Marine Sniper

by Charles Henderson

  Land did the politicking within the Headquarters Marine Corps bureaucracy. He sold them with the Hathcock legend, with the idea of what the future could hold for battalions that each had squads of snipers. He sold them an exciting new idea that had been on the battlefields since Leonardo da Vinci defended the gates of Florence by sniping with a rifle of his own design, shooting the enemy from three hundred yards away.

  But never before had anyone trained snipers during peacetime. It was against the conscience of most men, especially those from Western cultures, to “back shoot,” to assassinate from a hide, to bushwhack like an outlaw. It was somehow cowardly to not give an opponent a “sporting” chance.

  However, every Marine agreed that the snipers’ effect on the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese was dramatic. There the “CounterSniper” program had been applauded because it fought back at the sniper problem that the enemy unleashed on the U.S. forces.

  Land and his colleagues pushed the idea of the program onto the commandant. And to sell this “unsportsmanlike” concept of war fighting, Carlos Hathcock became the key ingredient. He was their example of the effectiveness of the sniper in combat—their embodied concept of who the sniper is. And he was their expert, now stationed at Quantico, ready to put all his knowledge and experience and integrity into the foundation—the lesson plans and course structure and content—of the program.

  In 1977, Gen. Louis H. Wilson approved the concept and established a program in which every Marine infantry battalion would have a team of eight snipers within a special platoon of scouts and snipers called the Surveillance and Target Acquisition (STA) Platoon.

  The Marine Corps Scout/Sniper Instructor School was authorized to begin operation at Quantico. It’s staff consisted of three Marines: an officer in charge, Capt. Jack Cuddy; a sniper instructor/armorer, Gunnery Sgt. Ron McAbee; and a senior sniper instructor—the Senior Sniper of the Marine Corps—Gunnery Sgt. Carlos Hathcock. The school would be part of the unit that Major Willis commanded.

  In its first year of operation, the sniper school did not host any students. Hathcock and Cuddy and McAbee traveled to Canada, England, and the Netherlands, attending each nation’s sniper and scout schools. They brought home ideas and innovations, things like the Ghillie Suit*—a uniform on which the sniper sews long and narrow strips of burlap in various shades of green, brown, and gray. With this piece of gear, a sniper can lie in low grass, ten feet from a victim, and not be seen.

  From the start Carlos Hathcock had been perhaps the school’s greatest advantage. Men like Land and Reynolds had known they would have to find someone who could make quick decisions for them. How could they find someone who was a national long-range shooting champion, and also the best sniper around? In Hathcock they had him.

  He allowed them to make rapid decisions by giving a sound opinion. They knew that if he said it would work, it most likely would, and if he saw trouble with a proposal, it more than likely would be a problem. They trusted his judgment, and that got the school off the ground.

  With Hathcock’s assistance, Capt. Jack Cuddy established what became the world’s finest and most renowned school devoted to sniper training—the art and skill of solo combat. Today it provides training and expertise in areas as diverse as urban warfare, arctic and alpine skills, and counterterrorist tactics.

  Hathcock gave all of himself to the program. When Major Willis reported to work at 5:30 each morning, he would look across the parking lot at the small, two-room structure that housed the sniper school. The lights would already be on.

  “Carlos?” Willis called as he peeked through the door.

  “Yes, Sir! Come on in! Have a cup of coffee!” Hathcock would answer. He had already been there long enough to boil the water for the coffee for the day and check through the lesson plans for his snipers.

  The Marines Hathcock taught loved him, and they were in awe of him even before they met him. Captain Cuddy in his introductory presentation would tell them unbelievable stories of courage and cunning in combat—of how two men could hold off more than one hundred for five days, and of how one man could sneak inside an enemy commander’s headquarters, kill him, and get away. Naturally they cheered and whistled and grunted and clapped when Cuddy then introduced the sniper who had done all those unbelievable things—Carlos Hathcock.

