A GENTLE BREEZE lustled the white feather in the Marine sniper’s floppy hat as he watched the land below through the telescopic gun sight. The soft stir of air had swept up die hill from the rice paddies and, just moments earlier, had touched a twelve-year-old Vietnamese boy whose khaki shirt hung loose and wet across his skinny back and who struggled to keep his heavily laden bicycle upright.
It was a mild February afternoon in 1961, and Sgt. Carlos Norman Hathcock III sat cross-legged behind his M-2 .50-caliber machine gun. A year and a half earlier, at Camp Perry, Ohio, the slim, twenty-four-year-old Marine had won the U.S. 1,000-Yard High-Power Rifle Championship. Now he took aim from the southern finger of a solitary peak in South Vietnam.
He squinted as he stared through the eight-power Unertl sniper scope mounted on the top, right-hand comer of the machine gun’s receiver. His spotter, a darkly tanned, shirtless Marine staff sergeant named Charles A. Roberts, silently crouched next to him and looked through an M-49 twenty-power spotting scope, watching for the enemy.
The brim of Carlos Hathcock’s faded camouflage bush hat sagged over die dull green tube of die telescopic sight as he observed a distant speck wobbling toward him up the dirt road.
Slowly the boy on the bicycle grew larger in Hathcock’s gun sight, and a troubled expression crept across Hathcock’s narrow, suntanned face. He saw a number of rifles—four dangling from the handlebars, two on each side, and three more tied sideways beneath the bicycle’s seat. A dirty, green haversack hung from the center of the handlebars, bulging fat with hundreds of rifle cartridges packed in bandoleers or loaded in a dozen banana-curved magazines that protruded from beneath the flap of the old canvas pack. This boy was not just another kid on a bike; he was a Viet Cong resupply “mule,” carrying arms and ammunition to an enemy patrol. When night fell, that patrol would turn the rifles that this underfed, twelve-year-old boy now struggled to deliver, directly on Hathcock’s brother Marines.
Hathcock never wanted to kill men, much less children. He knew, however, that this was no ordinary child. Children in war grow up quickly. And Marines die as fast from bullets fired by twelve-year-old boys as they do from bullets fired by twelve-year-old boys as they do from bullets fired by men.
The bicycle teetered closer and closer. The sniper’s grip tightened on the gun’s two wooden handles. His thumbs rested firmly on the butterfly-shaped trigger, which was mounted between the handles at the gun’s butt. He followed the youth until the boy came abeam him, allowing for a clean, two thousand-yard, broadside shot.
Hathcock moved his scope’s cross hairs onto the front wheel and fork of the boy’s bike. He pressed his thumbs slowly down on the trigger and sent a heavy (two and-one-half-inch, seven hundred-grain) bullet ripping into the bicycle’s framework.
The boy somersaulted over the handlebars and crashed into the orange dust that covered the road. His deadly cargo scattered, and Hathcock smiled. Maybe now this boy would run away and leave the work of death to men.
That hope rapidly vanished. The shaken lad grabbed the nearest automatic rifle and, with a quickness gained from many firelights, jammed a banana-curved magazine into the weapon. Then he raised the gun. Just as he began to shoot, Carles Hathcock dropped him dead.
A Marine patrol walked down to the road and took the load of enemy rifles and ammo. Vietnamese farmers who had been working in the nearby rice paddies carried the boy’s body away.
As he always did after engaging the enemy, Hathcock jotted down the facts of the incident in a dog-eared, green notebook—his “sniper log”—that he carried in the slanted breast pocket of his camouflage shirt. Later that evening, he would describe the “kill” in a situation report that would be sent to his new officer in charge, Maj. D. E. Wight.
Hathcock didn’t need to take notes, however, to keep that experience forever vivid.
He and Roberts looked over the sandbag wall and watched the villagers carry the boy’s limp body toward the mud-and-rice-straw huts that stood a few hundred feet away. The broken bike lay unattended on the roadside. It would be gone by morning.
The sniper’s dark eyes followed the road back toward the mountain passes—the many corridors of the Ho Chi Minh Trail. No doubt those weapons had been boxed in China and had ridden the rails through Nanning and Ningming, across the North Vietnamese border to Lang Son, Kep, and into Hanoi. There women took them from their boxes and repacked the rifles into smaller lots for their trip southward to the Mu Gia Pass, the main funnel from North Vietnam to the Ho Chi Minh Trail and to South Vietnam’s combat zones.
During the United States involvement in the Southeast Asian conflict, American forces divided South Vietnam into three zones of combat. In the far south, Saigon rested in the heart of the III Corps Tactical Zone—the Mekong Delta lowlands; Camau Peninsula (later designated IV Corps); and the hill country north of Bien Hoa Air Base. The n Corps encircled the vast Central Highlands with Dac Son and Da Lat bordering the south and Pleiku and Phu Cat the north.
From the 17th parallel—the cease-fire and demarcation line of July 1954, popularly called the DMZ—to the Central Highlands’ northern ridges is 1 Corps.
In 1966 and ’67, 1 Corps was a tough place for an American fighting man to live. Primarily controlled by Viet Cong and North Vietnamese forces, that combat area’s western border blended into Laotian jungles where the Ho Chi Minh Trail’s three main arteries flooded arms and freshly trained troops into Vietnam’s war.
