{"id":3062,"date":"2023-10-21T12:10:40","date_gmt":"2023-10-21T16:10:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/newssprinters.com\/index.php\/world\/ukraine-a-sniper-mission-and-the-myth-of-the-good-kill\/21\/10\/2023\/"},"modified":"2023-10-21T12:10:40","modified_gmt":"2023-10-21T16:10:40","slug":"ukraine-a-sniper-mission-and-the-myth-of-the-good-kill","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/newssprinters.com\/index.php\/world\/ukraine-a-sniper-mission-and-the-myth-of-the-good-kill\/21\/10\/2023\/","title":{"rendered":"Ukraine, a Sniper Mission and the Myth of the \u2018Good Kill\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"

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SOUTHERN UKRAINE \u2014 What you need to understand about a sniper mission is that from the minute it begins to the minute it ends, everything you do is in service of killing another human.<\/p>\n

But almost no one says that. So it was a little startling when \u2014 standing in the stairwell of a half-destroyed building in southern Ukraine, in the midst of a mission with a team of Ukrainian snipers \u2014 one soldier decided to explain to me his moral calculations when killing Russian troops.<\/p>\n

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He was saying the quiet part out loud.<\/p>\n

The front line was roughly 1 mile away. The snipers stared through the scopes of their rifles, waiting for something or someone to move. Machine gunfire ratatated in the distance. I was hungry and ate a cold chicken nugget purchased at a gas station many hours before.<\/p>\n

We had been awake since 3 a.m., when a colleague from The New York Times and I crammed into two trucks with the sniper team and drove for about an hour \u2014 though it seemed much longer \u2014 over jagged back roads and shattered bridges to the front line.<\/p>\n

Thirteen years earlier, as a U.S. Marine corporal, I had led a sniper team of seven Marines and a Navy corpsman in southern Afghanistan.<\/p>\n

That was probably the only reason the Ukrainian snipers agreed to take me with them. 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.<\/p>\n

The soldier in the stairwell, a Ukrainian sniper who chose to go by his call sign, Raptor, seemed especially weary as he explained himself. He had shot competitively before the war and had become adept at shooting paper and steel targets.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s recoil to dissipate and for his watchful eye to readjust in the scope, framing the show of his own violence.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m not proud of this,\u201d Raptor began in deliberate English.<\/p>\n

Overtired and cautious not to throttle what he had to say, I dared not take notes. Only after we talked, I jotted something down: \u201cKilling someone \u2026 I\u2019m not proud of this.\u201d<\/p>\n

Violence in any conflict is processed differently by those involved and those not. Russia\u2019s full-scale invasion of Ukraine has been characterized by its sheer brutality \u2014 including cities leveled by bombardment and mass graves \u2014 and by how accepting much of the world has become of wholesale death and destruction.<\/p>\n

Casualty numbers \u2014 inflated, closely guarded and impossible to verify \u2014 are traded like sports scores between Ukraine and Russia. Snuff videos of combatants being killed by drones, gunfire and artillery circulate like some digital token of battlefield action.<\/p>\n

None of that changes the reality that entire generations in Ukraine and Russia are being thinned death by death.<\/p>\n

As in any war, to cushion the effects of their own violence, those fighting fall back on the hierarchical imperatives of modern military service. Ukrainian soldiers also realize that to lose the war is to lose their country to an invader.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe kill not because we are vicious, but because it\u2019s our order, our duty,\u201d Raptor said.<\/p>\n

His reflection had a level of clarity that had taken me years to find myself. How could he talk about pride and duty in the middle of the act? There was no time for that here, in the middle of a war.<\/p>\n

But Raptor stood in front of me, wrestling with something we dared not talk about in Afghanistan. He was breaking the fourth wall.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think of people on the other side,\u201d he said. \u201cThey might not want to be here, but they are here.\u201d<\/p>\n

Raptor was working his way through the subject that sniper cultures often avoid. Few times during my deployment did I pause to consider the Taliban \u2014 at least in conversation. We conditioned ourselves that Talibs were targets and little else. Our time revolved around killing them as they killed us, and before they killed us more.<\/p>\n

It would take years for me to realize how indoctrinated we all were. Raptor already understood \u2014 at least enough to articulate his findings to a stranger in a stairwell amid the thud of distant artillery strikes \u2014 that he was killing a human and trying to explain why.<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t want to kill, but I have to. I\u2019ve seen what they\u2019ve done,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

We found ourselves in the middle of some poorly thought-out counterinsurgency strategy, propping up a corrupt government that collapsed almost as soon as the United States left. We were protecting one another. That became a binding ideology, all the clarity we could summon in the puzzle our politicians in Washington handed us. We stumbled through exhausted, mouthing our lines, until our tours ended and we were discharged.<\/p>\n

Now we\u2019re discomforted by our own killings, aware of the details and the violence we committed under the bright banners of \u201cnation-building,\u201d or \u201cwinning hearts and minds,\u201d or whatever our officers told us as the seasons changed. In the shadow of our failures, our silence hangs over it all.<\/p>\n

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 \u201cgood kill.\u201d<\/p>\n

Raptor\u2019s mission ended at dusk without a shot being fired. And after another hourlong car ride, we arrived in the parking lot of the same gas station where I had ordered my chicken nuggets that morning. The sky was oily black. The only light from the rest stop seeped through the cracks in the sandbags that shielded its windows.<\/p>\n

Raptor and the rest of the sniper team asked if we wanted dinner. Then they apologized, in the way of wearied tradesmen who had not done their jobs, for a day without a kill.<\/p>\n

c.2023 The New York Times Company<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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SOUTHERN UKRAINE — What you need to understand about a sniper mission is that from the minute it begins to the minute