THE LATE AFTERNOON sun shone through the camouflage netting draped over the old plantation house that now served as a North Vietnamese Army division’s command center. The yellow light cast spotty shadows through the window and over the old commander who sat behind his table like desk, scratching out a note.
His division continued to expand and improve. But the old commander was like the great tiger that lived in these mountains and now limped because of a thorn that festered in his paw. This “thorn” was the increasing number of U.S. Marine snipers and especially the one who wore a white feather in his hat—a symbol that enraged the Communist general because he saw it as an insult to the abilities of his best guerrillas. News of someone sighting the sniper who wore the white feather spread fear among his troops, as well as among the local peasants. Whenever this man was seen, people died.
He gazed out the window, looking through the blotchy netting as the blood red sun stood at the crest of the mountains that arose from the sanctuary of Laos. The setting sun’s highlights sparkled from the gold and silver that ornamented the large, red patches sewn on his collar. He thought of the war and the increasing numbers of American soldiers and weapons that now flooded into South Vietnam. And he thought of the increasing number of heavy bombs dropped daily from the bellies of high-flying B-52s.
As those bombs fell along the Demilitarized Zone and the Laotian border, Hathcock wadded a green-and-white cigarette pack and tossed it into the wooden ammunition box that he had turned into a combination ntght stand, stool, and trash container. He lay back on his cot and took a long and deep drag off his last cigarette. The sun now set behind the distant hilltops in the west, and he watched the blazing orange sky turn dark as night fell.
As he lay there, he thought of his conversation with Gunny Wilson earlier that day just after he’d finished writing to Jo; recounting his past six months as a sniper made him realize that many things had permanently changed in his life. The Carlos Hathcock who reported to Maj. George E. Bartlett at 1st Marine Division’s military police company nearly one year ago at Chu Lai, and who worked there as a machine gunner and desk sergeant, was a completely changed person from the Carlos Hathcock who spent the last six months on duty as a sniper and assistant chief sniper instructor at Da Nang. When he reported to the “Mustang” major, himself a competitive marksman, Carlos had never killed anyone. He had never known the heat of combat or the reality of war. Now, he had eighty kills confirmed to his credit and had trained several hundred snipers, more than one hundred of them personally. When he came to Chu Lai, he equated marksmanship to targets. Now he equated targets to living, breathing human beings.
In a few days, he would pick up the orders that canceled his temporary additional duty as a sniper, and he would return to the Military Police Company, his parent command, that would process him for travel back to the World. He came to Vietnam a green kid, twenty-three years old, still immature and full of ideals and dreams. Now, his face bore wrinkles at twenty-four years, his ideals and dreams were tempered by the lessons of combat. And his boyishness had disappeared, drained from his soul at Elephant Valley, Charlie Ridge, An Hoa, and Da Nang. Now he felt old.
Hathcock looked at the letter that he had written to Jo apologizing for not telling her that he was actually a working sniper, not just an instructor. The idea of her reading about it in the newspaper continued to rouse his anger. “Once I got home, I would have told her,” he thought. “I just didn’t want her worrying.”
“Sergeant Hathcock! You in there?” a voice called in the night.
“Yo!” Hathcock called from his cot and raised himself on his elbows to see outside his hooch. “Yeah, Burke, what’s up?”
Burke peered through the screen door. “Gunny needs to see you. I think they want you for one more trip to the bush.”
Hathcock sprang to his feet like a fireman hearing the alarm sound. “What do you know? They tell you anything?”
“No. Gunny just said for me to roust you up.”
Hathcock slipped on his shirt as he walked toward the sniper headquarters where he could see two figures standing outside.
“Looks like some sort of powwow,” Burke said in a low voice as they drew near.
A hulking Marine captain who looked as though he could play on any National Football League team’s front line stood next to the gunny. Wrapping his enormous paw around Hathcock’s outstretched palm, he started shaking it.
“I’ve heard a lot about you, especially from Major Wight. That’s why I made the trip down here to see you. Vfe have a very risky job. And we think you’re the only man who can pull it off and survive. I know you’re due to go home in a matter of days, so I’m not here to order you. You may accept or reject our proposal. I can only tell you that the need is urgent.”