At the point where the southernmost route of the Ho Chi Minh Trail enters I Corps, the Sihanouk Trail joins it, giving the Viet Cong, or VC, a second supply flow of Soviet—and Chinese-built arms and ammunition, landed into Cambodia via the Gulf of Siara and carried by elephant, by train, and on human backs into Laos for entry into Vietnam.
A few kilometers inland from where the South China Sea washes Vietnam’s east coast, at a place called Due Pho—1 Corps’ southern-most tip—a high, lone hill overlooks miles of farm fields and hundreds of mud-and-straw huts. Off to the west steep mountains rise and, between the peaks, streams and rivers flow into broad valleys that spread like fingers on an outstretched hand, feeding water to this rich, rice-growing countryside.
From where the Ho Chi Minh and Sihanouk trails meet inside Laos on the Vietnamese border, a lacework of roads, footpaths, and tunnels branch out across the rugged mountains, following ridges and streams across the breadth of Vietnam to the rice lands that Due Pho’s solitary hill overlooks.
On that hill, Carlos Hathcock sat with his spotter watching this “Indian Country,” slowly scanning the miles of terrain spread out before them, and hunting and killing “Charlie”—Charlie the man, Charlie the woman, and Charlie the twelve-year-old boy.
That youngster had ridden a long way, judging from the salt rings that encrusted his shirt. He had peddled and pushed that rifle-laden bike since before daybreak. The sun was just setting now above the rugged peaks of the mountains that make up the high backbone of Vietnam, the Annamite Cordillera. No doubt the rifles had almost reached their destination halted their transport and, in the process, killed a child.
He wondered if the men who lay waiting for that delivery had seen their cargo stopped dead by his bullet. To him it was cowardly to send a child to do a soldier’s work, and as he leaned back against the sandbags and lit a cigarette, he shook his head. He thought of occasions on which the Viet Cong had wired three—and four-year-old children as booby traps and had blown away the unlucky Marines who stopped and offered the tots chewing gum or chocolate, and of the Marines who had accepted cold sodas from slightly older children. The sodas had been poured into cups filled with tiny shards of broken glass, mixed with chipped ice. It did not take many stories like those before a Marine learned to stay clear of children.
Hathcock stood and dusted the seat of his trousers, and as Roberts departed up the hill, disappearing behind large rocks, be took one final look down the narrow road that led to the mountains and the setting sun. This was his favorite time of day. It had always been special for him, ever since he was a kid staying with his grandmother in the countryside near Little Rock, Arkansas, It seemed long ago now. He wondered what she would have thought about his killing the boy this day. Would she understand that he had no choice?
He looked at the graying sky and wished he could be home. “Tour’s almost done, Carlos,” he said to himself, trying to kill the pang of homesickness that struck. “Golly, I’ll bet Sonny has grown a foot taller by now.” In a few months he’d be home to celebrate his twenty-fifth birthday, and eighth year in the Marine Corps, with his wife, Josephine, and his little boy, Carlos Norman Hathcock III.
For now, he closed out another day on his hilltop position. Here, he was one small part of a special landing force operation called Deckhouse IV that had been dovetailed into another operation called Desoto, now underway for several weeks.
Marines from 1st Battalion, 4th Marine Regiment, served as the main force in this operation, clearing the Due Pho area of Viet Cong concentrations.
Hathcock had positioned the gun on a finger of the solitary hill so that he could cover much of the area between the coast and the mountains, but, sitting there on the hill also made him a target for daily fire from below. Those long shots sent lead splattering on the big rocks around the Marine sniper’s nest, yet as long as he and Roberts kept low in their position, they were relatively safe.
From the hill, the snipers provided a blocking force and some security for the battalion during their sweeps through this broad, flat countryside. Hathcock’s duty on this operation exercised very little of his ability as a sniper, requiring minimal stealth, just sharpshooting with the heavy machine gun. It was a son of carnival shooting gallery where Viet Cong, rather than tin ducks and clay pipes, were the targets.
Hathcock had pioneered using the .50 caliber machine gun as a sniper weapon. The big gun’s seven hundred-grain bullets offered a stable trajectory for nearly three thousand yards, extending the sniper’s range of highly accurate fire well beyond two thousand yards, more than double the capability of his .30-06 rifle. The .50’s cyclic rate was slow enough to allow for single shots with no difficulty. And, mounted on its T-and-E, a traversing and elevating tripod that accurately adjusted the machine-gun’s fire with geared control knobs, die system served as a steady and finely tuned aiming platform for the eight-power telescopic sight, which was necessary to precisely train the gun on its distant targets.
The Marine sniper stretched. He was more tired than usual and glad the operation would soon end.
A star-filled sky greeted Carlos Hathcock the following morning. He sat in the dark, cross-legged behind his machine gun, waiting for the sun to share its new light with the enormous valley below. It would be a very busy day,
A Marine major stood behind Hathcock’s right shoulder. He scanned the brightening horizon through powerful, green binoculars. Hathcock’s wispy white feather quivered in his hatband as a steady westward breeze dried the dampness left by the ground fog and overnight dew. No one spoke.
Both Hathcock and the major listened for the sound of helicopters. That sound would signal the beginning of a final sweep through this area. A dog barked in the darkness far below the group of Marines, and Hathcock glanced at the cooking fires that flickered near the huts where the dog lived. There, Vietnamese fanners prepared for another workday. He gazed farmer out into the early morning grayness where other firelights twinkled. Viet Cong, he thought.
