First female active-duty soldier graduates from sniper schools | Hacker News Reader

First female active-duty soldier graduates from sniper schools

taskandpurpose.com

10 pointsPaulHoule12 comments

I think diversity for the sake of diversity ranges from neutral to positive in most cases. Diversity in stuff like this is mostly just used to distract from institutional and systemic harms. We need fewer people killing other people for the government. I don't care if the person pulling the trigger is the most unique person on the planet.

it's used to give us the best snipers possible so if Russia invades Alaska we will be ready.

Democratic governments tend to not have war with each other so if we really want to stop war, we have to defend democracy against all of the actors who would rather it did not exist. Ukraine shows that state-state warfare is not over and democracy is not guaranteed to win.

Spoken from a position of privilege from freedom brought by the very people you seek to eliminate.

I agree we need fewer people being killed, but maybe not fewer people who could kill if required.

Si vis pacem, para bellum. The reality is every country needs to be prepared for military action, even if they don't initiate it themselves. The world is a hostile place, and wishing for peace is great, but it's not a substitute for being able to fight back.

I'm not going to reply to each individually since they're all essentially the same. Isn't it interesting how someone always misreads (or misrepresents) a call for a smaller, more effective military as a call to abolish the military? I don't know how to tell a victim of the propaganda from a perpetuator of it. People who call for reforms are always portrayed as the enemy.

> A close friend told Hay she’d never make it in the Army or become a sniper.

> “Needless to say, that person is no longer part of my life. But now that I look back at it, I really do appreciate the motivation,”

Great example of the power of negative motivators, who trigger a response of "Oh yes I can, and I'll prove it"

too bad she's not doing anything useful with her life, only causing death and destruction

cf https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyudmila_Pavlichenko (fl 1941-1942)

> fl 1941-1942

For a person that recent, I'd expect more information to be available than "she was alive during these two years".

tl;dr: Female active-duty soldier who graduated from sniper school (sometime during 1937-1941 according to the WP page) and is credited with 309 kills (36 counter-sniper) during those two years.

"Sniper school is widely viewed as one of the toughest courses in the [US] Army" I don't think anybody is arguing she's the first woman every to graduate such a school. She's the first in the USA, in the US Army.

of course! The context of TFA was clear (congrats to Sgt Hay); I had just thought the curious might appreciate some wider context in which to place it.

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