42                                      U.S. MARINES IN THE PERSIAN GULF, 1990-1991


to seem vulgar, even psychopathic, a coarse necessity best ignored if you want
to enjoy the benefits of it, like the making, as they say, of sausage.
    It is more modern to press a button and annihilate scores, hundreds,
thousands, whatever, with systems, capabilities, all of the euphemisms for the
mass-production Sniping that is war in the age of progress and technology.
    As Jean Cocteau said of World War It, the plural has triumphed over the
singular, a tendency Dylan Thomas deplored when he insisted in a poem about
an air raid that "after the first death there is no other."
    Sniping, the shooting part at least, is about first deaths. Snipers prefer to
talk about the other parts. They have learned to do it in precisely the language
that bureaucratic intellectuals approve of.
    "People don't understand sniping," says Staff Sgt. Mike Barrett.  "We're the
most misunderstood people in the world.     Our primary mission is intelligence,
indexing  targets, establishing disposition  and  composition    of the  enemy,
survei!lance and target acquisition, determining what's viable and what's not."
Indexing.  Disposition. Viable.
    "We are the eyes and ears of the commanding officer.      We carry cameras.
We have to be able to draw, do panoramic perspective drawing of what we see.
You have to be able to make it by yourselves out there, you and your partner.
You carry one meal a day, I never take a sleeping bag, I don't believe in
creature comforts.  The more creature comforts you have, the less edge you
have, and I'm not about losing the edge.    If it gets cold, my partner and I, we
hot-rack it, you roll up together inside a poncho liner, like you would with your
wife."
    Of course, there is the shooting too. Sometimes you might use the range of
these rifles, well over 1,000 meters, to take out a radar installation. Sometimes,
you might kill someone.
    There is no fancy language for this part, it seems.
    The sniper puts the rifle on his shoulder and his partner studies the target
through a spotting scope, calculates the range, estimates how much to allow for
crosswind by studying heat waves twitching out there.
    The sniper takes a breath, lets half of it out and fires.   It can take a full
second for the bullet to get there.
    "Your spotter is looking through the scope," Barrett says.      "He sees the
guy's head explode. Vapor."