The words “the only man who can pull it off” overshadowed everything else the. captain said. No sales pitch was necessary beyond that. Hathcock knew that if they believed that he was the only man who had a chance at surviving this mission, then he must accept. If he rejected the request they’d select a less experienced sniper. A man who had less chance of surviving. He couldn’t go home with that on his conscience.
“What’s the job, Sir?” he said, folding his arms, ready for some sort of hint at this very dangerous assignment.
“I can’t say. You have to accept or reject this request based totally on the prospect that it will be extremely hazardous. The odds of your surviving are slim, so I can only ask you to volunteer.
“If you accept, you will come with me and receive a briefing and a package containing all the information and planning that we’ve done on this mission. You can then tailor this plan to suit your needs and abilities. You will receive total support.”
Hathcock scraped the toe of his boot through the dirt and thought of the short-timer stories about Marines who took one more mission with only days remaining in-country and died on it. To take such a mission violated a superstition. Go on patrol when you’re a newbee or a short-timer and you’re dead. But, he also thought that the odds stood in his favor more than in any other sniper’s, despite the short-timer superstition.
He looked at Burke, standing silently in the moonlight. What if they turned to him or to the gunny or the top? Which friend would he allow to go in his place?
He looked at the captain and took a deep breath. “Sir, I’ll go. I wouldn’t be able to face myself if I didn’t.”
The captain put his arm over Hathcock’s shoulder and patted him. “I’ve got a map and some recon photos up at operations, we’ll talk there.”
The two Marines walked away from the sniper hooch, and Burke watched them disappear in the darkness. A feeling of emptiness suddenly pulled at his soul: he would never go hunting with his partner again. The reality of it struck him as he watched his friend leave. He wished he could go too.
“Oh, Carlos, oh, Carlos, you ain’t a comin’ back alive from this one! You and your big ideas,” Carlos Hathcock said aloud. Johnny Burke sat on a wooden crate scrubbing his M-14’s bolt-face with a doubled-up pipe cleaner. Carlos sat on another crate. Between his feet a topographical map and several photos lay spread on the dirty plywood floor of me sniper platoon’s command hooch.
“How on earth did I ever get myself into this one?” Hathcock said with a sigh.
“You’re the best, Sergeant Hathcock. That’s why you wear that white feather, isn’t it?” Burke said, looking up.
Hathcock glanced at his partner. “Maybe. But, I ain’t so sure about this one. Come here and look at these recon photos. I tell you, this one’s suicide.”
Burke laid his bolt on a towel and walked across the hooch. Hathcock had drawn an orange line on the plastic film that he had laminated to the face of the map to make it weatherproof. The line represented the path that the patrol, which dropped him off, would take. He was pondering the best route from there to his mission’s ultimate destination.
“There ain’t a stitch of cover within two thousand yards of that place,” Hathcock said, pointing to an aerial photo that corresponded to an area on the map around which he had drawn a red circle. “I’ve got the tree line for cover up to here,” his finger tapped the circle as he spoke. “All I’m ever gonna get at the guy is one shot. I’ve gotta make it count. Once that round goes, all hell’s gonna break loose so the odds for a second shot are zero. I can’t gamble on connecting at two thousand yards—it’s gotta be eight hundred yards or less. That means I’ve gotta cover about fifteen hundred yards of open ground without being seen.”
Burke knelt on one knee and shook his head. “Sergeant Hathcock, I don’t know!”
Hathcock looked at Burke, an unusual expression of worry crossing his face, “I know.” He looked back at the map and photos and again leaned his elbows on his knees, clasping his hands together beneath his chin, as if in subconscious prayer, “I’ve gotta go worm-style across there and hope they don’t walk across me.”
Burke walked back to his crate and sat down. He picked up his rifle’s bolt and began scrubbing its face with a fresh pipe cleaner.
“Sergeant Hathcock, if anybody has the answer, you do. If it can be done, you can do it. But I gotta tell you the honest truth. Goin’ into the NVA’s headquarters and blowin’ away their stud duck takes one hell of a tot more guts than I’ve got. Too bad you can’t tell ’em to forget it.”
