link to psl in action
http://www.dragunov.net/psl_action.html
The following is an excerpt of an interview between American gun writer David Fortier and an ex-Soviet sniper.
"I had a chance to interview a former member of the Soviet Army who served in Afghanistan for 16 months in 1986-1987. He currently resides in the U.S. and was a very down-to-earth and honest guy. I will be frank, I grew up thinking that one day we'd be fighting these Godless commies in Europe, and that the only good commie was a dead commie. You know the drill. Then I had a chance to sit down and drink vodka with a bunch of Soviet Naval Infantrymen. To my surprise they were down to earth, funny, and a lot like me. It was from that first meeting that I started to research and write on Soviet/Russian firearms.
My new friend here was drafted into the service when he was 19. He had a background in martial arts, Judo and Sambo, and was sent to Airborne School. He made 24(!!!!) jumps during his training. During rifle training his marksmanship abilities were noted and he was asked if he would like to try shooting the SVD Dragunov sniper rifle. He said sure, and when he saw it for the first time he was blown away by how it looked. (I admit....it is the sexiest looking rifle I have ever seen too). He trained with it only out to 400 meters, and only on static targets. Basically he was given all the ballistic tables to learn, some shooting time, and then was expected to pick everything up on his own at his unit. Nice eh? Most of the training was spent learning how to jump....and they never jumped once while in Afghanstan! He was selected out of Airborne school for a Special Forces-type unit that did recon work and ambushes.
When he got to his unit in Afghanistan he said he was lucky because he was issued a rifle that had never been in the field before and still had its cheek piece and rubber eyecup. Usually these items were lost or stolen (he said people would steal the cheekpiece as it would fit an AKS-74 so he had to sleep with it) with cheek pieces being replaced with tourniquets wrapped in electrical tape.
The rifle was nicknamed the "oar" by the troops due to its length and its looks. There was one sniper per platoon and he functioned in what we would refer to as a designated marksman or sharpshooter. During ambushes he stayed with the rear support element (PKM machinegun) and fired in support.
OK, the nitty gritty: How far did he and could he engage? He engaged past 1000 meters in support, firing at heavy weapons, trucks, and personnel. At 600-800 meters (660-880 yards) he felt that he could reliably hit a man with one shot with the SVD. The weapon? He liked it very much, and felt that it was quite accurate and effective. During training (and I have heard this exact same thing from another source) they were told that if you fired and missed your target, human nature would often cause that person to freeze for a couple seconds, due to the proximity of the shot, during this time a semi-automatic rifle allowed you to make your correction and get off a follow-up shot. He liked the rifle, and owns one here in the US now. He just wished that more than one were issued to his platoon. (Later in the war up to 6 were issued per platoon.) On the optics he felt the PSO-1 was quite servicable and thought the reticle extremely effective. This I gotta agree on, I think the PSO-1 has one of the best sniper reticles out there. It ranges easily with the choke rangefinder, provides ranging using the Mil system if you desire, has 10 Mil marks on either side for windage or lead corrections and is illuminated. I was surprised that he did not feel hindered by it being only 4x and he actually liked the extremely large Field Of View.