Giving the rear eyepiece a quarter-turn to the left, Hathcock brought the mirage into full focus and could see it angling first to the right, and then boiling straight up, and then angling to the left. “Little bit of a fishtail,” he told himself. At more than twelve hundred yards, the shifting wind, even though a very light breeze, made this one of the most difficult shots a marksman could attempt.
Waiting until the mirage leaned well to the left, Hathcock set his rifle scope’s reticle on the chest of the man who sat on the stool having his hair trimmed by the woman. He took a breath, exhaled, and squeezed the Winchester’s trigger.
The rifle’s crack sent a flock of dark brown and black birds flying skyward from the thick brush that grew on the hillside below the hide where Hathcock lay. He drew back his bolt and chambered a second round, watching the first strike the thick, straw roof of the hut and skip skyward.
The woman and two men heard the shot strike the hut’s roof and immediately leaped for cover behind the tall pile of straw and grass. They knew that the haystack would block them from the view of the rifleman atop the hill and hoped that it would stop his bullets, too.
Before Hathcock could settle his aim on any of the three, they had vanished from sight. “Damn it,” he said under his breath, turning the knob on the right-hand side of his scope four clicks, moving this next shot down two minutes of angle, slightly more than twenty-four inches from where he had zeroed the last one.
“Well,” he told himself, “it’s a stab in the dark, but what can I lose?” Steadily, he positioned the center of the scope’s cross hairs on the middle of the haystack, and after one last check to see that the mirage leaned well to the left, he sent a second round cracking down from the hill, across the rice fields, and through the haystack.
Like frightened animals, the two men scurried from behind the haystack, bolted across the wide yard, and disappeared into the stand of tall trees, leaving their rifles and shirts inside the woman’s hut. Hathcock chambered a round and drew his scope to the rear for a third shot, but nothing else moved.
“I must have nailed her,” he said to himself, taking a closer look at the scene through the twenty-power spotting scope. He continued watching, waiting for the two men to return for their rifles and shirts. But that hope quickly turned sour when he looked to the right of the hut and saw a Marine patrol hurrying toward the haystack.
They had been on the other side of the community of huts where the young girl had gone earlier, and had heard shots. They saw the unarmed woman lying in the dirt behind the haystack and hurried to give her assistance. They thought that the woman had been hit by a stray round.
When Hathcock saw the Marines rushing down the dike, one by one, thirty yards apart, he knew that he had struck the woman with his shot. “I better get up the hill to counterintelligence and ITT,” he told himself. “If that woman is alive, that big, ugly gunny will want to talk to her.”
He screwed the lens cap on his spotting scope and slid it back into his pack. Scooting out of his hide, he slung his rifle over his right shoulder, grabbed his pack by the straps, and hurried up the trail from the lower edge of finger four. He walked to a hard-back tent near the center of the compound, where he found the gunnery sergeant whose job it was to interrogate prisoners of war and enemy suspects brought to Hill 55.
Many of the Marines assigned duty with the counterintelligence and interrogator/translator teams had shaved their heads and had grown long handlebar mustaches. The gunnery sergeant was much taller than Hathcock and was very broad across the shoulders. Hathcock felt intimidated by his menacing appearance and thought that if this Marine and his kind caused that much uneasiness with him, they surely must devastate the Vietnamese suspects whom they interrogated.
“Gunny,” Hathcock said, heaving and panting after running up die hill from his hide. “I need to talk to you about something that just happened down off finger four.”
The fearsome Marine wore a flack jacket and no shirt beneath it. He carried a helmet in his right hand and dipped his head as he walked outside to meet Hathcock, who ran the final few steps up the dirt pathway to the gunnery sergeant’s hooch. “What did you see, Sergeant?”
“It ain’t exactly what I saw as much as it is what happened,” Hathcock said huffing. “I watched this woman cuttin’ what looked like two NVA snipers’ hair, and I took a shot at ’em. I shot a little high, so the three of them ran to this haystack to hide. I put my second round into the haystack, and I believe I hit the woman. Meantime, the two NVA hot dogs got away in the tree line.”