The major stuffed a load of chewing tobacco into his mouth and said, “Won’t be long-sun’s just about up. Sergeant, how does it look through your scope?”
Hathcock put his eye to the long and slender rifle scope mounted on the machine gun. He shook his head, “Still too dark. But when the frogs land, we should have plenty of light.”
When he first came to this lonely hilltop, he had zeroed the gun sight to place his shots dead-on at twenty-five hundred yards, and now, from this sandbagged, promontory nest, he easily covered the entire valley with his deadly fire.
The sniper’s victims never knew what hit them when his brand of whispering death struck-they only heard the heavy bullet’s impact if he missed.
Today, Hathcock’s gun would again serve as a blocking force for the battalion, turning the fleeing enemy back into the sweep, where they would either die or fall prisoner to the Marines. If they gambled to run, they must get by the sniper, who was already becoming famous among the Viet Cong as “Long Tra’ng”—The White Feather. To get by him, they must cross several hundred yards of open rice fields, flooded ankle deep in water.
The sniper waited and listened. He heard the distant mumbling of two Marines crouched up the hill among the rocks behind him. They had a radio beside them and were waiting to hear from the sweep leader that the operation had begun.
The distant sound of helicopters caught Hathcock’s attention. Almost simultaneously, the radio crackled, “Red Man, Red Man. Evil Eyes three-six. Over.” The Marine sitting next to the radio picked up the handset, answering the call, “Evil Eyes three-six. Red Man. Go ahead, over.” The response came, “Roger, Red Man. Evil Eyes three-six at point Tango. Over.”
The major searched the horizon and easily picked up three helicopter silhouettes racing toward him just above the tree-tops, “I’ve got them,” the major said. ’Tell them we’re ready here.”
“Evil Eyes three-six, roger and tallyho. Red Man is ready,” the radio operator responded.
The sweep began with three twin-rotor CH-46 Sea Knight helicopters letting off their passengers in three “hot” landing zones. The chatter of small-arms fire filled the air as helicopters swept down the ridge lines, just above the treetops, and set down. In half a minute, this first wave of choppers was up and away, leaving the Marines to face the hostile fire that greeted them.
Farther to the west, other twin-rotor aircraft landed, unloading another company, blocking “Charlie’s” hope for escape to the mountain ridges there. The two companies would push the entrenched Viet Cong out and into a cross-fire or into the blocking forces who now waited.
Hathcock watched die jungle that edged the expanse of flooded rice paddies beneath him. His eyes carefully searched each stretch of dense cover. Soon he realized that he could relax his grip on the machine-gun’s handles. From the sounds of the fighting, the Viet Cong would not easily give up the security that their trenches and the tree cover offered. They held on as the Marines closed toward them. Hathcock knew that it would be awhile before he had any work.
The warm orange of the morning turned white as the sun climbed toward noon. The major stood staring through his binoculars, searching the trees and hedgerows for VC sneaking out of the sweep. Sweat trickled down Hathcock’s neck as he scanned the tree line with his sniper scope.
The intense fighting had sent several Viet Cong retreating toward the southwest, only to meet the ambushing fire of blocking forces stationed there. The VC knew that the east’s open fields would expose them, so they attempted to turn west, only to confront the widespread rifle squads of the flanking company. Hundreds died that day. Many others surrendered. By the end of February 1967, the landing force claimed more than a thousand Viet Cong confirmed dead, and they counted another thousand probable dead.
Two frightened Viet Cong guerrillas carefully crawled through the brush at the edge of one water-covered rice field. They could hear the Marines closing swiftly behind them.
The two men searched the field’s borders and saw nothing, and yet both men knew crossing it could mean certain death. Sweat soaked through their shirts. Their hair lay plastered flat and dripping. Then—eyes burned from the perspiration that ran off then—brows and down their faces. A decision could wait no longer.
When the men stood to run, Hathcock spotted them in his scope and said to the major, “Sir, two are breaking out on the left.”
“Shoot to the side of them. Try to turn diem back into the sweep.”
Hathcock pressed the trigger and sent the first shot into the water ahead of the men. They had no place to hide, yet they kept running toward the far side of the rice field.
He sent two more shots down the hill, but the guerrillas continued to charge across the shining surface of the field. They seemed to be moving through the shin-deep mud and water in slow motion, their legs pumping like pistons and their feet splashing in the mire.
“Major, they’re not turning,” Hathcock said.
“Kill them,” the major responded.
The sniper placed his scope’s cross hairs on the first man and pressed the butterfly. The soldier splashed down dead in the muddy water.
“Good shot,” the major said. He took the binoculars from his eyes and leaned slightly to his right, spitting a load of tobacco juice to one side of the sandbagged nest.
The second man wheeled, almost falling, and broke to his right, still headed away from the sweep. Carlos Hathcock laid his scope’s cross hairs on the VC’s back and again mashed the machine-gun’s trigger. The second man tumbled into the water.
No one else broke out of the tree line during that day’s sweep. When it was over, the major walked back to the command post, located on the other side of the hill, for an appraisal of the day’s operation, and Hathcock waited and watched through the afternoon. He suspected mat once the dogs had called off their hunt, “Homer the Hamburger” might show himself. For Hathcock, the Viet Cong had only two families—the Hamburgers and the Hot Dogs. They were all named Homer.
Sure enough, just as he had expected, he spotted a figure slipping from the trees to the edge of a distant rice field. He knelt and put his face in the water, and when Carles put his scope on him, he could see a Chinese K-44 rifle slung across his back.
