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.
2. The Nature of Things
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-
