A New York Times profile of a Ukrainian sniper confronts the “myth of a ‘good kill'”

EDITOR’S NOTE: Thomas Gibbons-Neff served with the U.S. Marines in Afghanistan; he now writes for The New York Times, covering the war in Ukraine. Karl Marlantes served with the U.S. Marines in Vietnam; he is the author of three novels, including the acclaimed Vietnam novel “Matterhorn” and a nonfiction book about the moral implications of war. When Gibbons-Neff wrote a day-in-the-life profile of a Ukrainian sniper on the front lines of the battle against Russian invaders, we asked Marlantes to comment on what made it a standout piece of journalism. His short, pointed essay, published as Ukraine enters a third year of war against Russia, is not a typical Storyboard analysis of story craft — but a thoughtful reaction to waging and covering war. WARNING: Some readers may be offended by slang terms used to describe enemy combatants.

By Karl Marlantes

I was asked by Storyboard for my literary reaction to Thomas Gibbons-Neff’s article in the New York Times (Ukraine, a Sniper Mission and the Myth of the ‘Good Kill,’ October 21, 2023). I was a young Marine infantry officer in Vietnam in 1968-69. I was not a sniper. I did, however, on occasion accompany a sniper to act as a spotter or security, so I have some experience with them. I never wanted their job.

I also am a writer of novels and essays. But I am not writing an essay about the writing craft in Gibbons-Neff’s piece. What follows instead are observations from my time in the field and thoughts brought to mind as I read the sniper profile.

Movies and television show the hidden sniper silently waiting to kill his enemy, keenly observing the landscape, then carefully putting a bullet in an enemy soldier’s head. The reality is that observing anything for hours and hours on short sleep is almost impossible. It involves tedious waiting in a state of anxiety about being discovered and getting killed. As for the much-admired headshot, not likely. A good sniper will shoot for the center of mass. If the shot doesn’t kill, taking care of the wounded soldier will at least temporarily remove two more soldiers from combat.

Snipers are almost always drawn from infantry soldiers, but they must have additional attributes. A sniper must be better at keeping fear and excitement in control. An irregular heartbeat or a hand that even hints at shaking can move the end of a long rifle barrel an almost imperceptible amount. Such a tiny movement, further magnified by the extreme distances to the targets, would almost always result in a miss. Worse than a miss, the shot could reveal the hiding place, giving the sniper only seconds to move before being hit with violent return fire. An infantryman engaging an enemy is most likely to fire on full-automatic in the general direction of the threat — and emotions can have full range.

Snipers therefore are members of a club inside a club and experience war differently than an infantryman. Gibbons-Neff is someone in that club within a club, which is why he was allowed to accompany the Ukrainian sniper, Raptor. His article telling us what that experience was like is rare. Club members usually don’t like talking to outsiders. As he writes:

They trusted that I had done the thing, and that even with a language barrier, I understood what was happening around me: orders of work, setting up a hide, the quiet monotony and flurry of activity that comes with watching the same spot for hours or days with a rifle purpose-built to kill at long range.

Gibbons-Neff describes how he felt about killing when he was a sniper in Afghanistan compared to how Raptor felt about it as a sniper in Ukraine. First, when Gibbons-Neff did his killing, he was likely much younger than Raptor. He tells us Raptor “shot competitively before the war.”

Now it was different: He was shooting people. At such long distances, it took several seconds for the bullet to find its way through air to cloth, then flesh. Long enough for the rifle’s recoil to dissipate and for his watchful eye to readjust in the scope, framing the show of his own violence.

“I’m not proud of this,” Raptor began in deliberate English.

Also, Marines are the youngest military service. The frontal cortex doesn’t mature in humans until their 20s. That’s why so many of our best warriors are teenagers: They don’t think — they react, and they carry out orders without questioning. Based on Gibbons-Neff’s profile, it seems Raptor was a mature adult with a fully functioning cerebral cortex.

I wanted to applaud when I read Gibbons-Neff’s lines about “how accepting the world has become of wholesale death and destruction.” Then he emphasizes his point:

Casualty numbers — inflated, closely guarded and impossible to verify — are traded like sports scores between Kyiv and Moscow. Snuff videos of combatants being killed by drones, gunfire and artillery circulate like some digital token of battlefield action.