“Nope,” Hathcock replied without looking up. “Ain’t my style. Job’s gotta be done.”
Carlos looked at his watch and softly laid it inside his foot-locker with all his other personal items. He would leave everything behind on this stalk.
He took his bush hat with his left hand and gently slipped the wispy white feather from its hatband, dropping it between the pages of his Marine Corps issue New Testament. He placed the cigarette-pack size book in one corner of his foot-locker and dropped shut the locker’s wooden lid. Snapping the combination lock on the big box’s hasp, he tucked on his bush hat, slung his rifle over his shoulder, and walked out to meet fate head-on.
As he walked through Hill 55’s complex of deeply dug and heavily sandbagged bunkers, hard-backed tents, and antennae farms, Carlos listened to the new day come alive.
“Goooood morning, Vietnam!” a voice boomed from a nearby radio tuned to AFVN. “It’s six-oh-five in the A-M and time to… Shout!” Joey Dee and the Star-Lighters’ all-time rock and roll favorite, “Shout,” echoed through the camp from scattered radios tuned to the Da Nang American Forces Radio station.
A black Marine with a gold-capped front tooth sat on a stack of sandbags next to his rocking and rolling radio. His steel helmet pot, half-filled with milky colored water, sat in the dirt before him. Lather covered his face, and he stretched his neck tight as he shaved under his chin, rolling his eyes downward in order to look in a mirror balanced atop the radio. Hathcock thought about how long it had been since he had stood in front of a bathroom sink and shaved with hot water.
He walked down the hill beyond the bunkers and joined a group of Marines wearing helmets and flack jackets. Each man had two fragmentation grenades and several pouches full of ammunition, balanced by two full canteens hanging on their cartridge belts. Carlos had only his rifle, one canteen hooked to his belt and a KaBar knife. He reached in his pocket and touched the tube of camouflage greasepaint resting there. He was scared.
The walk to the landing zone did not take long, neither did the flight—due west and well into the high mountains that bordered Laos.
The Marine rifle squad moved quickly taking him to the departure point, and by noon Hathcock sat alone, his back against a tree, surrounded by heavy vegetation. He was preparing himself mentally for what he knew lay ahead. The fear that lay like a heavy animal inside his chest would need some calming.
Carlos had calculated perfectly, as always in the past, and arrived at the tree line’s edge just as the sun set. He covered his exposed skin with shades of light and dark green greasepaint from the tube that he carried in his pocket. Every buttonhole and strap on his uniform held various-shaped leaves and grass.
Here, at the edge of the open country, he saw the NVA’s heavily guarded buildings with their camouflaging and their fortified gun positions. He had no idea where in Southeast Asia he was at the moment and had not wished to ask. The terrain map he had studied had had no place names. From their flight path and the distance covered, he would not have been surprised if he was in Laos or even North Vietnam.
Under the cover of darkness, Carlos retouched his camouflage paint and exchanged the forest’s deep green leaves for the lighter green and straw-colored grass that now surrounded him and covered the vast open land ahead. He drew his canteen and poured a capful of water. He brought the lid to his lips and sipped, his eyes constantly shifting and looking for signs of movement, his nose testing the air for any smell of other men.
For the next hour, he continued preparing himself, drinking sips of water from his canteen lid and relaxing in the tree line’s cover.
Finally, his every move fluid and slow like that of a clock’s minute hand, he lay on his side and slipped into the open. His Winchester rifle was clutched tightly against his chest.
His body was in constant motion, but the motion was so slow that a man staring at him from ten feet away would in all probability have seen no movement. He traveled inches per minute and yards per hour. From now until he reached his goal, Hathcock would not eat or steep and he would drink rarely.
He had had no idea that he would have to move this slowly. The dry grass was about a foot above his head as he crawled slowly on. Hathcock noticed the stars in the clear night sky and prayed for rain. If it came he could move quickly, since the enemy’s vision would be obscured and the shower’s noise would cover his. Dampness would also soften the crackling dry grass and weeds.
