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