A lieutenant from a company that had participated in the sweep now sat next to the Marine sniper, staring through binoculars.
“You see him down there?” Hathcock asked the young officer.
The lieutenant shifted the binoculars toward the direction that the machine gun now pointed and found the Viet Cong soldier, still drinking. “I got him. How far you judge that to be?”
“Twenty-five hundred yards. He’s right on the spot where I zeroed this gun when I first got here.”
The lieutenant laughed, and Hathcock said, “Let’s see if I can’t rain all over his parade.” He took a firm grip on the gun’s two wooden handles, took a short breath, and began pressing the trigger, waiting for the recoil’s surprise.
The lieutenant watched. He felt strange because even at mis distance he could see the man’s face and his eyes. He had never looked at a man’s eyes just as a bullet killed him. The young officer jerked as die machine gun belched a single round down the hill. At that precise second, the enemy soldier started to rise and caught the bullet just below his chin.
The lieutenant saw the soldier kicking in the dirt and shouted, “You missed!”
In his Arkansas, low voice, Hathcock drawled, “He’s dead, sir. They just flop around a lot when you shoot ’em in the head.”
Hathcock never connected with a longer shot.
Later that day, he saw a Viet Cong soldier coming down a trail. On the same trail, an old woman was carrying water-filled buckets hung on the ends of a long pole, which she balanced across her shoulders like a yoke. She was teetering up the path when the Marine sniper’s bullet struck the dirt between the soldier’s legs and ricocheted over the woman’s bead. The frightened man charged right at her, and she attempted to set down her load. But, just as she began to squat, the soldier struck her head-on. The woman tumbled over backward into the dirt, spilling her buckets and losing her pole.
Hathcock had a chance at a second shot, but his laughter took charge of his aim. He continued chuckling as he dismantled the big machine gun. It was a satisfying end to his long watch atop the hill at Due Pho.
The weapons platoon retook possession of their M-2 .50-caliber machine gun that had served as Carlos Hathcock’s sniper weapon during his stay on the Due Pho hilltop.
Hathcock fastened the long Unertl scope back on his sniper rifle—a match-conditioned, .30-06 Springfield caliber, Model-70 Winchester anchored at the receiver with precisely torqued screws that held it in a glass-bedded, Monte Carlo-style stock, above which the finely tuned barrel floated, less man the width of a dollar bill, allowing the barrel to flex freely when he fired the rifle. He again zeroed the weapon for seven hundred yards.
With his NVA pack strapped snugly to his back and his rifle shouldered, Carlos Hathcock waited at the landing zone for the helicopter that would take him back to Hill 55, his base of operations. He liked Hill 55 because it overlooked miles of Viet Cong-controlled countryside—hot spots like Elephant Valley to the north and, to the south, Antenna Valley. East of Hill 55 were the friendly strongholds of Marble Mountain and Da Nang, but to the west lay the badlands known as Charlie Ridge and Happy Valley.
Hathcock felt glad to be getting back to his old hunting grounds. Charlie Roberts stood next to him and nudged him, “Looks like our frog.” He pointed toward the twin-rotor helicopter that had just cleared the horizon along the northwest coastline and now raced toward them, skimming the treetops.
Hathcock said nothing to Roberts. It was typical of their relationship. They had never gotten along, and Hathcock politely endured die staff sergeant whik suppressing his often felt frustration with the senior Marine. As they waited, Hathcock recalled the first day on Due Pho and how Roberts had stood atop the rocks surrounding the sniper position, admiring the breathtaking view, and drew a hail of enemy fire. A senior NCO in the battalion had yanked Roberts off the rocks just as the shooting began and then questioned the reliability of both the Marines. That insult had deeply wounded Hathcock’s pride. From that day forward, the rift between the two men grew. Hathcock did his thing, and Roberts did his-mostly watching.
Hathcock smiled and took off his bush hat, holding his white feather secure in the hatband with his thumb.
More than seven years before, on a warm spring day in 1959, Cartos Hathcock had stood in die Marine recruiter’s office in Little Rock, Arkansas, and watched his mother sign the papers giving him permission to join the Marine Corps. It was May 20—the day of his seventeenth birthday. He was fulfilling what for him was already an old dream.
That afternoon he got on a plane bound for San Diego, where he would have thirteen weeks at the Marine Corps Recruit Depot in which to prove himself man enough to join the United State’s most elite society of warriors.
Carlos stood five feet ten inches tall and weighed one hundred forty pounds. Although slight in build, he could run all day and lift a load equal to bis weight over his head. He had developed mis strength after dropping out of high school at age fifteen and going to work for a Little Rock concrete contractor, shoveling cement ten hours a day, six days a week.
Boot camp wasn’t going to be any picnic, but Carlos had the physical stamina to withstand the long, punishing days and nights. As for the mental pressures, he would handle them with the strong self-discipline that he had developed at an early age when he was forced to shoulder the responsibilities of his family.
Hathcock arrived at MCRD San Diego sitting on a brown, plastic-covered seat inside a dull gray bus with “U.S. Navy” stenciled on its side. He and approximately thirty other reemits had ridden it from Lindbergh Field to the recruit depot. Several of die young men talked loudly and smoked cigarettes, although the chubby, blond-haired Marine private who drove the bus had warned them that that wasn’t the best way to start their military careers.