The Marine sniper had crawled approximately thirty feet from the tree line when he heard the first enemy patrol approaching his position. His eyes strained to find them in the moonless dark. He knew they were closing in on him by each crunching footstep’s increasing loudness. Hathcock held his breath. The patrol was very near. His lungs burned, and his heart pounded. Sweat gushed from every pore on his body. He was worried they would smell him. Absolutely motionless, he stared back at the trail of bent and broken grass that lay behind him.
Hathcock thought, “If they see me, then that’s how. They’ll see my trail.” His lungs could take no more pain—he must have air. He felt like a pearl diver gone too deep, seeing the water’s mirrored surface over him. Too much distance lay between him and the sweet air above. He remembered, as a boy, diving deep and swimming up, and how his lungs ached just as he reached the water’s surface. Hathcock relaxed his lungs slowly—silently releasing the captive breath. He longed to gulp a replenishing surge of oxygen, but instead filled his lungs silently and very slowly with tiny puffs of air.
Movement near his feet nearly made him scream. A leg flashed by him. Another and another flickered past. The NVA patrol was now between him and the safety of the trees.
He heard one soldier clear his throat. Another whispered something in Vietnamese. Hathcock thought, “These guys are goofing off. They aren’t even looking. They’re safely in their own backyard and don’t suspect a thing.”
As the patrol passed, Hathcock watched them traipsing along beside the tree line, oblivious of his presence. “That looseness just might save my life,” he thought. “Boy, will they be sorry,” he told himself. A smile crossed his face, and his confidence soared. As soon as the enemy was out of earshot, he pushed on through the night.
The hour before sunrise has a sleep-inducing effect. Nearly any soldier who has had to remain awake through the night will testify that the worst hour, when fighting sleep poses the greatest challenge, occurs when the night is darkest, coolest, and quietest—an hour or so before dawn.
Hathcock had to rest, but he could not afford risking sleep. In the past months, he had taught himself to nap, yet remain awake, his eyes wide open. He did not know what sort of self-hypnosis made it possible, but he always felt very rested following one of these ten-minute respites.
The flickering light from a small cooking fire caught his attention and brought him out of his catnap. “These dumb hamburgers!” he thought, “Another time and another place, and you would have been mine, Charlie.”
An iron pot filled with boiling water and rice hung over the fire. Three NVA soldiers squatted nearby, sleepily waiting for their breakfast to finish cooking. They manned the “Quad-51” machine-gun position on the left flank of the compound. A narrow trail through the grass led from the compound, passed next to the machine-gun nest, made a sharp left turn, and then led arrow-straight to the trees. Lights shone through several windows of the main house. Carlos supposed that it had been a French plantation in years past.
Inside, the short, graying general leaned over a porcelain bowl filled with cold water. A thin white undershirt covered his hairless, sagging chest and wrinkled belly. Baggy white shorts covered his bottom. He wore no shoes but stood on the glossy teak floor in his stocking feet. The old officer’s brown uniform rested neatly on hangers hooked to a peg on the door. Gold clusters and braid shone on the uniform’s wide, red shoulder-boards and on the broad red patches sewn on his collar.
In an adjoining room that had been made into an office, the general’s aide-de-camp huddled over papers, shuffling them into order for the old man. They would inspect a battalion today. The day before, the general and his entourage had walked the perimeter, inspecting the security of his headquarters. He had found it satisfactory.
Hathcock had seen him, but the old man was too distant from the Marine sniper’s firing point. Now the sun fully lit the new day. In the distance, Hathcock watched a white car pull away from the house, drive up the trail, and disappear into the tree line.
“Old man’s gone for a while, I reckon,” he told himself. “Good. That means that those guys will really slack off.”
By late afternoon, Hathcock had put five hundred yards between himself and the tree line. More than twenty hours had passed since he had left the jungle’s cover.
Just before sunset the white sedan drove up to the house and stopped. Carlos watched the indistinguishable figures walk toward the door. “Just keep it up, Homer—you and your hot dogs. I’ll get you.”
