When the alarm buzzed next to Hathcock’s head at four thirty Monday morning, the sleepy Marine put his feet on the floor and struggled to stand. He felt as though he would throw up. “Oh God!” he moaned as he walked down the aisle between the rows of racks and wall lockers in the squad bay, heading toward the showers. An hour later he stood at the brink of the confrontation that he had dreaded all night.
“Gunny Yeager, Jo and I are getting married,” Hathcock told his NCO-in-charge.
“No you’re not.” Yeager told Hathcock in a matter-of-fact voice.
“Yes I am. I’ve already made all the plans. She’s got a good job and I love her.”
The gunny looked at Hathcock and shook his head. “You will get married anyway, won’t you. It’s just like that car. I gotta know this. Is she in trouble.”
Hathcock looked angrily at the gunny. “No. And why would you think such a thing? She’s a nice girl.”
“Back off! I have to see the captain, and he will ask.”
The gunny looked at him appraisingly. “How you going to live? On her pay? You gonna sell your car? Where you going to live? And what if she does get pregnant? What then? You better think of all this too. You know that bank won’t let her work pregnant! If she loses that job, you’re shit out of luck.”
Hathcock looked at the gunny and said in a calm, low voice, “I’m getting married. You’re invited to the wedding. It’s November 10.”
The next year, Jo became pregnant and had to quit her job, and Hathcock managed to make meritorious corporal.
Once safely on the ground, Hathcock headed for his bunker. He was thinking about the past and the future. He knew his wife would be happier if he left the Marines and put down roots somewhere—got a job and a house. But he loved the Marines, and he had already given a lot of his life to it.
“Eight years already,” he said aloud as he walked down a path that led to a waist-high ring of sandbags that surrounded the plywood-and-screen-sided, tin-roofed building, the Marines called a hooch, which housed 1st Marine Division’s scout/sniper instructors.
Lance Corporal John Roland Burke lay on a cot. Carlos Hathcock regarded him as the best spotter with whom he had ever worked. The young Alabama Marine looked up and said, “Sergeant Hathcock, you say something?”
Hathcock leaned his shoulder against one side of the long, narrow building’s doorway. “No. Just talking to myself. You gonna be ready to move out tomorrow? Gonna work north, I think. Up around Elephant Valley.”
Burke nodded, “I’m set. Sure don’t look forward to another week of peanut butter, cheese, and John Wayne crackers. Think I’ll pack a few cans of jelly, too. Need something different.”
Since the snipers had to travel light they were used to carrying nothing but the small, flat cans of peanut butter and cheese. The bulkier C-ration cans were not for them.
Hathcock laughed. “You want to eat good? Learn how to type. They’ll have you over on Hill 327, sittin’ around camp and gettin’ fat in a heartbeat.”
“No thanks,” Burke said. “I’m no pogey.”
Hathcock headed for the chow line near Hill 55’s mess tent. One last good meal for another week, he thought. Tomorrow’s chow would be the standard peanut butter-and-cheese entree.
Resting a tablet on his thigh, Hathcock sat on the edge of his cot and wrote another letter home to Jo. She had no idea that he did anything beyond instructing Marines in marksmanship—the only job that she had known him to do in the Marine Corps outside of competing on the rifle team and being an MP for a while. She had no way of knowing that her husband—a soft-spoken, country boy—was now the Marine Corps’ deadliest sniper.
She’d been relieved when he wrote in October telling her that he had been taken out of the MPs and was now with his old shooting teammate Capt. E. J. “Jim” Land, forming a new school to instruct Marines in marksmanship. His letters told her how he missed her, but they never mentioned going into “Indian Country” to hunt and stalk “Charlie.”
In New Bern, North Carolina, Jo Hathcock picked up her daily copy of the Raleigh News and Observer from 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.