MAY 7, 1954—it was only thirteen days before Carlos Hathcock’s twelfth birthday.
The boy was going out to play in the woods with an old German Mauser rifle. Its barrel was plugged shut but, even though he couldn’t shoot with it, he loved the gun. His father, Carlos Norman Hathcock, Sr, had brought the rifle home as a war relic nine years before and given it to three-year-old Carlos II. Carlos’s family background was WASP with a touch of Cherokee Indian, and no one knew quite why the first name of Carlos had become traditional for the men in the family.
As young Carlos walked toward the woods that stood behind his grandmother’s rural home, a white frame house next to a gravel road in a tiny farming community near Little Rock, the hourly news that crackled from the radio could have been reporting that the French Union Army’s 167-day defense of a place called Dien Bien Phu had ended. That was the day the French fell to Gen. Vo Nguyan Giap’s Viet Minh forces. General Giap had managed to starve them out and now the Geneva Conference, called that spring, seemed heavily tilted toward die Communists.
But, if that was the news on the air, Carlos cared nothing for it. That conflict did not involve America or the U.S. Marines. He had John Wayne, Japanese, and a real war on his mind today. Sergeant Stryker in the Sands of Iwo Jima was one of the few movies in which the “bad guys” had killed “The Duke.” Carlos mourned Stryker’s death, and he cheered as Marines from Echo Company, 28th Regimental Combat Team, raised the Stars and Stripes atop Mount Suribachi.
He, after all, was a Marine, too. He had decided four years earlier, when he was eight, that he would join the United States Marine Corps someday. Carlos felt certain that no greater calling could exist in this life.
He hummed the Marines’ Hymn as he marched toward the woods, his Shetland collie dog, Sassy, trotting at his heels and Carlos squarely holding the rifle at “right shoulder arms.”
Carlos saw his first Marine at age eight, in the Memphis apartment building where he and his parents lived. His father had quit his Arkansas railroad job to work in the Mississippi River port city as a welder for the Tennessee Fabricating Company.
A young Marine and his wife lived downstairs from the Hathcock family then, and from the first time that Carlos had set eyes on the trim and straight man who had a square jaw and rock-hard arms, he could imagine no greater thing than to become a Marine.
Bill Monroe sang nasally about his “Brown Eyed Darlin’” following the radio news. Carlos’s grandmother hummed along with the bluegrass melody as she opened her kitchen’s screen door, causing its rusty spring to sing out when the old door swung wide.
“Carlos!” she shouted in a voice that cracked slightly from age—a sing-song grandmotherly voice that young boys, now grown old, associate with barefoot memories of warm summers and goodness. “Supper’s gonna be ready soon. Don’t you go mnnin’ off and gettin’ yourself dirty. You hear me?”
“Yes ma’am,” Carlos called back. “I’ll be right out here—me an’ Sassy.”
Now, once behind the dense, green cover of the weeds and bushes and trees that grew on the edge of his grandmother’s backyard, Carlos dropped to his knees. He knelt next to the thick trunk of an old pine that overlooked the yard and magically projected his imagination through space and time to the jungles of Guadalcanal, where he joined the 1 st Marine Raider Battalion in action.
The skinny, black-haired boy no longer wore jeans and T-shirt but Marine Corps herringbone and boondocker boots. He faced the Japanese enemy alone. They hid behind every tree, stump, and rock.
Quietly, Carlos shoved the muzzle of his rifle through the prickly vines of a blackberry bush. Pushing with his toes, he slid across pine needles and damp earth without making a sound. There he lay hidden beneath an umbrella of tangled vines.
Today, he hunted the Japanese, much the way he stalked squirrels and rabbits with his J. C. Higgins .22-caliber, single-shot rifle, which he had gotten for his tenth birthday. He rarely missed a shot.
Carlos hunted small game to put meat on the family table. His mother and father had separated, and now he and his two-year-old brother, Billy Jack, had accompanied their mother here to live with their grandmother. They were poor.
But peering down the old Mauser’s sights on this warm spring day, Carlos did not think of food as he drew bead on a tortoise. A tortoise, which now became a well-camouflaged Japanese sniper—the deadliest sworn enemy of Edson’s Raiders, heroes of the Pacific.
However, the young warrior’s dog failed to appreciate the intense situation, and she trotted over to the tortoise, nudged it with her nose, and began barking. The tortoise clamped shut, Carlos rolled from under the vines and thorns and stood erect, holding the long rifle by its muzzle and resting its butt on his toe. “Sassy!” he shouted, frowning at the dog. Then he glanced down at his clothes. No longer in the South Pacific, but back in the woods of Geyer Springs, Arkansas, he realized feat he had trouble. Muddy circles outlined the knees on his once-clean jeans. His T-shirt had fared no better. He frantically dusted off the loose soil, but the muddy stains on his knees and T-shirt remained. That meant a problem at home.