The evening security patrol began its first tour of the perimeter. Ten NVA soldiers fanned into a line and began closing toward Hathcock. He stopped his oozing wormlike slither and waited. He watched as the soldiers approached him in the dimming light. “It could have been worse,” Hathcock thought, “They could have come before sunset.”
After lying flat in the dirt for twenty-four hours, Carlos had attracted a following of ants. His body ached from hundreds of small lumps left by their bites. He wondered if enough ant bites could eventually kill a man. Sweat poured into his eyes as the enemy patrol came on. They were spread on-line with twenty—to thirty-feet wide gaps between them.
“Here I am, gettin* hell stung out of me,” Hathcock thought, “my body crawlin* with critters, layin’ here can’t move—and here comes Homer and his friends. Hell, I’ll probably crawl all the way up, never be seen, kill this old muckety-muck, and then when I try to leave, I’ll die from all these critter bites. The ants will cart off my bones, and I’ll wind up MIA forever.”
Carlos watched the approaching patrol. He could see only three of the soldiers now, the remaining seven were on his blind, right-hand side. He watched the three NVA riflemen plod closer and closer.
“If the guy on my right don’t step on me, I’ll get by this one too,” he reassured himself. But the soldiers were looking far ahead, toward the tree line, and they were oblivious to the sniper they had just passed.
The sun found Carlos Hathcock twelve hundred yards from the compound’s headquarters, its doorways and windows now clearly visible to him. He watched as the soldiers relieved and posted the guard. “It’s as though they’re back at Hanoi,” he thought. Over everything hung the calm air of routine.
Throughout the day, he observed couriers filing in and out of the compound, reporting to the man with the red collar. The sniper kept to his steady pace. He could feel adrenalin surging at the thought that tonight he would halt and prepare to fire with dawn’s first light.
He thought of how he had succeeded thus far. He also turned his attention to his escape. To the right of where Carlos would eventually lie, a small, almost imperceptible gully ran nearly to the tree line. Once he fired his shot, he planned to slide along the shallow and gently sloping gully and disappear through the trees.
“It’s a good thing, Carlos,” he told himself. “These hamburgers are so loose here, it’ll take them half a day to figure out what happened.”
Hathcock squirmed forward a few more inches and then, looking ahead of him, his confidence faded at the same time that his entire body stiffened.
The hunger, which had wrapped his stomach in knots for two days, vanished. The blood drained out of his face and the whole world took a violent spin. He wanted to jump up and run. He wanted to scream. He wanted to do anything rather than continue to lie there and look into the eye of a jade-green bamboo viper that lay coiled in the grass six inches from his face.
Panic ripped through every fiber of self-discipline that Carlos had ever been able to string together. He felt numb as his eyes focused on the deadly snake’s emerald head, its ruby-colored eyes evilly slanted above head-sensing pits.
The snake was motionless but the sniper felt his own body shaking. “Gotta get hold here,” he breathed slowly. “Oh Jesus! What if he bites me in the face! Control yourself! He ain’t bit you yet.” He knew this snake was neurotoxic like the cobra. One pop, even a little one, would kill him in minutes. “You’ve come too far to let a bamboo snake end it all,” he told himself as he lay still and watched the viper flick its black, forked tongue from its yellow-rimmed mouth, testing the air.
Almost as though the shaken Marine had never existed, the glossy snake turned its head, whisked silently between broad stems of grass, and disappeared.
After Hathcock’s heart slowed to its normal rhythm and the shaking effects of the adrenalin that sent his blood coursing through his temples had subsided, his nagging hunger returned, accompanied by a sudden thirst. “Where’s the groceries!” he exclaimed to himself. “Where’s the water!”
His hand found the canteen lid, and he began to carefully unscrew it from the flask. Half an hour later, he felt the wet relief of the now warm liquid soaking into his swollen tongue like water on a dry sponge.
Hathcock moved on, wincing with every inch he went. His hip, knee, and arm were covered with blisters from the three days of constant pushing. Shards of pain shot through his side. He had less than two hundred yards left to travel, and compromise began tempting him now.
“You can do it from here,” he considered. In all his years of marksmanship competition, his best scores came from the thousand-yard line. “It’s been all bull’s-eyes and Vs from this distance,” Carlos told himself. But in all his years of shooting, never had one shot been so critical.