It was eleven o’clock of a warm, West Coast evening. The bus came to a halt, and a Marine sergeant wearing a tan uniform, with creases so sharp that they stood out a half inch from his chest, stepped briskly aboard.
The sergeant wore black, spit-shined shoes, which glistened like patent leather, and a brown, beaver-felt campaign hat with a wide, flat brim. Centered on the hat was a coal Mack Marine Corps emblem. The Marine walked directly to where one of the cockiest recruits was sitting.
During the ride from the airport, this loud-talking fellow boasted how tough his St. Louis gang had been. The young man wore his long and thick black hair heavily oiled and combed back in a ducktail. He sported a pack of Camels rolled in the sleeve of his black T-shirt. A smoking cigarette dangled from one corner of his mouth.
Without a word, the Marine drill instructor plucked the cigarette from the recruit’s lips, dropped it on die black rubber mat mat ran down die aisle of the bus, and crushed it out with a single twist of his toe. Half a dozen other lit cigarettes suddenly dropped to die floor in silence as die broad-shouldered sergeant gazed toward die rear of the bus with his stern, dark eyes, almost hidden under die brim of his hat.
Hathcock was in awe. “This is it!” he said loudly.
The Marine looked at him. Hathcock was just about to rise to his feet when he caught the drill instructor’s cold stare.
“Ladies—you too, sweetheart,” he said in a loud voice and looked directly at Hathcock. “You will not utter a word from this moment on, unless you are addressed by your drill instructor. When that occurs, die first word out of your mouth will be Sir,” die DI growled emphatically, pausing for effect. “And die last word out of your mouth will be Sir. Is that dear?”
Only silence followed.
“When you are addressed by a drill instructor, and he asks you a question, you will respond with Sir, followed by the appropriate answer, and then finish with Sir. Is that clear?’
Again, only fearful silence met the DI’s ears. He looked at Hathcock. “Private!”
Hathcock swallowed and answered him in a low, Arkansas drawl, “Yes Sir?”
“What did I just say?”
Hathcock felt the blood rushing through his face. He rose to his feet and mumbled, “Sir… ah… you ain’t supposed to say nuthin…”
The Marine cut him off in mid-sentence. “You? You? Boy, do you know what a ewe is? That’s a female sheep! You’re a country boy, ain’t ya. You ought to know what country boys does to them female sheeps. They fucks ’em, don’t they—boooy. You want to fuck me?”
“Sir, no Sir,” Hathcock quickly responded.
“Sit down, boy,” the drill instructor barked.
“Sir, yes Sir,” Hathcock said, gladly shrinking to his seat.
“I can’t hear you, boy.”
Hathcock responded loudly, “Sir, yes Sir!”
“Okay, ass eyes,” the granite-faced sergeant said angrily. “When you answer me, you are on your feet, at the position of attention, and your asshole better pucker and your ears better pop. If they don’t you ain’t answering loud enough. You got that?”
Hathcock leaped to his feet, arching his back and jutting his chin straight up. He screamed with his eyes squeezed tightly shut and bis veins bulging on his neck, “Sir, yesss Sirrr!”
The Marine sergeant walked down the aisle, “Ladies, any time a drill instructor addresses you as a group, you will answer as a group. You will answer property and loudly. If you fail as a group, you will pay for your sins as a group. Is mat clear?”
Thirty young men chimed together, assholes puckering and ears popping, “Sir, yes Sir.”
“Very good.”
“When you speak to a drill instructor, you will address him in the third person. That means if you have a request, such as one of you ladies might need to go tinkle, you would request it in this fashion, ‘Sir, the private requests permission to make a head call, Sir.’
“Two words that will never be a part of your vocabulary are I or You. You will replace those words with The Private and The Drill Instructor, respectively. Is that clear?”
“Sir, yes Sir,” thirty voices yelled.
“Now, when I step off of this bus, I don’t want to hear the sound of anything but wind sucking in, filling the vacuum that you just left, and the thunder of your hooves hitting those yellow footprints painted out there on the concrete. You got that?”
“Sir, yes Sir.”
“I will not hear one word out there. Marines are sleeping in the barracks just down the road and we don’t want to disturb them, do we?”
“Sir, no Sir.”
The Marine turned his back and stepped off the bus, followed by the stampede of thirty frightened recruits, including Hathcock.
That night they gave him a web belt, a pair of tennis shoes, a green utility cap, jacket and trousers, a large white T-shirt, a large pair of white boxer shorts, green wool socks, a blue, plastic soap dish, a bar of Dial soap, a blue, plastic toothbrush holder, a can of Barbasol shaving cream, a razor, a tube of Crest toothpaste, a toothbrush, a pair of rubber thongs that the marines called shower shoes, a pair of gray shorts, a yellow sweatshirt with a red Marine Corps emblem emblazoned on the front, a green canvas seabag with a wide strap that clipped through a ring on the top, a bucket, two sheets, a pillow, and a blanket. He got to bed at 4:00 A.M., and an hour and a half later a drill instructor rousted the exhausted recruits and sent mem on the first day of their thirteen weeks of hell.
Hathcock chuckled as he recalled those unforgettable days. He gazed out the helicopter’s door at the emerald-and-orange jungle, watching treetops blur past just a few feet beneath the chopper as it raced toward Hill 55. He thought how that first day in the Marine Corps had to be his most memorable birthday.
