plans and course structure and content—of the program.
In 1977, Gen. Louis H. Wilson approved the concept and established a program in which every Marine infantry battalion would have a team of eight snipers within a special platoon of scouts and snipers called the Surveillance and Target Acquisition (STA) Platoon.
The Marine Corps Scout/Sniper Instructor School was authorized to begin operation at Quantico. It’s staff consisted of three Marines: an officer in charge, Capt. Jack Cuddy; a sniper instructor/armorer, Gunnery Sgt. Ron McAbee; and a senior sniper instructor—the Senior Sniper of the Marine Corps—Gunnery Sgt. Carlos Hathcock. The school would be part of the unit that Major Willis commanded.
In its first year of operation, the sniper school did not host any students. Hathcock and Cuddy and McAbee traveled to Canada, England, and the Netherlands, attending each nation’s sniper and scout schools. They brought home ideas and innovations, things like the Ghillie Suit—a uniform on which the sniper sews long and narrow strips of burlap in various shades of green, brown, and gray. With this piece of gear, a sniper can lie in low grass, ten feet from a victim, and not be seen.
From the start Carlos Hathcock had been perhaps the school’s greatest advantage. Men like Land and Reynolds had known they would have to find someone who could make quick decisions for them. How could they find someone who was a national long-range shooting champion, and also the best sniper around? In Hathcock they had him.
He allowed them to make rapid decisions by giving a sound opinion. They knew that if he said it would work, it most likely would, and if he saw trouble with a proposal, it more than likely would be a problem. They trusted his judgment, and that got the school off the ground.
With Hathcock’s assistance, Capt. Jack Cuddy established what became the world’s finest and most renowned school devoted to sniper training—the art and skill of solo combat. Today it provides training and expertise in areas as diverse as urban warfare, arctic and alpine skills, and counter terrorist tactics.
Hathcock gave all of himself to the program. When Major Willis reported to work at 5:30 each morning, he would look across the parking lot at the small, two-room structure that housed the sniper school. The lights would already be on.
“Carlos?” Willis called as he peeked through the door.
“Yes, Sir! Come on in! Have a cup of coffee!” Hathcock would answer. He had already been there long enough to boil the water for the coffee for the day and check through the lesson plans for his snipers.
The Marines Hathcock taught loved him, and they were in awe of him even before they met him. Captain Cuddy in his introductory presentation would tell them unbelievable stories of courage and cunning in combat—of how two men could hold off more than one hundred for five days, and of how one man could sneak inside an enemy commander’s headquarters, kill him, and get away. Naturally they cheered and whistled and grunted and clapped when Cuddy then introduced the sniper who had done all those unbelievable things—Carlos Hathcock.
But Hathcock was pushing himself harder than he had ever pushed himself before, and his body was crumbling. He had become a man obsessed. He lived by his iron will, and it was strangling his inner peace. He was losing those qualities of patience and calm, steadiness and self-control that had made him a great sniper.
It was late in 1978, a pleasant afternoon out on the rifle range and Major Willis stood talking to Hathcock who was watching his sniper students shoot moving targets on Death Valley. Willis shelled peanuts and shared them with Hathcock.
Neither Marine felt the need for a jacket. Hathcock had the splotchy green sleeves of his camouflage shirt rolled down. His camouflage bush hat showed signs of fading, but still looked crisp, especially accented by his white feather.
Willis leaned against the fender of a pickup truck that was parked on the left side of the range. Hathcock stood near the front and watched the snipers shoot. The major did not see what set Hathcock off, but Hathcock began screaming at the snipers, “Don’t you know better than that? You’re about to graduate and you still make stupid mistakes like that? You dummies are gonna die if you ever get into combat!”
Hathcock slammed his fist on the hood of the pickup and continued to scream and swear at his men. It was the behavior not of an instructor but of a man falling apart. At that moment, Major Willis, Hathcock’s commanding officer and his trusted friend, realized that the candle had burned short.
A few days later Willis spoke to Hathcock as a friend. The senior sniper had just finished a medical board and the news was worse. They contemplated retiring him and that worried Hathcock. He had to make twenty years.
“Hathcock, damn it, as far as I’m concerned, I’ll bury your body on the six hundred-yard line. You can stay here with me as long as the good Lord allows us to stay on this earth, but in this command, you’re gonna have to function.”
“Sir,” Hathcock said, leaning forward in the chair next to Willis’s desk, beneath a statue of John Wayne and a giant, silver trophy cup filled with peanuts, “I gotta make twenty. That’s only a few more months. Just until the end of June.”
It was just before Christmas and Willis had strong doubts whether Hathcock could make those final few months, but he would not spoil a man’s Christmas with a decision right now. However, he did plant a seed for Hathcock to consider.
“There are other things involved here,” WilUs told him. “You’ve had a long and illustrious career. You are a living legend. People respect you. All the snipers want to be Catios Hathcock. They emulate your gesticulations, your voice, the way you go about things. Not only do they do what you say, but they want to be you. So you’ve got to watch what you do, because you can destroy what you’ve done here. And the destruction is not just that of a myth or a legend, but jather the sniper won’t be as good as he should have been because he can’t be you. You want to turn him into a top-notch sniper, but you want to do it within the Marine Corps order and within the means that we have available, not through total frustration and anger.”
One day in January 1979, while he watched his snipers taking their final examination—trying to move across open terrain, camouflaged from sight, make it to their firing point, fire, and exit without either Hathcock or Captain Cuddy seeing them—Hathcock collapsed.
Doctor Brannon examined him, watched him for days, and read the tests. The inevitable conclusion occurred: It was time to quit.
He called Major Willis. When the major answered, Brannon began the conversation by simply saying, “No.”
Willis knew immediately what the call was about.
“Look,” Willis said, “I’ll come up there and sit down and talk to you about it.”
“No!”
“I know him. I’ve known him a long time.”
“No,” the doctor said. “I know him too, and I’ve counselled him and the answer is no. He has to get out.”
It was hard for Willis as a commanding officer, and doubly hard as a friend, to hear that final verdict. And if he couldn’t accept that no, then how could Hathcock?
On April 20, 1979, in Maj. David Willis’s office, Gunnery Sgt. Carlos N. Hathcock II ended his Marine Corps career, transferred to the Disabled Retired List with 100 percent disability.
Hathcock had taught classes up to the day before his retirement. He told the snipers that afternoon, “Remember, the most deadly thing on the battlefield is one well-aimed shot.” He turned, fighting back tears, walked out of the room, put on his bush hat with the white feather in its band, and went outside to be alone with his thoughts.
On that April afternoon when he stood before Major Willis and listened to the order transferring him to that retired list, he cried. Hathcock stood at attention and accepted a rifle from McAbee—a rifle built by the Marines from the Marksmanship Training Unit’s armory. Carlos Hathcock had been involved in determining the requirements for this rifle and in testing it once it was made. The rifle was an M-40 Al Sniper Rifle—a rifle made only for and by the Marines using a Remington Model 700, 7.62mm Rifle Receiver, fitting it with a “heavy” barrel made of stainless steel, free-floating it in a solid fiberglass stock, and then mounting a 10-power Unertl scope on it.
When Major Willis, fighting back tears, read the plaque—a bronzed Marine campaign cover mounted above a brass plate—the room stood silent. “There have been many Marines. There have been many Marksmen. But there has been only one Sniper-Gunnery Sergeant Carlos N. Hathcock. One Shot—One Kill.”