A second voice told Carlos, “Stick to the plan. Don’t change things now. Survival depends on it. Survive.” Carlos always listened to that voice. It had kept him alive. “You thought out this plan when you were rested; now you’re tired. Gotta stick to the plan—got to.”
He pushed on toward where the slight depression came slicing through the grass. It was very much as he had estimated—almost precisely eight hundred yards from the target. Darkness fell and, as he drew near to his planned firing position, Hathcock’s anticipation mounted. He versed himself on everything in these surroundings that might affect his bullets flight. He was constantly aware of humidity, wind speed, and wind direction. The faint sound of men laughing caught his ear. He could imagine the North Vietnamese general and his officers drinking and toasting each other around a dining room table. “That general had better enjoy himself while he still can,” Hathcock thought.
The Marine sniper watched as the nightly patrol began another round. “They don’t even consider a ground attack,” he reflected. “They’re more worried about air assaults. Look at the bunkers and holes they’ve got around here. Everything’s covered.”
The last guard changed as Carlos Hathcock reached the shallow gully he had spotted on aerial photographs and that he had spent the last three days crawling toward. It was not even six inches deep, but it was wide enough for a man to lie in. The depression, which stretched fifteen hundred yards to the distant tree line, actually began here in the middle of the open field, and at its head there was a slight rise, on the back side of which Hathcock positioned his rifle. He unfolded a handkerchief-size cloth and laid it down beneath the weapon’s muzzle so that the gases the rifle expelled from the barrel when he fired it would not raise up dust from the ground and give away his position.
When the sun sent its first rays across the wide clearing, the Marine sniper’s eyes already blinked through the eight-power scope atop his rifle, searching for his target.
He had estimated the distance correctly—his experienced eyes verified eight hundred yards to the walkway. “I’ve got to get him standing still with either his face or his back toward me,” Carlos told himself. “Don’t compromise.” He watched for signs of wind-trees rustling, smoke drifting from the cooking fires next to sandbagged gun positions, the waving of the grass and weeds between him and his target. But more important than these, he watched the mirage, how it danced and boiled above the earth and tilted with the wind.
From that he could calculate the wind velocity by dividing the angle of the mirage by four. After determining that, he could multiply the velocity times eight, which represented this particular range in hundreds of yards, and then divide that again by four and have the number of “clicks” or half-minutes of angle he would need for windage.
The sun climbed higher and sweat trickled down the sniper’s cheeks. His eyes still fixed to the scope’s lens, he felt his neck bum from the overhead sun that baked the ground powder dry and left the grass wilting in its heat.
From somewhere behind the complex of bunkers came the sound of an automobile’s engine. The white sedan wheeled around the bunkers and stopped short of the walkway upon which Carlos held the rifle scope’s cross hairs. The driver waited with the motor running.
“Here we go,” Hathcock told himself. “Get a firm grip. Watch the cross hairs.” The general stepped through the doorway, and Hathcock centered the man’s profile in his scope. He waited for him to turn face-on. He did, but as the commander turned and walked toward the sniper’s sight, the general’s aide-de-camp stepped ahead of him. “Dummy! Don’t you know that aides always walk to the left of their generals? Get out of the way!”
At every moment since the sun rose Hathcock had refined his attunement to the environment with computer like detail and speed, judging the light, the humidity, the slight breeze that intermittently blew across his line of fire. He factored in the now-increasing heat and how the rise in temperature would elevate the mark of his bullet by causing the powder to burn more quickly when he fired. The air density and humidity would affect the velocity of his bullet, and the light would change the way his target appeared.
Based on his estimations, he decided to place his scope’s reticle on the general’s left breast, in case the breeze carried the round eight inches right. The bright sunlight warned the sniper to keep his aim high on the man’s chest, but not too high, in case the heat raised the bullet’s flight a few inches.
The group of officers walking out with the general departed toward the side of the house. It left only the old man and his youthful aide. Carlos waited. The young officer took his place at the left side of his superior. Hathcock said, “Now stop.” Both men did. The sniper’s cross hairs lay directly on the general’s heart.
