Maia Gabrial
22nd January 2015, 13:40
I've learned that "American Sniper" is a very popular movie right now and no one knows why it's succeeds where the other war flicks haven't.
These times are so morally turned upside down. Good is bad. And bad is good. Violence and murder and criminals are glorified in training programs called Hollywood movies. It baffles me how some people just don't understand that.
There's another thought provoking article in Veterans Today. Gordon Duff, editor of Veterans Today was a sniper back in Vietnam and his recollections don't seem to match Hollywood's take on things.
American Sniper Mythology and Other Tales of Horror
Posted by Gordon Duff on January 21, 2015
Being a sniper is all about shame
Lounge Lizard Clint Eastwood in his Best Dirty Harry American Sniper Suit
Lounge Lizard Clint Eastwood in his Best Dirty Harry American Sniper Suit
By Gordon Duff, Senior Editor
The job of sniper has nothing to do with the stories of movie and television, nothing related to the heavily fictionalized books foisted on the public decade after decade. Snipers with high kill numbers shoot primarily armed American allies they “mistake” for enemy or unarmed civilians. The best of them protect American bases and small units with precision fire and take great risks.
If you kill more than dozen people as a sniper and you aren’t guilty of murdering innocent civilians, I would be very surprised. If you are insane enough to convince yourself, let’s say you are in Afghanistan or Iraq, countries where it is legal for any civilian to carry a weapon and no sane person would go outside without one, that shooting “armed Muslims” makes you a hero, you are both a liar and a fool. You are probably also a psychopath.
Most of the armed “insurgents” the US has killed during the War on Terror were friendly militias, local herdsmen or, at best, armed tribal units that were armed tribal units when they fought the British and Russians as well for hundreds of years. We are talking about “patriots” defending their country against foreign invaders who support drug cartels and criminal politicians like the governments the US has placed in power over and over.
I do expect this; I expect an American Sniper to use his skills to protect American personnel from attack even if America is there as part of an armed aggression on the part of whoever it is that runs America, which sure as hell isn’t the American people. At best it can be considered a sad necessity and any moral person would, as soon as possible, rectify that mistake. When wars were fought by draftees, that was harder. Today you can simply not sign up again or ask for another job.
Oh, I am forgetting “stop loss,” that the US stopped letting people simply quit when their enlistment was over. We don’t talk about that either. We don’t talk about not thousands of suicides but hundreds of thousands. Yes, this is not a simple story and there are no entire good or bad people. Welcome to reality.
I was a sniper in Vietnam. I held that occupation for a short time, seen as a “relief” from every day life there which for Marines involved 3 hours sleep, starvation, sleeping on the ground “behind enemy lines,” and the rigors of the backpacking trip from hell. Here, decades later, the weapon I used isn’t even officially listed and doesn’t exist.
Sniper “talk” is largely mythology and, far too often, simply crazy.
Anyone ever find a .243 M14 National Match with Gen1.5 Starlight Scope? Shooting a handful of people at night from 400 meters away could be done in less time than it takes to open a can of beer and this was with what some might consider “junk” by today’s standards.
I should have taken a photo of it, I could sell it to gun magazines for millions. There were folks out there with Remington 700s though none of us ever saw one, maybe we weren’t supposed to or were there other reasons?
99% of talk about snipers is plain bull and mythology. I am not the world expert but I have “done the work” in the worst place on earth, I collect sniper rifles and own a company that builds them. I make weapons that are longer range, lighter, smaller and more versatile, easily converted from silenced/suppressed short barreled MP (machine pistol) or SMG (submachine gun) configurations to a sniper file capable of extraordinary range. Technology allows this, new optics and weapons designs.
I make weapons and can only hope they are used properly. There are bad people who deserve killing but most of them are trained and supplied by the Mossad, CIA and our British and French allies, I am talking Boko Harum, ISIS and that gang. You didn’t know that? Imagine that.