He thought that he could have married Jo on a May 20 also, but choosing die Marine Corps’ birthday—November 10—seemed better, somehow. It balanced the year’s celebrations, and it was a date that he remembered easily. November 10, 1967, would mark his fifth wedding anniversary. These five years of marriage had passed quickly for Hathcock. They had been happy for the couple, but not easy.
Jo did not like being a “shooting-team widow.” However, when she married Carkw in 1962, she knew what lay ahead: He would be gone often, competing in regional, state, and national shooting matches throughout the United States. Carlos would leave Thursday and come home Sunday night. Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday he worked from 5:00 A.M. until 6:00 P.M. at the rifle range. In the evenings, he lay on the floor in front of the television and practiced “getting into position”—the tightly contorted stances (standing, sitting, kneeling, and prone) from which he fired in the matches, From March through April he did nothing but shoot.
However, Jo had resigned herself to that life-style when she decided to become Mrs. Hathcock. Had someone asked her if she would ever make that decision when she first met him, she would have laughed in his face. Hathcock, on the other hand, had thought Jo was swell—nice looking and with a great personality. He formed that opinion the day that he walked into the bank in New Bern, North Carolina, where she worked as a teller. That was in January 1962.
Hathcock had just reported to the Marine Corps Air Station at Cherry Point from the 1st Marine Brigade in Hawaii, where he had spent the past two years cruising the exotic ports of the Far East and South Pacific.
It had been a dramatic change for Hathcock, departing that tropical paradise, with its brown-skinned girls and wonderful liberty nights, for coastal North Carolina, with its tobacco-lined country roads and gas-station entertainment.
After boot camp and basic infantry training, Hathcock had left Camp Pendlton for the base at Treasure Island in San Francisco Bay, where he sailed on a troop ship to Hawaii. There he became a machine gunner in the weapons platoon of Company E, 2nd Battalion, 4th Marines. And he did his best to fnainfrin the image of the battalion’s nickname—The Magnificent Bastards—during his liberty stops in Taipei, Tokyo, Papeete, and other exotic ports, as well as at home port in Honolulu.
When Hathcock reported to the air station in North Carolina, the first problem that die personnel chief had to solve was how does an air station employ an infantry Marine? The nearest infantry regiments were forty miles south at Camp Lejeune. The personnel chief asked Hathcock if he would like to work in special services, sweeping out die gym and passing out basketballs. Hathcock swallowed a lump in his throat and tried not to show die repulsion he felt at that idea.
He looked straight in die eyes of die ruddy-faced Marine and innocently asked, “Does Cherry Point have a rifle range?”
Hathcock knew that they did and that it was die home of an outstanding shooting team, too. He figured that if he asked to be assigned to die team right off, the personnel officer might not respond to the wishes of a private first class. But if be let diem come up with die idea, it would be a sure thing.
“I have some experience shooting,” Hathcock told die gunny. “I coached at Kaneohe Bay and shot on die Hawaii Marines team, too. You can call Gunner Terry or Lieutenant Land back in Hawaii. They put me through their scout/sniper school there. I might be of some use out at die range.”
The gunnery sergeant listened and then said, “I’ll call Gunny Paul Yeager down at die rifle range and see if he has a slot for you.”
The phone call lasted but a moment. Yeager had heard that a hard-shooting PFC named Hathcock was headed his way and that this young Marine had won die Pacific division rifle championships die year before. He had already made plans to have Hathcock try out for die All-Marine Champion, Cherry Point Shooting Team.
In his three years of shooting at Cherry Point, Hathcock rose from a talented novice to become a Distinguished Marksman, winning Marine Corps, Inter service, and National shooting championships. He set die Marine Corps record on die “A” course by shooting 248 points out of a possible 250—a record never matched again—and retired widi die course. That was during his first year there.
Hathcock spent his first Carolina Christmas alone in the barracks, where he read books and practiced squeezing his slim body into tight, rock-solid shooting positions. The South Pacific’s liberty ports had been an unforgettable adventure, but competitive shooting was more fulfilling. For Hathcock, marksmanship represented the essence of a Marine: It was the skill of his trade. Hathcock did not mind the lonely Christmas. The thought of the rifle range opening for the new season and the opportunity to possibly make the Cherry Point shooting team kept his spirits high.
But some of the other Marines who lived with him during the holidays felt sorry for this quiet and unassuming shooter. He looked as though he could use a good time. One of the well-meaning Marines had a girl friend who worked in a bank in New Bern, North Carolina, a small community located a short drive west of the Cherry Point air station’s main gate. She had a girl friend who might provide the perfect medicine for this lonely Marine.
It was a very cold January day when Carlos Hathcock walked inside the New Bern bank where Josephine Bryan Winstead worked. She was a woman who had just entered her thirties, yet looked hardly a day older than twenty-one. She wore the latest hairstyles and fashions and had adjusted to living independently again after an unhappy and unsuccessful marriage. Now she took care of her mother, who lived with her in a small apartment in New Bern. On weekends, she and her mother drove to Virginia Beach where they visited Jo’s sister. She had dated little since her divorce.
On this brisk January morning, Hathcock wore a black, long-sleeved, polished-cotton shirt with white pearl buttons on his collar, cuffs, and shirtfront, and black sharkskin trousers. They were the only civilian clothes that he owned.