Carlos’s grandmother never understood that Marines cannot fight in combat and keep their knees clean—especially twelve-year-old Marines.
“Canr-looos,” her voice sang through the woods.
“Commm-inggg,” he answered apprehensively.
May 20, Carios celebrated his twelfth birthday and opened his gifts. He found one special present that dwarfed the importance of all the others-a Remington 12-gauge, single-snot shotgun. His mother and grandmother both thought that he should have something for his twelfth birthday that required more responsibility, something that would give him a better edge than his .22 rifle.
Carios Hathcock had an exceptional ability to shoot a rifle well, even at age twelve. When he saw the long and narrow box, he knew that its contents could only be one thing—a new rifle or a shotgun.
There was a certain fineness about firearms for the young shooter. He never saw them as toys but as tools crafted for a purpose mat he greatly respected and enjoyed—hunting.
Now, with a shotgun, Carios’s grandmother thought, be could hunt dove and pheasant and quail when they came in season. Carios saw the shotgun as a more efficient firepower to snap-shoot the squirrels and rabbits that often flashed through the brush before he could draw down on them with his rifle.
Carios opened the box containing his new shotgun and shells at nine o’clock mat morning. By nine thirty he walked in the woods with the gun resting over his forearm, its breach broken open and a shell chambered.
A sudden gray flash caught his attention. In a single motion, Carios snapped the breach shut and raised the gun to his shoulder. He heard the rabbit skitter through the weeds ahead, so he waited for another flash of fur. This time he would be ready.
The flash again caught his eye, but this time it was several yards away. He fired the gun and watched the rabbit run up and over a hill. He had missed.
By eleven o’clock Carios had killed nothing, and he had missed several shots—easy shots. He put the shotgun away and returned to the woods with his single-shot rifle. The .22 may not have had the spread, but with it Carios never failed to bring home meat. Just past noon, he returned home with two squirrels and a cottontail rabbit dangling from a tether.
Carios never mastered the knack of hunting with the shotgun, although he tried shooting dove and pheasant and quail. He hunted with the shotgun often, but always wound up getting his old single-shot rifle to bring home the game.
Warm damp air hung heavily in the morning stillness when pleasant childhood memories blurred into conscious thought and Hathcock awoke. He felt sticky and uncomfortable. The nun, which had lulled him into a restful sleep, now heralded Ike beginning of another humid day in Vietnam.
Outside Hathcock’s hooch, Lance Corporal Burke sat quietly whittling on a stick. Hathcock saw the back of Burke’s bush hat resting against the wire screen and called out drowsily, “You been there long?”
“No, not really. Figured you weren’t in any special hurry since we’re going for the week. Thought I’d let you sleep some.”
“Let me grab my pack and rifle, and I’ll be with you. What’s the time?”
“Almost six thirty.”
Hathcock and Burke walked to the Combat Operations Center, where radios crackled around the clock and a tired-eyed gunnery sergeant sat at a field desk jotting notes on a yellow pad, assembling bits and pieces of an intelligence report from messages scrawled in pencil on flimsy, yellow slips of paper.
“Morning, Gunny,” Hathcock said in a low voice to the intelligence chief.
“Hi there, Sergeant Hathcock. Want some coffee? That jog’s fresh.”
Each man poured himself a cup and then Hathcock looked over at the sergeant. “Anything going on north-up around Elephant Valley?”
“Happenings everywhere, Sergeant Hathcock. Take your pick. Ream’s sighted lots of movement. Already had reports of contact this morning from two patrols—one up toward Elephant Valley. You planning to work up there?”
“Had that in mind, unless someone has something else to flffer. Lance Corporal Burke and I coordinated a long-range nassion up that direction.”
“Good. I could use some intel-reps from up there. Let me know your call sign when you check out with operations. And be careful—Charlie’s up to something.”
Hathcock finished checking out in the operations center and joined Burke outside in the drizzle.
“What’s the plan on getting up there?” Burke asked.
We chop north to a fire base where we join a patrol. They’ll take us to a good drop-off point. After that, we’ll be by our lonesome. A long-range patrol will pick us up on its way in Sunday, at the edge of Elephant Valley. That’s six days alone with no rear guard.
“We’re Bravo-Hotel on the radio net. We will only make contact on the move or when departing our position.”
