing lingers. Trees do not figure in this theater.
Snipers will be lucky to find a dune, a bit of scrub, maybe one of the little trash
piles left by the Bedouins.
   Snipers are among the last warriors in the Western world who choose their
enemies and not only kill them but see them die.
   This is not fashionable, nowadays, as Vietnam veterans learned when they
were asked, with triumphal snickers: "Did you kill anybody?"
   Sgt. Alvin York was a great American legend of World War I for his
sniping. You shoot Germans like turkeys, he said, you start at the back of the
column and work up.  But ever since bureaucrats and intellectuals started doing
most of the talking about war after World War II, this kind of killing has come

Copyright 1990 The Washingion Post. Rcprinted ~ith Pcrmission