One Shot One Kill by Charles W. Sasser

Author:Charles W. Sasser
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pocket Books
Published: 1990-12-07T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Even though history reveals that it is the soldier who can shoot who plays the most important role in battlefield victory, American GIs have progressively become poorer marksmen. Except for snipers and a few hard-core Army Regulars and Marines, U.S. soldiers of this century have rarely attained any true skill or proficiency with their weapons.

During World War I, the American soldier expended an average of 7,000 rounds for each enemy casualty. The average jumped to 25,000 during World War II, while Korea doubled that figure to 50,000 rounds. Estimates range anywhere from 200,000 to 400,000 rounds fired for each enemy body count in Vietnam.

In 1971 when Major Lones Wigger, Jr., assumed command of the U.S. Army’s Twenty-third Infantry Division’s Sniper School in Vietnam, his duties included marksmanship training for the division’s replacement troops.

Wigger was an expert rifleman. His marksmanship earned him a spot on the 1968 U.S. Olympic rifle team that competed in Mexico City. Although he won no medals at the Olympics, he took a silver medal in the three hundred meter prone and a bronze in small-bore free rifle two years later during the World Championships. He was also a member of three gold medal winning teams and six silver medal winning teams at the World Championships. His 1971 tour in Vietnam was his second. In 1967,he served as an agricultural advisor for an infantry operations staff in Vietnam.

What Wigger discovered in Vietnam in 1971 stunned him.

“I found the average replacement could not hit a silhouette target at twenty-five meters, knew little of basic marksmanship fundamentals, and did not understand why he needed to zero his rifle.”

Wigger was not the only one to make this discovery. Master Sergeant Emil W. Heugatter found the same thing in 1969 at Cu Chi when he took charge of the Twenty-fifth Infantry Division’s Combat Marksmanship School, an euphemism for “sniper school” since the Army was still squeamish about admitting it was training snipers.

In testing the marksmanship proficiency of selected line platoons, Heugatter and Sergeant First Class Cleone L. Anthony placed one-foot-square targets on stakes at a distance of twenty-five meters from the firing line. Only about ten percent of the soldiers in the selected platoons were able to hit the targets. Some of the poor showing was due to lack of marksmanship knowledge, some because most of the soldiers did not understand why they should zero their rifles, nor how to do it, and some because of poor maintenance. The front sights of some rifles had rusted beyond adjustment, some had worn-out barrels, and one rifle had no front sights at all.

These findings extended even to officers and NCOs.

Vietnam, say many military observers, was the result of decades of military de-emphasis on marksmanship in favor of returning to the old philosophy of massed firepower that dates back to the stand-up-andshoot armies of Europe. It is a proven fact that only a small percentage of soldiers in combat ever actually fire their weapons atthe enemy.

“Only one out of five servicemen in Korea regularly fired their rifles in combat,” observed Major General M.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.