A True American Hero
The sniper, pointing his rifle and thinking to himself, easy . . . steady . . . steady . . . aim . . . fire. The projectile hit its target a North Vietnamese commanding General from 700 yards away. The sniper doesn’t dare run for fear of being seen; he turns and crawls back towards safety as quickly as possible.
Carlos Norman Hathcock II was born in Geyer Springs, Arkansas on May 20, 1942. Growing up in rural Arkansas, living with his grandmother after his parents separated, Carlos learned to shoot a rifle, which his father brought back from Europe after World War II. He learned to shoot accurately, making every shot count.
As a young boy, Carlos and his dog spent most of their days in the woods hunting and pretending to be an Army Ranger fighting fake Nazis. Carlos dreamed of being a Marine throughout his childhood, and on May 20, 1959, at the age of seventeen, he enlisted in the Marine Corps.
On November 20, 1962, Hathcock married Josephine Winstead, and one year later, Jo gave birth to a son, Carlos Norman Hathcock III. He too, would later join the Marines.
Carlos, in 1965, while at Camp Perry, Ohio, won many shooting championships, including the Wimbledon Cup; the long-range shooting’s most prestigious prize. A year later he was sent to Vietnam as an MP, but was quickly recruited as a sniper.
A long-distance shooter removes the humanity in war. You no longer have to be within arms length of the enemy, and possibly looking them in the eyes while pulling the trigger.
Carlos Hathcock had ninety-three confirmed NVA and VC annihilations. His actual total is believed to be well over 400, with at least an additional 300 being unconfirmed, which the official count does not reflect. (During the Vietnam War, kills had to be confirmed by an acting third party: this was feasible on a battlefield, but snipers usually worked in pairs, a shooter and spotter; and often didn’t have a third party, which made confirmation difficult if not impossible.)
The North Vietnamese put a bounty of $30,000 on Hathcock’s life, which was far more than the typical eight dollars for snipers. The Viet Cong and NVA called Hathcock Long Tra’ng du’Kich, translated as “White Feather Sniper,” because he wore a white feather in his hat.
An entire platoon of trained Vietnamese snipers was sent to hunt down “White Feather,” causing many Marines in the same area to don white feathers to deceive the enemy.
Hathcock’s most famous accomplishment was shooting an enemy sniper through his scope. Carlos and John Burke, his spotter, were stalking the enemy sniper in the jungle near Hill 55, just south of Danang, the base where Hathcock was operating. The enemy sniper had already killed several Marines, and it is believed he was sent specifically to kill Hathcock. Carlos saw a flash of light, a reflection off the enemy sniper’s scope. Both, he and the enemy sniper were zeroing in on each other. Hathcock fired first. The enemy rifle was recovered and the incident documented by a photograph.
Sniper and spotter are also referred to as marksman and observer. The spotter is fully qualified as a sniper, but both have different duties. The sniper takes the shot, while the spotter detects and assigns targets, and watches for the results of the shot. He will read the wind by using physical indicators and the mirage caused by the heat on the ground. The spotter will also make calculations for distance, angle shooting, and corrections for atmospheric conditions. He lies next to the sniper to help find the target. The shooter uses a fifty caliber round, which is seven or eight inches long, the casing is about an inch in diameter, and the bullet itself is one half inch in diameter and about one and one half inches long. The sniper’s target is usually one half mile away . . . or more.
On Hathcock’s first deployment, he crawled over a thousand meters in a field to take out a commanding NVA general. The 5’10”, 120-pound sniper wasn’t given the details of the mission until he was en route to the insertion point aboard a helicopter. Carlos remembers the four days and three nights without sleep, and crawling inch-by-inch for most of the way. He later told of nearly being stepped on by an enemy soldier as he lay in a field camouflaged in vegetation, and nearly bitten by a bamboo viper. After Carlos fired a single shot, eliminating the general, he had to crawl away while soldiers were searching for the long-distant shooter.
After Hathcock knocked off the general he returned to the United States in 1967, however, he missed his friends from the unit. Carlos returned to Vietnam in 1969, where he took command of a platoon of snipers.
Carlos Hathcock usually used the standard issue sniper rifle, the Winchester Model 70 (.30-06 caliber) rifle and scope, but on some occasions, he used the fifty-caliber M2 Browning Machine Gun with scope, and a bracket that he personally designed.
Hathcock’s career as a sniper soon came to an end on September 16, 1969, when the amphibious tractor he was riding on struck an anti-tank mine. Carlos Norman Hathcock pulled seven Marines off the flame-engulfed vehicle before jumping to safety. He was burnt over ninety percent of his body, forty-three percent were third degree burns. He was taken to Brooke Army Medical Center in Texas, where he underwent thirteen skin graft operations. His injuries left him unable to effectively perform in combat. He refused any commendation for his bravery, however thirty years later he accepted the Silver Star, the U.S. military’s third-highest award given for valor.
Carlos Hathcock helped establish a scout and sniper school at the Marine base in Quantico, Virginia. Because of his injuries, he was in nearly constant pain, but he continued to teach snipers.
In 1975, Hathcock’s health began to deteriorate; he was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, an incurable and degenerative nerve disorder. He was forced to retire just fifty-five days before his twenty years, which would have made him eligible for full retirement pay, he received 100% disability instead.
Carlos later fell into a state of depression, Jo, his wife, almost left him, but she finally decided to stay. Hathcock eventually took up a hobby of shark fishing with local friends; which helped relieve his depression.
Hathcock once said that he survived in his work because of an ability to “get in the bubble,” by putting himself into a state of “utter, complete and absolute concentration.”
After the war, a friend showed Hathcock a passage written by Ernest Hemingway: “Certainly there is no hunting like the hunting of man, and those who have hunted armed men long enough and like it, never really care for anything else thereafter.”
“He got that right,” Hathcock said. “It was the hunt, not the killing. I never enjoy killing anyone.”
Carlos Norman Hathcock II died on February 23, 1999 in Virginia Beach, Virginia.
To this day, Hathcock remains a legend among the Marines. The Gunnery Sergeant Carlos Hathcock Award is presented annually to the Marine who does the most in promoting marksmanship training. A sniper range is also named for Hathcock at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina. In addition, on March 9, 2007, at Miramar, near San Diego, California, the Marine rifle and pistol complex was officially renamed the Carlos Hathcock Range Complex.
In 1967, Hathcock set the record for the twentieth century’s longest combat kill with a Browning M2, fifty-caliber machine gun with a mounted telescopic sight. The distance was 2,286 meters or 1.42 miles.
The record stood until 2002 when it was broken during Operation Anaconda in Afghanistan by a Canadian three-man sniper team. The shooter was Corporal Rob Furlong with a shot of 2,430 meters or 1.509 miles, while using a McMillan TAC-fifty-caliber rifle used against a Taliban fighter.
Non-Fiction
William J. Thibodeaux
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