  BUT HATHCOCK WAS PUSHING HIMSELF HARDER THAN HE HAD EVER pushed himself before, and his body was crumbling. He had become a man obsessed. He lived by his iron will, and it was strangling his inner peace. He was losing those qualities of patience and calm, steadiness and self-control that had made him a great sniper.

  It was late in 1978, a pleasant afternoon out on the rifle range and Major Willis stood talking to Hathcock who was watching his sniper students shoot moving targets on Death Valley. Willis shelled peanuts and shared them with Hathcock.

  Neither Marine felt the need for a jacket. Hathcock had the splotchy green sleeves of his camouflage shirt rolled down. His camouflage bush hat showed signs of fading, but still looked crisp, especially accented by his white feather.

  Willis leaned against the fender of a pickup truck that was parked on the left side of the range. Hathcock stood near the front and watched the snipers shoot. The major did not see what set Hathcock off, but Hathcock began screaming at the snipers, “Don’t you know better than that? You’re about to graduate and you still make stupid mistakes like that? You dummies are gonna die if you ever get into combat!”

  Hathcock slammed his fist on the hood of the pickup and continued to scream and swear at his men. It was the behavior not of an instructor but of a man falling apart. At that moment, Major Willis, Hathcock’s commanding officer and his trusted friend, realized that the candle had burned short.

  A few days later Willis spoke to Hathcock as a friend. The senior sniper had just finished a medical board and the news was worse. They contemplated retiring him and that worried Hathcock. He had to make twenty years.

  “Hathcock, damn it, as far as I’m concerned, I’ll bury your body on the six hundred-yard line. You can stay here with me as long as the good Lord allows us to stay on this earth, but in this command, you’re gonna have to function.”

  “Sir,” Hathcock said, leaning forward in the chair next to Willis’s desk, beneath a statue of John Wayne and a giant, silver trophy cup filled with peanuts, “I gotta make twenty. That’s only a few more months. Just until the end of June.”

  It was just before Christmas and Willis had strong doubts whether Hathcock could make those final few months, but he would not spoil a man’s Christmas with a decision right now. However, he did plant a seed for Hathcock to consider.

  “There are other things involved here,” Willis told him. “You’ve had a long and illustrious career. You are a living legend. People respect you. All the snipers want to be Carlos Hathcock. They emulate your gesticulations, your voice, the way you go about things. Not only do they do what you say, but they want to be you. So you’ve got to watch what you do, because you can destroy what you’ve done here. And the destruction is not just that of a myth or a legend, but rather the sniper won’t be as good as he should have been because he can’t be you. You want to turn him into a top-notch sniper, but you want to do it within the Marine Corps order and within the means that we have available, not through total frustration and anger.”

  One day in January 1979, while he watched his snipers taking their final examination—trying to move across open terrain, camouflaged from sight, make it to their firing point, fire, and exit without either Hathcock or Captain Cuddy seeing them—Hathcock collapsed.

  Doctor Brannon examined him, watched him for days, and read the tests. The inevitable conclusion occurred: It was time to quit.

  He called Major Willis. When the major answered, Brannon began the conversation by simply saying, “No.”

  Willis knew immediately what the call was about.

  “Look,” Willis said, “I’ll come up there and sit down and talk to you about it.”


  “No!”

  “I know him. I’ve known him a long time.”

  “No,” the doctor said. “I know him too, and I’ve counselled him and the answer is no. He has to get out.”

  It was hard for Willis as a commanding officer, and doubly hard as a friend, to hear that final verdict. And if he couldn’t accept that no, then how could Hathcock?

  On April 20, 1979, in Maj. David Willis’s office, Gunnery Sgt. Carlos N. Hathcock II ended his Marine Corps career, transferred to the Disabled Retired List with 100 percent disability.

  Hathcock had taught classes up to the day before his retirement. He told the snipers that afternoon, “Remember, the most deadly thing on the battlefield is one well-aimed shot.” He turned, fighting back tears, walked out of the room, put on his bush hat with the white feather in its band, and went outside to be alone with his thoughts.