Hathcock usually wore his uniform. He was proud to be a Marine and loved to put on the tan outfit that had impressed him as an eight-year-old boy when he saw his first Marine. He had all of his uniforms tailored to fit perfectly. He even had his green herringbone utility shirts and trousers tailored and leather heels with horseshoe cleats put on his spit-shined boots. He was a poster-perfect Marine. He had never needed civilian clothes until his buddies at the air station’s barracks convinced him that he would get much further with the ladies if he wore his civvies.
When Jo saw the slim, dark-eyed Marine with his jet black hair and clothes, she thought, “Oh my God! What on earth have I gotten myself into?” And when Hathcock swaggered across the bank’s polished marble floor, the loud click of his heels added accent to Jo’s first impression.
“Hi! I’m Carlos Hathcock,” he said with cocky bravado. He locked his dark hazel eyes on hers without blinking and smiled, showing his sparkling, straight teeth.
Jo tried very hard to took beyond the bold clothing, and she noticed a very handsome young man who was slim and muscular, clean and clear-skinned. But his eyes seemed to dominate his entire presence—they pierced and flashed. It was a glance that overpowered Jo and left her blushing and turning her eyes toward the floor.
“I’m Jo,” she said. She had not felt so uncomfortable since her teen years. She suddenly felt very shy.
As they walked down the street, she asked Hathcock, “Aren’t you cold? I’m freezing! Where’s your coat?”
Hathcock’s face turned bright red and Jo suddenly knew mat she had asked the wrong question. In a concerned tone she said, “I’m sorry.”
“Oh, that’s all right,” he answered, holding his head high. “I just got here from Hawaii and haven’t bought a coat yet. I’m freezing loo.”
Jo suddenly moved very close to Hathcock as they walked, putting her arm around him, trying to share her warmth. “Let’s hurry. I don’t want you to freeze.”
A wide smile crossed his face.
Pay came twice monthly for Hathcock—less than $50 each fifteenth and thirtieth. He had bought U.S. savings bonds since his first week in boot camp. He had also taken out an allotment of $20 per month from his pay, which went into his savings account. After slightly more than two years, he had amassed more than $500 cash, not counting his bonds. He had planned to buy a car when he made corporal. Meeting Jo caused him to alter those plans. He barely had enough to cover the monthly payments, but the $500 that he paid down on the Chevrolet Bel Aire kept the total cost within his range. Gunnery Sergeant Yeager lost his temper when he saw what die underpaid private first class had done. “Hathcock! Are you out of your mind, or do you come by that special brand of stupidity naturally? What are you going to do for spending money? After you pay for your haircuts and cleaning and men make your car payment and buy gas, you won’t have a dime left to your name.”
“I eat in the chow hall. I sleep in the barracks. That’s all free. And haircuts cost a quarter, and I spend five dollars a month on cleaning. I won’t have any problem making the payment,” Hatncock retorted.
Hatncock spent the summer dating Jo and not spending more than $5 a week doing it. But for Jo, that didn’t matter. She had come to know and love this gentle young man. He had a boyish nature, full of ideals and dreams. He made her feel very comfortable. By August she had fallen deeply in love with Carles, and he in love with her. Their relationship had gone for nearly nine months, and Hathcock made no overtures beyond their frequent dating. Jo felt it was up to her to make the next move—he certainly was not doing it.
“You and I have to stop seeing each other,” she told Hathcock as they drove away from the bank on a warm August evening. “We have no future like this. I don’t want to go on just seeing a movie on Friday nights and riding in the country on Saturdays and Sundays. I want more. I’m a woman, not a little girl.”
“I can’t get married,” Hathcock said in a low, almost inaudible voice. “You gotta be a sergeant. I got busted to private already twice now, and I just sewed on my PFC stripe for the third time. Do you think that they will give me permission to get married?”
“I won’t wait,” she said. “And they can’t tell you no, either.”
Hathcock saw there was no use in arguing with her on this subject. He had never asked any of his superiors about marriage; he only knew the scuttlebutt that fellow snuffies told concerning the Marine Corps’ feelings about it. He did know that a PFC’s or even a corporal’s pay was not nearly enough with which to even dream of supporting a wife. But Hathcock loved Jo, and he did not want to lose her. He felt that he could suffer through anything, as long as she was willing, too.
When the alarm buzzed next to Hathcock’s head at four thirty Monday morning, the sleepy Marine put his feet on the floor and struggled to stand. He felt as though he would throw up. “Oh God!” he moaned as he walked down the aisle between the rows of racks and wall lockers in the squad bay, heading toward the showers. An hour later he stood at the brink of the confrontation that he had dreaded all night.
“Gunny Yeager, Jo and I are getting married,” Hathcock told his NCO-in-charge.
“No you’re not.” Yeager told Hathcock in a matter-of-fact voice.
“Yes I am. I’ve already made all the plans. She’s got a good job and I love her.”
The gunny looked at Hathcock and shook his head. “You will get married anyway, won’t you. It’s just like that car. I gotta know this. Is she in trouble.”
Hathcock looked angrily at the gunny. “No. And why would you think such a thing? She’s a nice girl.”
“Back off! I have to see the captain, and he will ask.”
The gunny looked at him appraisingly. “How you going to live? On her pay? You gonna sell your car? Where you going to live? And what if she does get pregnant? What then? You better think of all this too. You know that bank won’t let her work pregnant! If she loses that job, you’re shit out of luck.”
Hathcock looked at the gunny and said in a calm, low voice, “I’m getting married. You’re invited to the wedding. It’s November 10.”
