Really for the VC I think the dogs would have become food. Most captured enemy soldiers were outfitted only with a small tube of rice and a portion of nuc mom, the fermented fish sauce popular in SE Asia. I think after even two or three days of that I’d be ready to eat the loyal company pet myself.
As has been mentioned, a sniper is used these days to do recon, and to provide cover fire. What most of our snipers are doing in the sandbox these days is living on rooftops, and waiting to catch badguys setting up ambushes or IED’s, and then taking them out.
Also, I don’t have a cite on hand, so I’ll have to go find one, but I recall reading in another book that most military brass discounts Hathcocks many claims of being a solo stalker. I would attribute it to the disdain held for the sniper, save one man stated that if they had known where an NVA general of importance was going to be, with exact enough details to send a sniper, they would have just plastered the area with high explosives.
I take Hatchock stories with a grain of salt, but still find them entertaining, and there is no doubt that he surely had the skills to back up his tales. That man’s a legend.
No lie, though: my Bichon would’ve found Hatchcock in no time. 
In your defense, you did state you have no cite, but would you mind finding one. Perhaps my point of view was implanted in my head a la brainwashing, but I have never heard this from anyone. So, I must ask…do you have a cite (from as good a source as possible, pretty please)?
FormerMarineGuy … while you’re here: dogs can find snipers hiding in open terrain no problem, right? If not, are there anti-dog countermeasures out there?
A trained guard dog in the military do not need a sock to find an enemy. What they do is to indicate (silently, of course) to the trained “dog patroller” that they smell that somebody was here a short while ago. And if the soldier wants him to, the dog follows the scent, and often is able to stop, sit, and thus silently indicate that the person they are following, is now close. We had those kind of dogs at my company and their work was impressive. Don’t know about the VC:s though, but surely a pain in the arse for a sniper crawling away, one would guess.
I have never been a sniper nor attended sniper school, but I was friends with snipers. Anyone with knowledge of dogs can come in here and tell you about there great sense of smell and great instincts. With that being said, yes, a dog can find someone in open terrain. However, in the case of sniper killings from so far away, it would be pretty hard.
The countermeasure would be a shot in little Fido’s head, I guess.
With everyone talking about snipers and snipering, I think that CalMeacham hit it on the spot, saying most snipers get away in the confusion following the kill. If the sniper were to have proper cover and is a nice distance away, he could just get up and take off to his pick up spot.
Also, as pointed out by a few posters, the role of the sniper has changed over the years with more urban combat. The Marine sniper tends to be more of a scout, and does provide cover fire from rooftops and the like.
However, as Bobotheoptimist also pointed out, the Marine Corps did learn a lot from the Vietnam War and it’s self-taught sniper training (Marine snipers in Vietnam learned a lot as the war moved on) and a lot of the stuff is still used today and is even taught to basic infantrymen throughout their careers.
The emergence of rifles chambering the Browning .50 Cal round, such as the Barrett Rifle, allow reliable kills out to ~ 1 mile. Human sniper teams have flexibility and mobility issues that machines do not have.
An interesting discussion would invovle the interplay between the primary sniper and the secondary sniper/spotter.
There are other types of snipers, those who dig hides, crap in clingfilm, urinate in a bottle and wait for days.
Also tree snipers, typically Chindits in Burma.
A story I heard about a Marine sniper in Vietnam (I don’t recall if it was Hathcock or someone else, and my source is a History Channel show about snipers) involved a Vietnamese sniper of some notoriety being sent out to hunt this particular American sniper. This fellow was apparantly quite good, having taken a few guys out at the base in Vietnam where the American snipers were trained. Anyhow, the American sniper and his spotter are in turn sent out to hunt this guy down, so they can go about their work unimpeded.
At some point, a bullet strikes the canteen of the spotter, alerting them to the enemy presence, and the American sniper takes a shot at a glint of sunlight reflecting off of glass. They make they way over to where he shot, and find the Vietnamese sniper there, with a bullet hole in one eye and both ends of his sniper scope shot out. Apparantly the bullet didn’t touch the metal barrel of the scope during it’s travel, indicating that the Vietnamese fellow had been just about to take his own shot.
So this story would indicate that Spotters serve the vital task of drawing fire, although I imagine they have a wide variety of other jobs, apparently being trained snipers themselves.