“Or in case shit hits the fan?” Burke added with a sarcastic smile.
Hathcock unfolded a map that he had made waterproof with a clear-plastic laminating film. “We’ve got a battery of 105s here,” he told Burke, pointing to a hill located southeast of Elephant Valley. “They’ll fire on our call, if we need help. If we need air or some other kind of help, we call the S-3.”
“Sounds good, Sergeant.” The rain was ending, and Burke looked up at the brightening sky. “Weatherman says possible light showers off and on in the evening, and sunny days.”
“Good. We ought to be able to move pretty fast. Shouldn’t make any noise with the world soft and soggy.”
In less than an hour, the two snipers were climbing out of a helicopter at the fire base* where a rifle squad stood in a U-shaped formation. A tall, black corporal moved from man to man, checking each rifle and inspecting each Marine. Two Marine sentries sat behind sandbags, near a gap in the barbed wire that encircled the compound. The corporal turned toward the approaching snipers. A Marine standing in the squad crowed, “Looky here. It’s Murder Incorporated!”
“Shut the fuck up, asshole,” the black corporal snapped. “You the snipers we’re taking up toward Dong Den and Nam Yen?”
“I’m Corporal Perry.”
The men shook hands, and, in less than ten minutes, the patrol set out, moving quickly through the wire, one man at a time. Once they reached the far side of the tangled maze of barbed wire surrounding the fire base, stretched in crisscrossing patterns, each Marine took a covered position, widely spaced and on line along a hedgerow near a well-traveled road.
Perry took a quick head count and motioned to the point man to move out. One at a time, each Marine stood and followed the lead, the men taking positions staggered from right to left and spaced thirty feet apart. They maintained mis discipline of wide dispersion to lessen the effects of ambush or booby traps.
Hathcock and Burke joined the column near the patrol’s rear guard—a heavyset and already sweating Marine whose boots had worn nearly white from lack of polish. Hathcock had seen many Marines like this one—Marines who neared the end of their tours, their domes showing the wear of a year at war. He could see beginnings of the telltale one thousand-yard stare, the stoic expression on a face that had seen its fill of combat.
Hathcock looked at his own faded uniform—Marines called it “salt.” That lance corporal walking rear guard looked salty, but, except for his boots, no more salty man he or Burke did. The snipers used plenty of Mack paste wax on their boots, but they left it unbuffed so as not to reflect sunlight and draw fire.
Hathcock thought about the wisecrack the Marine had made when he and Burke turned up. It was the sort of thing he had had to get used to. He remembered Capt. Jim Land, the man largely responsible for selling the sniper program to the Marines, saying, “When you react to their brand of bullshit, you just buy more. Keep this in mind, they don’t understand snipers because snipers are new. They may be a little scared of you, too. Show them you’re a pro by not letting their crap get in your way.”
It was Land who had recruited Hathcock and Burke and fifteen other men as snipers, and be had known perfectly well what he was doing. Land looked for a special breed of Marine to join his unit—the 1st Marine Division’s Scout/Sniper Instructors. Good marksmanship was important, but that was a skill one could acquire. He picked men like Hathcock because they possessed the more important skills—great knowledge of nature and the outdoors, a sense of belonging to the wilds, extensive field-craft skills, and, most important, strong mental stability and extreme patience. So far Land’s judgment had paid off.
The patrol walked for two hours through the bush, and engaged in one fire fight that could have been costly but wasn’t because they had approached an area that seemed ideal for a Viet Cong ambush with caution. The ambush had come, but the Marines hadn’t been where the enemy expected them to be. Result: six dead Viet Cong and a massive string of mines the Cong had laid along a trail set off by one of their own men.
The Marines departed from the scene of the action and moved through more acres of hills and thorns and tall grass. The sun baked the ground dry from the morning rain. The weeds crunched under their steps as the patrol approached a stream mat led northwest, toward Elephant Valley.
“Sergeant Hathcock, I guess this is it for now,” the black corporal said to the snipers. “I hope I see you again. You two Marines take care of yourselves.”
Hathcock and Burke dropped away as the patrol moved westward. This was the start point from which the sniper team moved into Elephant Valley for the week.
They had a long trek ahead that would be at a much slower pace. Beneath the thick undergrowth they went forward cautiously, on constant alert for the slightest hint of Charlie’s presence. Hathcock faced the inner struggle of speed versus stealth. He wanted to be hidden by nightfall—in position and ready to start hunting Charlie at first tight. But he was going to see to it that even their presence in this area would be unknown to the enemy.