“What makes you believe they were NVA?” the Marine asked, leaning slightly down to make eye contact with Hathcock.
“They wore dark green uniforms and carried long rifles—looked like Mosin-Nagants. Those two hamburgers left them in her hooch with their shirts when they flew the coop.”
“Hmm,” the gunny said thoughtfully. “What else?”
“A patrol walked into the scene and picked up this woman. I need to know where they’re taking her, because I don’t think that they realize what she is. Those Marines never checked out her hooch or anything around it. They just snatched her up and hauled her off and never saw the uniforms or the rifles.”
Palming the helmet in one hand, the interrogator shoved the camouflage-covered, steel pot on his head and began walking briskly toward the operations center. “Come on, Sergeant. We better get a lead on these guys.”
In less than five minutes the two Marines had a report from the patrol who had found the woman. They sent a fire team back to the thatched hut to search for the weapons.
Thirty minutes later, word came on the radio that the fire team had found nothing. They claimed that this probably was someone else and that she had been hit in the neck by a stray round. She was just too far away for it to come from Hill 55.
“Gunny, I shot her,” Hathcock said, narrowing his eyes. “She is a collaborator. Those two hamburgers doubled back and grabbed their rifles and shirts. There is one sure way to prove she is the woman who was cutting those ol’ boys’ hair.”
The gunny looked at Hathcock and started to walk back to his tent. “Okay, Sergeant. How’s that?”
“When they take her to the aid station, have one of your own men standing by while the doctor pulls that slug out of her neck. If it’s my woman, the bullet that they pull out will be a 173-grain boat-tail Sierra.”
Hathcock lay on his cot, leaning his head and shoulders against his pack as he read a letter from Jo and listened to Glen Campbell singing “Gentle on My Mind.” The screen door slamming shut, followed by heavy footsteps, distracted his attention from the home thoughts and music.
It was the mountain-sized gunnery sergeant. He stood twirling his long handlebar mustache with his right hand as the low-angled sunlight shone off his head. “She’s yours, Sergeant Hathcock. The doc pulled a boat-tailed bullet out of her neck. I’ll talk to her tomorrow. I just came by to let you know, and to say thanks. She may know quite a bit. If these gooks talk to their barbers like we do, we might get real lucky.”
Hathcock smiled, “Hope so, Gunny. If you think of it when you interrogate her, you might ask her about a platoon of NVA snipers. Captain Land thinks they’re operating a full platoon down here now. If she knows something, give me a holler. I’d surely appreciate knowing anything about that.”
The big Marine nodded to Hathcock and clomped on through the hooch to the back door.
“Thanks again, Gunny.”
“Anytime, Sergeant. Anytime.”
The gunny let the door slam shut as he stepped outside. He wheeled on his toes, crunching small rocks beneath his heavy boots, and looked back through the screen at Hathcock. “One hell of a shot, Sergeant. Right at three-quarters of a mile, maybe more. You make many like that?”
“A few, Gunny.”
“What’s the secret? Luck?”
“No secret,” Hathcock said, still lying on his cot. He raised
his hand in the air and crooked out his trigger finger. “Maybe a little luck, but mostly good trigger control, proper alignment, and allowing for just the right windage.”
“How do you get just the right windage?”
Hathcock looked toward the gunny and with a straight face said, “I watch the clouds… how fast they’re moving. I look at the treetops and bushes. I take a good look at the mirage, that tells me a whole lot. Once I settle on direction and velocity, I take a swag and come up with minutes of windage.”
The gunny cupped his hands around his face and peered through the screen at Hathcock, who sat up on the cot smiling at him. “What’s a swag, Sergeant Hathcock?”
Hathcock narrowed his eyes, cocked his head to one side, and in a serious tone said, “We use it a whole lot