Wikipedia would attribute that too to the Marine Hathcock as well, see the link in my OP.
Interesting posts in this thread. A sniper would probably have a more interesting job than the average infantry man perhaps?
Well, define “interesting”. The school is said to be one of the hardest to graduate from, they spend lots of time learning how to remain undetected (like having no problem if say a large colony of ants decides to crawl over you…for 12 hours), and the fact that according to my brother they’re regarded somewhat as outcasts amonst enlisted men, at least in the USMC, it may well be interesting but maybe not that much fun.
Perhaps that was true, but the evidence suggests that neither the British or Americans believed that at the time. (And I would argue that post war comments from German leaders like Albert Speer and Hermann Goring suggest that the death of Hitler wouldn’t have slowed their efforts.) Documents released in the 1990s, for example, show that at the highest levels, British officials had dismissed the idea of targeting Hitler. The BBC reported: “They thought that assassinating Hitler would only turn him into a martyr. There was also substantial opposition from those who felt that Hitler was more valuable left in place because of his mistakes in managing the war.”
Both the Brits and Americans engaged in massive strategic bombing (over 1.4 million combined bomber sorties in Europe). The goal was to desroy the German infrastructure, and both countries devoted massive resources to attacks on manufacturing and transportation facilities. If it had been possible to derail the German war effort by attacking their leadership, it would have been a lot easier.
“Interesting,” in combat, has a less than positive connotation. 
Kind of funny you said that. Most snipers (to the best of my knowledge) in the Marine Corps are drawn from the infantry side. I had a good friend who took the indoctrination for the sniper platoon, which is living hell from what I witnessed when passing them.
After taking the indoc and passing it (something like 3 out of 50 just at the lowly batallion level) he slowly moved away from us, stopped going out, and just plain old disappeared to the point where it was a just a quick hi at the PX. The same goes for Marine Corps recon. They tend to keep to themselves, outcast like.
To be honest, I’m probably thinking as a games player and not even as an armchair general :o
Indeed, there could be less than pleasant connitations to “interesting” combat. Would a sniper perhaps have less menial duties compared to an average infantryman?
Any special ops person tends to withdraw a bit in my experiance. My brother just got new orders to report to MARSOC and I wonder if that might start to fade him out a bit too. But anything that get’s him out of the Sandbox is cool with me.
In the ‘rear’ as we call it, meaning non-combat zone, the snipers tend to do a little less, from what I saw. When I mean less, when we were doing stupid things (when I was a young Marine) such as painting rocks, picking up cigarette butts, and having classes on stupid things, they were sleeping or fucking sunbathing.
However, when they train, they train hard and they take the utmost pride in it. We did a three mile run, they would do a five. We would do a five mile run, they would do ten (and throw on some boots, on the sand, with a twenty pound pack on their back). They tended to be in better shape than the average grunt, and took pride in who they were and what they did.
In the field they might train hard, but it is not as physically exhausting as a basic infantryman’s job might be. However, they need to have more discipline as noted by Cluricaun. When training in Australlia in the jungle area, you would see them with ant bites and cuts all over, because they would let the things crawl on them.
JUst a WAG, as IANAS, but I think snipers are typically NCOs (sergeants), which automatically gets them out of most menial jobs like KP and Latrine Detail (unless as supervisors of said menial jobs), but it does open up a whole 'nother batch of “menial” jobs (Duty NCO kinds of jobs), to which I would think (but can’t say for sure) that snipers would be exempt from while “in the field.”
In garrison, I’d imagine, much less so, as snipers probably aren’t sniping beyond regular “maintenance” level training, leaving them open for all kinds of duties, details, etc.
But when talking about combat-related tasks, I’d doubt that snipers are any more exempt from digging foxholes (their own, for sure), improving defensive fixtures, guard duty, weapons maintenance, patrols, etc, than the average infantryman, even if snipers have a slightly different emphasis in their taskings than, say, and infantry fire team.
Let’s not forget that if we’re talking Leathernecks, no matter what your MOS might be, you’re still perfectly able to pick up an A4 and pop caps at the first signs of trouble with the best of them. Everyone from snipers to cooks to a radar man is first and foremost a ready infantryman, which is an enormous source of pride.