, but he went there in peace. A few days after he competed in his third Olympics in rifle shooting, Arab terrorists destroyed the peace of those Games by taking Israeli athletes hostage.
But being a military man who ran an Army sniper school in Vietnam in 1971, Wigger has strong opinions on how the matter should have been handled.
“What went through my mind at the time was, ‘It’s too bad they didn’t have some snipers there with proper firearms,’ ” said Wigger, a long-time Colorado Springs resident. “They probably could have stopped the whole thing. Of course I thought that way because of my background. There weren’t any firearms anywhere near where we were; they were all at the range, put away. I felt like they should have called in some military-trained snipers.”
Wigger knows the Germans weren’t about to call in the U.S. military, but he wishes they had.
“We had a few in Germany at the time at one of the Army bases there,” Wigger said. “They had the proper rifles and the proper equipment. If they had brought them in, that thing could have been handled properly.”
After the terrorists and their hostages left the Olympic Village and were taken to a NATO airbase for what they believed was a flight to Egypt, five undertrained German snipers ambushed them and the attack went badly. Some of the Israelis were shot by their captors. Others died by hand grenade.
“If the (trained) snipers had been out there and deployed properly, they could have killed all of them out there before anything happened,” Wigger said. “They botched it. But you can understand that happening because they weren’t expecting anything like that, they weren’t planning for anything like that, and they obviously didn’t react properly.”
John Meyer: 303-954-1616, jmeyer@denverpost.com or
