War

by Sebastian Junger

Snipers have the power to make even silence unnerving, so their effectiveness is way out of proportion to the number of rounds they shoot. The KOP’s mortars eventually start up, great explosions that crash through the base and then rumble back to us from the mountaintops. They may have killed the guy, but I doubt it, and in the end it doesn’t even matter; it’s just one man with a rifle and ten dollars’ worth of ammunition. He doesn’t even need to hit anyone to be effective: helicopters aren’t flying into the valley and thirty or forty men spend the afternoon behind sandbags trying to figure out whether they’re getting shot at by a Russian-made Dragunov or an old Enfield .308. Once I was at the operations center when single shots started coming in, and First Sergeant Caldwell headed for the door to deal with it. On his way out I asked him what was going on. “Some jackass wastin’ our time,” he said. That jackass was probably a local teenager who was paid by one of the insurgent groups to fire off a magazine’s worth of ammo at the KOP. The going rate was five dollars a day. He could fire at the base until mortars started coming back at him and then he could drop off the back side of the ridge and be home in twenty minutes.