Carlos Hathcock enlisted in the Marine Corps on his seventeenth birthday because he had wanted to be a Marine since he was a boy in Arkansas shooting for the pot with a .22. In 1965 he won the Wimbledon Cup at Camp Perry, the most prestigious long-range prize in the United States. A year later he was in Vietnam — as a military policeman, until a captain building the Corps' first sniper platoons went looking for shooters and found the national champion sitting in a guard post.
He ended the war with 93 confirmed kills, each of which needed a spotter and an officer to witness it; his own estimate of the unconfirmed ran into the hundreds. He wore a white feather in the band of his bush hat, which is how the other side came to know him: Lông Trắng, White Feather, with a bounty of thirty thousand dollars on his head at a time when the standard price for an American sniper was eight. When a platoon of counter-snipers was sent to hunt him, Marines all over the area started wearing white feathers of their own so the hunters would not know which man to shoot.
Two stalks made him a legend. In the jungle near Hill 55 an enemy sniper known as the Cobra was sent specifically for him; Hathcock saw a flash of light in the bushes, fired at it, and the round went down the Cobra's telescopic sight and through his eye — a shot that only works if both men are looking at each other at the same instant. And once, on a volunteer mission days before the end of his first tour, he took the feather off his hat and crawled fifteen hundred yards across an open field to shoot a North Vietnamese general: four days and three nights of moving inch by inch, nearly stepped on, nearly bitten by a bamboo viper, lying still through both.
In September 1969 the amphibious tractor he was riding on hit an anti-tank mine. Hathcock was thrown clear, on fire, and went back into the burning vehicle again and again until seven Marines were out. He was burned over some forty per cent of his body. The Corps gave him the Silver Star for it — in 1996, twenty-seven years late.
He rebuilt the Marine Corps sniper school at Quantico and wrote much of the doctrine that is still taught, then was medically retired with multiple sclerosis fifty-five days short of the twenty years that would have given him a full pension. He died in 1999, aged fifty-six. A rifle carries his name, and so does the Marine Corps' annual award for the best sniper in the fleet.
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