I remember watching TV coverage of the early days of the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq. Huge headlines, images of bombs exploding in the night, tanks roaring down highways, stirring martial music, and banners over and below the images like “The War in Iraq – Day Three.” You’d think they were describing the Olympics. Forgive them Father, for they know not what they do.

Most television news people and Internet bloggers are not in the club that Gibbons-Neff or anyone fighting in a combat zone belong to. Journalists should report the news and leave the cheering to high school football games.

But a major difference between the three of us — Gibbons-Neff, Raptor and me — is that Raptor is fighting to defend his people from rape, torture and death. Gibbons-Neff and I were not. Neither the Viet Cong nor the Taliban were storming the beaches at Santa Monica. We were “carrying out American foreign policy,” cooked up by more people who aren’t in the club. Too often these people have no idea what they’re asking of young soldiers and Marines. If you don’t know the costs, you don’t weigh them against the benefits.

Coming to terms

What all three of us do have in common is needing to come to terms with the killing we did. The “enemy” is usually coerced into killing by their culture or conscription, just as our side is. When you face that enemy, however, and don’t shoot true and fast, you will die. You will revert to your most primal animal self and you will not be thinking about how either of you got into this terrible mess. I suspect it’s a bit different for a sniper, because usually his enemy doesn’t know he’s in a fight. The sniper has a better chance of thinking, which is the function of the cerebral cortex, as opposed to reacting purely from the amygdala, which is the most likely mental state of the young infantryman engaged in combat.

It would take years for me to realize how indoctrinated we all were. Raptor already understood — at least enough to articulate his findings to a stranger in a stairwell amid the thud of distant artillery strikes — that he was killing a human being, and trying to explain why.

“I don’t want to kill, but I have to — I’ve seen what they’ve done,” Raptor went on, his own moral and martial purpose linked to the atrocities Russian forces had committed throughout the war. For Raptor, the reason for pulling the trigger was clear. For me and my comrades, all these years later, the reason we chose to kill can continue to elude us.

I would add some nuance to Gibbons-Neff’s description of “how indoctrinated we all were.” I don’t believe the military is smart enough to turn anyone into a killer. I believe what the military does is remove that thin, spider web of civilization that keeps our primitive killer instincts in check. We are not the top animal on the food chain because we’re nice. Boot camp is a finishing school.

A normal human finds it extremely difficult to kill another human. However, we have no problem killing an animal that is attacking us. It’s very likely in our genes. So to overcome the normal inhibitions of killing another human, we unconsciously employ a sort of psychological trick that is encouraged by the military — not indoctrinated by it.

Many people who are not in the club decry this is “dehumanizing.” You’re damned straight it is. It is the only way that anyone who is not a psychopath or sociopath can accomplish a mission that involves killing. We kill a false animal instead of a fellow human. To aid this we use names like hadji, sand rat, towel head, gook, nip, Kraut, commie, capitalist pig — there are hundreds of these names, and they’ve been used for centuries. Not only does the military encourage this, but so does society. We have boxcar loads of names we’ve learned since childhood for people whose politics, race, religion and even sexual orientation differ from ours: MAGAs, wokes, coons, crackers, prods, mackerel snappers, jihadis, bible thumpers, sodomites, rug eaters…it takes only a small push to move from people we dislike to people we want to kill.

This psychological fix, however, is only temporary. Some length of time after the killing takes place, often several decades later, that sand rat or gook we killed turns back into a frightened 18-year-old boy — just as we were. Eventually we must come to terms with the killing of another human. In this regard, Raptor perhaps has it easier than Gibbons-Neff and I have because, as Gibbons-Neff points out, Raptor was defending his sisters and brothers from rape and torture and fighting for the survival of his nation and the right to live under the rule of law. Because of the morally ambiguous wars our country sent Gibbons-Neff and me to fight, we have had to come to terms with killing without such helpful justification.

Now we’re discomforted by our own killings, aware of the details and the violence we committed under the bright banners of “nation-building” or “winning hearts and minds,” or whatever our officers told us as the seasons changed. In the shadow of our failures, our silence hangs over it all.

It was hard not to be jealous of Raptor and his team, especially in the wake of my lost war. Therein was the trap, the dizzying seduction of the “good kill.”

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Karl Marlantes is the author of the Vietnam novel “Matterhorn” and three other books. He lives in Washington state.