“Slitting throats of residents, looting and burning homes and abducting dozens of trapped women and children.” The Associated Press

This was in Nigeria, home of the Boka Haram meaning “against books” or against education. And this is another front of radical Islam’s attempt to establish an Islamic State, this one among Nigeria’s 170 million population. And the above atrocities have been continuing since Friday. During this time, ISIS decapitated a Japanese man, in a growing list of beheadings, because his country wouldn’t pay a ransom to keep these insane ISIS acts going .

This is not war, this is medieval madness. Now about war and killing:

“The object of war is not to die for your country but to make the other bastard die for his.” Gen. George S. Patton

It’s been said that a sniper is a coward because he shoots from hiding at a distant target.

Scopes and cross hairs come in many forms. But one thing is always true, it’s best to be on the good side of the glass. The American sniper…is on the good side of the glass.

Hiding and deception in combat are as old as war. The British thought of the American revolutionaries as cowards because they hid behind trees, brush and boulders while the Brits were out in open wearing red uniforms in rank and file, mano y mano, marching shoulder to shoulder. But the rebels used their land knowledge and stealth to take the advantage from the numerous British troops. And the rest, as is said, is American history.

The military trains in the use of cover and concealment, the former is the use of something that will both hide and protect you, like a boulder, a piece of concrete or a truck engine. Concealment is the act of hiding behind a shrub or in tall grass that will at least conceal you. Of course the former is preferred but the latter is better than nothing.

But if hiding from the enemy while engaging him in combat is cowardly maybe we should do away with stealth bombers and fighter jets, maybe artillery and rockets too…all whose targets are distant and unaware.

Maybe camouflage combat uniforms are cowardly as well. Perhaps Michael Moore would prefer our snipers to wear British red coats. And wouldn’t submarines which stealthily launch torpedoes or missiles be the height of cowardly acts of war? Should they not at least have orange warning flags attached to their conning towers like the safety flags on trikes?

We Americans send ¾ of one percent of our population to serve for us. Sometimes, the service we ask of them is not wisely thought through. But serve they do.

And the remaining 99 ¼ % of us stay home and watch the “breaking news” of war on TV. Some of us cheer the troops on as if we had boots on the ground ourselves. Some criticize every strategy  and tactic as if we were adorned with four silver stars. But support them we do.

We owe our troops that support. We owe them the wisdom to not send them off to needless war too. A wisdom that sometimes eludes us. But when they go, they go for us. We need to always remember that. And we don’t need anyone sniping at them.

If smart bombs and hell fire missiles fired from drones are considered surgical strikes then a sniper kill is arthroscopic, minimally invasive. One round, with acupuncture accuracy…a clean kill.

Snipers are cowards?

No, the cowards are the enemy with medieval mentality who clip off human heads as if they were working in a poultry farm. Cowards are those who stone women to death. Who shoot little girls in the head for riding a bus to school. Who burn entire peasant villages to coerce others into an Islamic State. Who raid, slit throats,  kidnap little girls by the hundreds for commerce in the human traffic of forced marriage to insurgents. Who “fit”  pre-pubescent girls for a “rite-of-passage”, a wrap of explosives that will pass them on from a life they never began to taste.

 These are acts of the ignorant and cruel, the cowards of centuries past. These are  the primitive acts which the rest of the globe, through education, have left behind. And it is that feared education that is most needed to defuse that bomb. But until that blessed change rises from those desert sands, we simply must stop them.

The America sniper is putting his skill to use to stop these brutal cowards and their supporters. He suits up and lays in wait. He lays his life on the line every time he does so. But he does the job we sent him to do: To fire his powerful rifle round to its target, thousands of feet away…and hundreds of years into the past.

Every time an American sniper “makes the other bastard die” there might be, in this world, one less petite-size explosive vest, one less slit throat and…one less empty dinner place at an American table.

Every time an American sniper’s rifle cracks he earns my respect and my salute.

God bless them all. God bless America.

Semper Fi,

Leebythesea

Related post:https://leebythesea.me/2015/01/12/got-gratitude-take-a-number/