There is a reason for this as many military organizations send out reconnaissance units with short ranged weapons and are incapable of defending themselves from accurate long range fire or require “overwatch” protection while engaged in building searches.
In South Vietnam there were some legitimate targets, sort of. In truth, the US was in South Vietnam illegally and on the wrong side in the first place so any moral high ground disappears immediately anyway. So, if you were a “sniper” killing the enemy, one thing for certain, you were shooting people better than you are.
It took a fat minute to figure that one out and absolutely everyone knew it, something we aren’t so sure about with our new “professional” military today. The “pro-Vietnam war” bull****ters began creeping out of the woodwork during the Reagan administration with the vast majority of them Bush/Romney type blowhards, “Chickenhawks” and phonies. Some had washed out of the military during basic training, others hadn’t been in the military at all.
While working for an intelligence organization long ago, I remember meeting with fellow “Vietnam vets,” all claiming to be Navy Seals, Marines or Ranger/Special Forces. They were cooks and truck drivers, honorable occupations of course and perhaps they shouldn’t have felt pressured to make things up, but you see where I am going with this?
I, of course, listened to their stories, the in some cases stories of an imaginary Vietnam. You see, most Marines either served in and out of DaNang or at least knew the city well, the bases, the black market spots, things like that. Try this one out, ask a Marine if he knows who “Sandy at 3 corners” is. We will save the explanation for a book sometime.
What we considered a legitimate target was a mortar or rocket team. They would infiltrate into the region surrounding DaNang and either fire on the city or the US bases surrounding, bases that at one time held several hundred thousand troops. The list of bases around DaNang would be rather lengthy with some like NSA (Naval Support Activity) extremely large, others with only a few dozen men.
No, there was no hospital at China Beach, no nurses or whores, not American whores anyway, not many and only for the privileged. We could have a discussion about Red Cross “girls” at some time but bringing up things like that should have been done by someone else like Fox News.
For the rest of the article: http://www.veteranstoday.com/2015/01/21/sniper-mythology-and-other-tales-of-horror/
These times are so morally turned upside down. Good is bad. And bad is good. Violence and murder and criminals are glorified in training programs called Hollywood movies. It baffles me how some people just don't understand that.
There's another thought provoking article in Veterans Today. Gordon Duff, editor of Veterans Today was a sniper back in Vietnam and his recollections don't seem to match Hollywood's take on things.
American Sniper Mythology and Other Tales of Horror
Posted by Gordon Duff on January 21, 2015
Being a sniper is all about shame
Lounge Lizard Clint Eastwood in his Best Dirty Harry American Sniper Suit
Lounge Lizard Clint Eastwood in his Best Dirty Harry American Sniper Suit
By Gordon Duff, Senior Editor
The job of sniper has nothing to do with the stories of movie and television, nothing related to the heavily fictionalized books foisted on the public decade after decade. Snipers with high kill numbers shoot primarily armed American allies they “mistake” for enemy or unarmed civilians. The best of them protect American bases and small units with precision fire and take great risks.
If you kill more than dozen people as a sniper and you aren’t guilty of murdering innocent civilians, I would be very surprised. If you are insane enough to convince yourself, let’s say you are in Afghanistan or Iraq, countries where it is legal for any civilian to carry a weapon and no sane person would go outside without one, that shooting “armed Muslims” makes you a hero, you are both a liar and a fool. You are probably also a psychopath.
Most of the armed “insurgents” the US has killed during the War on Terror were friendly militias, local herdsmen or, at best, armed tribal units that were armed tribal units when they fought the British and Russians as well for hundreds of years. We are talking about “patriots” defending their country against foreign invaders who support drug cartels and criminal politicians like the governments the US has placed in power over and over.
