Hunter Sniper

Deke didn’t stop to make sure the man was dead, although he had no doubt of it. His momentum carried him right past the crumpled body, and he kept going. Behind him, Philly and Yoshio didn’t stop either.

They didn’t encounter any additional threats, Japanese or otherwise, as they rushed to rejoin Captain Merrick’s company on the airfield perimeter. Up ahead, he saw the trees thinning out and the clearing that indicated they had reached the airfield.

“Coming through!” Deke shouted for the benefit of the soldiers who might be apt to turn their guns on the sounds approaching from the jungle.

He needn’t have worried. Captain Merrick himself stood nearby, standing tall even as Japanese bullets cut the air.

“Hold your fire!” Merrick shouted at the men ready to shoot at the trio that had burst from the jungle growth. To Deke he said, “Where the hell have you been?”

“Chasing Japs.” Deke refrained from calling the officer “sir” on the battlefield — it was a surefire way to attract even more attention from any Japanese within earshot.

“There’s plenty right here. Get busy.”

Merrick’s company had quite a fight on their hands. The night blossomed with explosions, stabs of flame, and brilliant streams of machine-gun tracers. It was like the Fourth of July and Hades all wrapped up together.

Amid the overwhelming noise of weaponry, they heard shouted orders — some in English, some in Japanese — the enemy was that close. The air smelled of cordite mingled with the fecund odor of the jungle at night.

Following orders, the sniper team took up position in a foxhole occupied by a dead man. Deke shoved the body aside without thinking, then slid his rifle to his shoulder and his eye to the scope. The flashes and bursts sprang closer, but the telescopic sight severely limited his field of view. This was exactly why he had Yoshio as a spotter.

“On your left!” Yoshio shouted.

Deke swung the rifle that way. Through the scope, he spotted the movement just where Yoshio had said it would be. A shadow separated itself from the larger shadow of a tree trunk. The Japanese soldier had been creeping up on their position. Before the enemy could fire, Deke squeezed the trigger and dropped him.

Off to Deke’s right, Philly was also firing at a target using his own rifle with its telescopic sight. Yoshio was trying to spot for them both, but the action was too fast and fluid. He gave up and turned his full attention to giving direction to Deke — who was the better shot, anyhow. Philly would just have to satisfy himself blasting away at the enemy muzzle flashes.

There were a lot of those. The Japanese paratroopers had converged on the airfield to make their attack, and they seemed to be everywhere at once.

What we could really use is a machine gun, Deke thought.

He would just have to do what he could to help defeat the attack and defend this jungle airfield, one bullet at a time. Though highly accurate, especially in the hands of a skilled marksman like Deke, his Springfield rifle had a slower rate of fire due to it being a bolt-action weapon.

The US Army lacked any official sniper warfare training, unlike the Japanese or the Germans. It was a little ironic, considering the Americans’ reputations as hunters and crack shots. Weren’t they all supposed to be like Daniel Boone and maybe Wyatt Earp? The truth was far from that. However, a little training went a long way, which was why a few renegades like Lieutenant Steele had made the effort to train snipers and put real sniper rifles into the hands of men like Deke and Philly, with devastating effect.

For the most part, the US military doctrine saw itself as a blunt instrument, a hammer blow. Sometimes what you needed was an ice pick, which was exactly the purpose that a sniper served.

The real advantage of a sniper came at the fringes of a battle, or not even during a battle at all. A good sniper learned to pick off the enemy during moments when he least expected it: having a smoke, drinking from his canteen, a careless moment when he stood up to admire the view or joke with a friend. That was when a sniper delivered death, a fatal metallic pill to swallow.

A sniper remained unseen and unheard until that moment when a bullet came out of nowhere. A good sniper would fire one shot and then vanish like smoke before the enemy could pinpoint him. He left death and fear in his mysterious wake.

More than anything, Deke had come to realize, sniping was a head game to strike fear into the enemy in quieter moments. That wasn’t going to happen during a full-fledged firefight.

“Ten o’clock!” Yoshio shouted.