On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society

by Dave Grossman

From January 7 to July 24, 1969, U.S. Army snipers in Vietnam accounted for 1,245 confirmed kills, with an average of 1.39 bullets expended per kill. (Compare this with the average fifty thousand rounds of ammunition required for every enemy soldier killed in Vietnam.)[3] In the course of calculating confirmed sniper kills, no enemy was counted as a kill unless an American soldier actually was able to physically “place his foot” on the body. Yet for all its effectiveness, there is a strange revulsion and resistance toward this very personal, one-on-one killing by snipers. Peter Staff, in his book on snipers, notes that after every war “the United States military rushes to distance itself from its snipers. The same men called upon to perform impossible missions during combat quickly find themselves to be peacetime pariahs. World War I, World War II, Korea. It was the same.”