Hathcock’s mind raced through all his marksmanship principles, “Good firm grip, watch the cross hairs, squeeze the trigger, wait for the recoil. Don’t hold your breath too long, breathe and relax, let it come to the natural pause, watch the cross hairs, squeeeeeeeeze.”
Recoil sent a jolt down his shoulder. He blinked and the general lay flat on his back. Blood gushed from the old officer’s chest and his lifeless eyes stared into the sun’s whiteness.
The general’s aide-de-camp dove to the ground and began crawling toward a sandbagged gun position. The other officers, who had only seconds earlier left their commander’s side, ran for cover.
The Marine sniper slid into the slight gully and, flat on his belly, began pulling himself stealthily along the ground with both arms. His rate of retreat seemed light-speed compared to his inbound time. Still smooth and deliberate, he traveled many feet of ground per minute. He now covered a distance, approximately equivalent to that which he had crawled across in three days, in four or five hours. The fact that no patrol approached him during his retreat told him that no one had seen his muzzle flash. In daylight, at eight hundred yards, that didn’t surprise him. The patrols would be out, but they would be searching hundreds of acres. Once he thought he heard one far to his left.
It was almost nightfall when he reached the jungle’s edge. Squirming past the outer layer of greenery, Hathcock lifted himself off his knees for the first time in three days. The pain was an excruciating counterpoint to his inner exhilaration. He hurried through the heavy forest. He was wary of mines and booby traps, but going as quickly as he dared, he covered the three kilometers to his preplanned pickup coordinate in a matter of a few hours.
There Carlos sat in a bush and waited, well aware that patrols might be scouring the jungle for his trail. His heart settled to a resting pulse. The songs of birds and other jungle creatures replaced the sound of heaving breath that had pounded in his ears. And as the hubbub settled to tranquillity, he thought of Arkansas and how similar this moment seemed to many childhood days behind his grandmother’s house, when he sat in the bushes there—the old Mauser across his lap and his Shetland collie dog panting at his side. He closed his eyes for the first time in four days.
“Sergeant Hathcock,” a voice whispered. “I thought you knew better than to doze off like that.” The Marine who led the squad that had left Hathcock four days earlier now knelt by the bush where the Marine sniper waited.
Hathcock smiled slowly, not even opening his eyes at first. “I knew you were there,” he said. “I heard your squad tramping up the ridge five minutes ago.”
“Let’s get going. Charlie’s crawling over these hills, and we’ve got a lot of ground to cover between here and the LZ,” the squad leader told him. “When we left the Hill, Charlie’s lines were burning up. I guess you got that general?”
“Well, he hit the ground mighty hard,” Hathcock said, pulling out his canteen and swallowing its last few drops. “Spare any water?”
“Sure,” the Marine said, handing Hathcock a canteen and sloshing its contents out the open top. “We better book.* Charlie’s mad as hell now. They’d love to get you after today.”
Hathcock felt uneasy when the squad leader told him, “Charlie’s mad as hell.” During the flight back to Hill 55, he wondered if the assassination of the general would only arouse the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong to fight with greater fury.
He would always have mixed feelings about this day’s work. As American casualties rose sharply in the weeks that followed, he began to feel that this was one sniper killing that might have been a mistake.
When Hathcock stepped off the helicopter, home at Hill 55’s landing site, a group of smiling and whooping Marines met him. Burke stood among them and said, “White Feather made it.”
Hathcock smiled.
The giant of a captain who’d recruited Hathcock for the mission slapped him across the back so hard that Carlos wondered if he had dislocated any bones. The hulking Marine put a pot roast-size hand on Hathcock’s shoulder and said, “Son, I’m sure as hell glad to see you back in one piece. Lot of us kept you in our prayers. You did one hell of a job.”
Walking up the hill toward his hooch, Hathcock felt the great fatigue from the mission finally take hold. He longed to lie down and sleep for days. But his standards were demanding. And despite the fact that this was his last mission—that he would leave Hill 55 in a few days to return to the MP company and on to the World by way of Okinawa—he remained true to them. He cleaned his rifle and gear before he rested.