The next year, Jo became pregnant and had to quit her job, and Hathcock managed to make meritorious corporal.
Once safely on the ground, Hathcock headed for his bunker. He was thinking about the past and the future. He knew his wife would be happier if he left the Marines and put down roots somewhere—got a job and a house. But he loved the Marines, and he had already given a lot of his life to it.
“Eight years already,” he said aloud as he walked down a path that led to a waist-high ring of sandbags that surrounded the plywood-and-screen-sided, tin-roofed building, the Marines called a hooch, which housed 1st Marine Division’s scout/sniper instructors.
Lance Corporal John Roland Burke lay on a cot. Carlos Hathcock regarded him as the best spotter with whom he had ever worked. The young Alabama Marine looked up and said, “Sergeant Hathcock, you say something?”
Hathcock leaned his shoulder against one side of the long, narrow building’s doorway. “No. Just talking to myself. You gonna be ready to move out tomorrow? Gonna work north, I think. Up around Elephant Valley.”
Burke nodded, “I’m set. Sure don’t look forward to another week of peanut butter, cheese, and John Wayne crackers. Think I’ll pack a few cans of jelly, too. Need something different.”
Since the snipers had to travel light they were used to carrying nothing but the small, flat cans of peanut butter and cheese. The bulkier C-ration cans were not for them.
Hathcock laughed. “You want to eat good? Learn how to type. They’ll have you over on Hill 327, sittin’ around camp and gettin’ fat in a heartbeat.”
“No thanks,” Burke said. “I’m no pogey.”
Hathcock headed for the chow line near Hill 55’s mess tent. One last good meal for another week, he thought. Tomorrow’s chow would be the standard peanut butter-and-cheese entree.
Resting a tablet on his thigh, Hathcock sat on the edge of his cot and wrote another letter home to Jo. She had no idea that he did anything beyond instructing Marines in marksmanship—the only job that she had known him to do in the Marine Corps outside of competing on the rifle team and being an MP for a while. She had no way of knowing that her husband—a soft-spoken, country boy—was now the Marine Corps’ deadliest sniper.
She’d been relieved when he wrote in October telling her that he had been taken out of the MPs and was now with his old shooting teammate Capt. E. J. “Jim” Land, forming a new school to instruct Marines in marksmanship. His letters told her how he missed her, but they never mentioned going into “Indian Country” to hunt and stalk “Charlie.”
In New Bern, North Carolina, Jo Hathcock picked up her daily copy of the Raleigh News and Observer from where the delivery boy had tossed it in the front yard of her 1303 Bray Avenue home. She slid the green rubber band off the large, tightly rolled newspaper and opened it to the front page. As she had done each day since her husband’s departure for that fax side of the world, she looked for news of the war, turning to the column marked SERVICE NEWS. There she hoped to read about people whom she and Hathcock might know. She sometimes clipped items and sent them to Carlos. Her eyes found a paragraph beaded A SCOUT-SNIPER. It told of the Marine Corps’ deadliest gun in Vietnam—Carlos Hathcock.
Jo’s hands trembled as she read of how her husband regularly crept into enemy territory alone, or with only one other Marine, and stalked the Viet Cong. The story began:
A SCOUT-SNIPER with the 1st Marine Division in Vietnam earned praise from his commanding officer for “making life miserable for the Viet Cong.” Sgt. Carlos N. Hathcock of New Bern is one of several “expert marksmen” credited with killing more than 65 enemy. Firing at ranges up to 1,125 yards, Hathcock and the “crew” have been picking off better than two enemy a day—without a friendly casualty.
Jo quickly folded the newspaper, walked in her house, and slammed the front door shut. She never had liked Carlos’s being in the Marine Corps. She hated Vietnam. She only tolerated the Marine Corps because Carlos loved it so dearly. She had often felt jealous of the Marines, especially when he spent nights away from home with the rifle team, competing. Now she felt both fearful and angry.
Jo Hathcock sat at her kitchen table, her young son playing on the floor near her chair. She sipped a cup of coffee as she wrote her husband a long letter.
In a darkened hut half a world away from New Bern, North Carolina, Carlos Hathcock licked the envelope’s flap and pressed it shut. He addressed the letter and jotted the word FREE on the upper-right-hand corner. “No tax, no stamps,” he reminded himself. Hathcock laid the letter on his footlocker and flipped open his Zippo to light a cigarette—his last for a week.
While in the bush, Hathcock wanted to smell like the jungle—not tobacco smoke. The Viet Cong could smell the stuff a mile away. As the Marine Corps’ best sniper, Hathcock had a healthy respect for the abilities of his foe. A pinch of chewing tobacco generally kept his nicotine craving controlled.
With lights out, only the glow of his cigarette illuminated the inside of his hard-backed hooch. He lay and listened to the sounds of the night and the war.
Carlos Hathcock lay back on his air mattress and thought about home and his twenty-fifth birthday. He sighed, “Twenty-five—my car insurance will go down, and I get a pay raise. Eight years in the Corps. It don’t seem like it.”
“Seems like yesterday when Daddy came home from Europe and brought me that old Mauser rifle. Boy, those were the days. I could barely lift the thing. I must have been ten or twelve years old before I finally got to where I could take aim with it.”
Hathcock closed his eyes. A gentle rain began falling. He listened to its patter on the sandbags that ringed his hooch. He quickly fell asleep.