I was a bit confused by that statement too, lumper. What did you mean? Most every sniper I knew understood that he could instantly be a very close-in fight at any point in time. Snipers had to spend long and extremely dangerous periods of time getting into a decent position and then even longer periods of horrifying waiting for the right moment to arrive. They were precision weapons with a specialty that gave a special value in combat and if they did really well, the enemy was reluctant to expose himself anywhere near where they thought we were.
During one short period of my life with the grunts in Vietnam, I was assigned to escort a sniper to his hide position and then cover his rear approach with my automatic M-14. The concept was for him to do the precision killing of high value targets - which he did quite well - and I was supposed to provide massive "smash through the bad guys fire" if we were discovered. Luckily for us, we never had to test that theory.
Killing people's killing people, whether at 10 meters (which means you let them get too damn close), or 50-100m or 300m+.
Our job was killing them and getting us home - any argument with that?
Thanks for the job you did, and for your wise comments as well.
You were in Vietnam with what unit? What was your MOS?