I do expect this; I expect an American Sniper to use his skills to protect American personnel from attack even if America is there as part of an armed aggression on the part of whoever it is that runs America, which sure as hell isn’t the American people. At best it can be considered a sad necessity and any moral person would, as soon as possible, rectify that mistake. When wars were fought by draftees, that was harder. Today you can simply not sign up again or ask for another job.
Oh, I am forgetting “stop loss,” that the US stopped letting people simply quit when their enlistment was over. We don’t talk about that either. We don’t talk about not thousands of suicides but hundreds of thousands. Yes, this is not a simple story and there are no entire good or bad people. Welcome to reality.
I was a sniper in Vietnam. I held that occupation for a short time, seen as a “relief” from every day life there which for Marines involved 3 hours sleep, starvation, sleeping on the ground “behind enemy lines,” and the rigors of the backpacking trip from hell. Here, decades later, the weapon I used isn’t even officially listed and doesn’t exist.
Sniper “talk” is largely mythology and, far too often, simply crazy.
Anyone ever find a .243 M14 National Match with Gen1.5 Starlight Scope? Shooting a handful of people at night from 400 meters away could be done in less time than it takes to open a can of beer and this was with what some might consider “junk” by today’s standards.
I should have taken a photo of it, I could sell it to gun magazines for millions. There were folks out there with Remington 700s though none of us ever saw one, maybe we weren’t supposed to or were there other reasons?
99% of talk about snipers is plain bull and mythology. I am not the world expert but I have “done the work” in the worst place on earth, I collect sniper rifles and own a company that builds them. I make weapons that are longer range, lighter, smaller and more versatile, easily converted from silenced/suppressed short barreled MP (machine pistol) or SMG (submachine gun) configurations to a sniper file capable of extraordinary range. Technology allows this, new optics and weapons designs.
I make weapons and can only hope they are used properly. There are bad people who deserve killing but most of them are trained and supplied by the Mossad, CIA and our British and French allies, I am talking Boko Harum, ISIS and that gang. You didn’t know that? Imagine that.
There is a reason for this as many military organizations send out reconnaissance units with short ranged weapons and are incapable of defending themselves from accurate long range fire or require “overwatch” protection while engaged in building searches.
In South Vietnam there were some legitimate targets, sort of. In truth, the US was in South Vietnam illegally and on the wrong side in the first place so any moral high ground disappears immediately anyway. So, if you were a “sniper” killing the enemy, one thing for certain, you were shooting people better than you are.
It took a fat minute to figure that one out and absolutely everyone knew it, something we aren’t so sure about with our new “professional” military today. The “pro-Vietnam war” bull****ters began creeping out of the woodwork during the Reagan administration with the vast majority of them Bush/Romney type blowhards, “Chickenhawks” and phonies. Some had washed out of the military during basic training, others hadn’t been in the military at all.
While working for an intelligence organization long ago, I remember meeting with fellow “Vietnam vets,” all claiming to be Navy Seals, Marines or Ranger/Special Forces. They were cooks and truck drivers, honorable occupations of course and perhaps they shouldn’t have felt pressured to make things up, but you see where I am going with this?
I, of course, listened to their stories, the in some cases stories of an imaginary Vietnam. You see, most Marines either served in and out of DaNang or at least knew the city well, the bases, the black market spots, things like that. Try this one out, ask a Marine if he knows who “Sandy at 3 corners” is. We will save the explanation for a book sometime.
What we considered a legitimate target was a mortar or rocket team. They would infiltrate into the region surrounding DaNang and either fire on the city or the US bases surrounding, bases that at one time held several hundred thousand troops. The list of bases around DaNang would be rather lengthy with some like NSA (Naval Support Activity) extremely large, others with only a few dozen men.
No, there was no hospital at China Beach, no nurses or whores, not American whores anyway, not many and only for the privileged. We could have a discussion about Red Cross “girls” at some time but bringing up things like that should have been done by someone else like Fox News.
For the rest of the article: http://www.veteranstoday.com/2015/01/21/sniper-mythology-and-other-tales-of-horror/