Why is this here?

Would somebody explain to me what Stephen Hunter's love letter to snipers is doing in the Style section of the Washington Post? I'm not surprised that he would write this:

... we are in the golden age of the sniper. He has become a kind of chivalric hero. He is the state, speaking in thunder, restoring order to the moral universe. Or he is civilization, informing the barbarians of the fecklessness of their plight. He is the line in the sand, the point of the spear, the man with the rifle, one of the few, the proud. He is also the intellectual of combat, in some ways, bringing a cool logic to what is normally hot, messy and exhausting.

It's the kind of fetishization of killing in a cool way that I expect from Hunter (read some of his movie reviews - say of The Two Towers, where he wrote:

Jackson's imagination is most vividly provoked by the extreme nature of Bronze Age battle, for the last hour of "The Two Towers" is pure combat and it's mind-blowing. The scene is Helm's Deep, a castle moored against a rock escarpment that takes the full force of the Uruk-hai attack, while our three human heroes and the Rohanites [sic] stand fast. Some won't be able to watch the hackings and gougings, and some (e.g., moi) won't be able to look away.

But underneath it all is the same issue that defined Tolkien's life, the battle between Western democracy and monsters who wanted to destroy it. Read into it what you want, or read nothing into it, but it's really the oldest story of all. It's the one about a band of free men on a hilltop with nothing to get them through the night but their belief in themselves and their cause and the long steel they carry in their scabbards.

But why is this worship of killers in real life presented as if it's a movie review, or a look at a new play or museum? Why isn't it on the op-ed page where it belongs?