on snipers and squid (1/3)

[bronze_ribbons]

So, yesterday ended up draining me a bit more than I expected - estate stuff in the morning and extended wrangling with technology in the afternoon - so I treated myself to a margarita with dinner (brisket-avocado-spinach quesadillas at the Alley Cat), which was tasty but also made me too sleepy to socialize afterwards, so I headed up to bed soon after we got home.

Since I'm currently obsessed with sussing out the springkink-fic is heading, I picked up Peter Brookesmith's Sniper: Training, Techniques and Weapons (St. Martin's, 2000) for a bit of reading, which turned out to be the perfect choice. You know that happy moment when a character comes into sharper focus at multiple levels -- that is, not just the version you're writing for a fic, but the one within the confines of canon? I went to sleep happy, because I've had several clicks of that kind during the course of drafting parts 1 and 2 of this fic (including one last week where I wrote a sentence, reread it, and only then realized, "Holy shit, so that's part of their dynamic too").

[The daft thing is that all of this excitement is extraneous to the actual story -- it's about how writing the story intensifies my pleasure in being a fan, and wholly irrelevant in terms of whether other people will find the fic sufficiently engaging or entertaining. On the down side, I feel more than a bit foolish expending this much time and mental energy on a fic that maybe seven people will read and two might actually like (the fandom is small). On the up side, it's exhilarating when a story insists on shoving me out of my ordinary groove and into a new-to-me landscape (which would be why you patient ones end up with all these teal deers about process galloping atcha).]

Anyhow, last night's unexpected revelations came when I was reading Brookesmith's discussions about how snipers are regarded by their fellow soldiers:

...snipers are rarely regarded with unalloyed gratitude or admiration by those on their own side. A sniper may be respected, even held in awe, for his peculiar skills, but he can't expect to be popular. In part, perhaps, this is becuase most soldiers feel there is something faintly immoral or unfair about the sniper's one-way trade in death. (p. 67)

... One might fairly surmise that most infantrymen find the sniper a difficult figure to contend with because he makes their stock-in-trade -- death -- all too uncomfortably clear. It is not easy to kill a fellow human, no matter how extreme the circumstances. Taking life is made less painful and onerous for the infantryman by training, indoctrination, and the impersonality and confusion of the average firefight. His weapons drop vague figures barely discerned at distances beyond any point of real recognition. There is an overriding desire to survive -- to end the oncoming threat to one's own life.

Possibly most critical (and comforting) in the heat of a conventional infantry engagement is the knowledge that one is surrounded and supported by mates and buddies. ... And when one is side-by-side with them in the battle, it is often impossible to know exactly who may have killed which particular enemy. In this way, personal responsibility for breaking the commandment "thou shalt not kill" is shared and diluted among a group of one's peers. The group as a whole can further, and usually fairly, plead in mitigation that, in any case, it was killing in self-defence.

In contrast, the sniper positively seeks to be a killer, and to kill in what most would regard as cold blood. But he is also prepared to take full responsibility for the deaths he causes. ... The sniper cannot fudge the issue in any of these ways. Nor would he want to, if the reflections of dedicated snipers on their work are any guide. Moral camouflage is the one kind of concealment that the sniper has to eschew.

The sniper is an outsider, regarded as a maverick even within his own profession ... in failing to deny or obscure that his trade is in death, he fails to acknowledge any great conformity with the herd, be it military or civil. ... it's a fact of life that most people are made a trifle nervous by egregious characters -- people who are just that little disconcerting bit more different or dedicated than the average.

...To be a sniper means finding a place within the military or the police, but that means living as an outsider in a subculture where conformity and convention are necessarily paramount, and which furthermore is one very long step removed from the peaceful easy self-direction of "civilian" life. Thus, the sniper is doubly isolated from the social conventions of both the broad and narrow societies within which he lives. Royal Marine Mick Harrison positively embraced his solitude as a sniper:

I didn't bother with any back-up; it was just me against them. The sniper is the loneliest bloke in the world, and that's how I liked it. When I came back, the others could smell it on you, and they all wanted to get away. You didn't have any friends.

[continued in the next entry...]

Comments

[valis2.insanejournal.com]

On the down side, I feel more than a bit foolish expending this much time and mental energy on a fic that maybe seven people will read and two might actually like (the fandom is small).

Tell me about it--I just wrote 26K for a fandom of four. For realz.

This is absolutely fascinating stuff about snipers, btw. Totally engrossing!

[bronze_ribbons.insanejournal.com]

I'd been thinking 8K for this bad girl, but part 2 is like the PlotTaffy of Doom: every time I think I'm about 100 words from the end, it twists and stretches on me. (543 words in the past 24 hours. Getting there, but geez.)

I need more time with the darn book. After Yuletide, I hope...

[lore]

You realise that Booth on Bones is a former sniper, now with the FBI? And last week's episode, after 3 seasons, revealed something very juicy about his past? Also, two fucked-up characters that only fit with each other?

Bones

Dude.

love, lore

[bronze_ribbons.insanejournal.com]

Oh, dear. That's an awfully cute still on that front page...

*looks at Netflix queue*
*looks at planner*
*resists sudden, savage urge to dump planner into Cumberland River*

(But seriously - now so so so very tantalized by that tidbit. You temptress, you...)

*hugs*