Last night I got to see about 5 minutes of a show about snipers on the history channel - before my oldest wanted me to come and reread Capek's Insect Play with her.

Three months ago I doubt I wouldn't have spent even 5 seconds watching such a program, but living in this area (northern virginia, usa), I've recently acquired a vague interest in the subject.

Anyway, a factoid I picked up was that while the British did not invent sniping, that the word sniper came from the habit of hunting the elusive snipe by British soldiers in India. Apparently, one had to be an expert marksman to actually hit one of them.

As I came into the program very late and left off very early, I'm not sure how it got to that point, but they were saying that apparently snipers had been very effective in the US civil war. (Not clear whether sniping started in the civil war or whether we were just damned good at it.) In any case, we dropped our sniping programs after the war, but the europeans had been thoroughly impressed - particularly the germans and english. The English decided to put together their own program and they wanted to get the best people involved. They made the brilliant observation that the men who helped the nobles hunt would make good snipers, since they had the patience, skill at tracking, stealth, etc., so they inducted some of them into their program. It was these Scottsmen who gave us the Ghillie Suit according to the program. Interestingly, I looked the word up and it's a variant of gillie which is a Scottish word for a fishing and hunting guide.


I refused to refer to our recent pair of bushwhackers as 'snipers,' because I thought it lent to much an air of professionalism to their activities. It was interesting to me to learn even this trivial amount of factual information on the subject.

k