  On that April afternoon when he stood before Major Willis and listened to the order transferring him to that retired list, he cried. Hathcock stood at attention and accepted a rifle from McAbee—arifle built by the Marines from the Marksmanship Training Unit’s armory. Carlos Hathcock had been involved in determining the requirements for this rifle and in testing it once it was made. The rifle was an M-40 A1 Sniper Rifle—a rifle made only for and by the Marines using a Remington Model 700, 7.62mm Rifle Receiver, fitting it with a “heavy” barrel made of stainless steel, free-floating it in a solid fiberglass stock, and then mounting a 10-power Unertl scope on it.

  When Major Willis, fighting back tears, read the plaque—a bronzed Marine campaign cover mounted above a brass plate—the room stood silent. “There have been many Marines. There have been many Marksmen. But there has been only one Sniper—Gunnery Sergeant Carlos N. Hathcock. One Shot—One Kill.”

  HATHCOCK SLUMPED LOW IN THE BOAT’S FRONT SEAT, HOLDING HIS camouflage bush hat atop his head as the craft, with a stainless steel hull covered with metal-flake red and silver fiberglass, raced through the surf, sending salt spray across his face as the wind whipped over the green nylon jacket that he wore. His eyes focused on the yellow circle of letters on the jacket’s left breast that spelled out U.S. Marine Corps Shooting Team. After six years of retirement, he still missed the Marine Corps.

  The transition from active duty had been horrible for Hathcock. As he first saw it, the Marine Corps had cut him adrift, and he spent the rest of 1979 and much of 1980 sitting in a dark room in the rear of his Virginia Beach home—a room filled with Marine Corps relics and haunting memories—brooding. He called it the Bunker, and there he withered, saying nothing and asking for nothing. He anguished over the $610 a month pay that represented the sum of his nineteen years and ten months of active service and how that meager paycheck was all he could offer his family. He could not work for pay and collect a disability retirement too.

  The feelings of rejection, inadequacy, and uselessness sent him spiraling into deepest depression. The flame that once blazed within his soul and kept him coming back again and again faded and threatened to die.

  Jo Hathcock saw her husband mourn the loss of his career and hoped that, as in death, the mourning would pass and Carlos would again discover life. But after more than a year, she packed her bags and angrily told him that she was through living with a dead man.

  Her decision to leave aroused Hathcock’s shrunken emotions, and he no longer thought of his past as his future smacked him head-on. He could not imagine life without Jo and Sonny. Hathcock rarely asked for help and never asked for consolation. But this time he did, and the significance of his plea convinced Jo to unpack.

  Hathcock first sought life in yard work, but the heat and stress often left him unconscious on the lawn. It frightened the neighbors and presented little excitement for him. Thus he and Jo searched for something else.

  As the boat sped from whitecap to whitecap, racing away from the Virginia Beach shore, sending cascades of spray skyward, Hathcock glanced at his friend, who controlled the craft with relaxed ease, and smiled.

  Steve McCarver turned toward Hathcock and yelled above the wind’s roar, “Hear anything from Sonny?”

  “He’s down at Jacksonville, Florida, going to another school,” Hathcock said. He was proud of his son—now a Marine lance corporal stationed at Cherry Point, and had made the shooting team there—the same team on which Carlos had gone distinguished and won a national shooting title. Sonny had joined the Corps on his own, and that pleased Hathcock. “He’ll be home in a few weeks…gonna take leave.”

  “Be good to see him,” Steve said as he turned his face back toward the rising sun.

  Hathcock had first met Steve McCarver at the Bait Barn, one of the dozens of tackle shops near the inlet. He had picked one at random and walked in, hoping to find something that might help fill the emptiness that his Marine Corps career had left. Perhaps talk of fishing might spark something hiding in that void.

  Several men sat and stood near the counter. Men who wore baseball caps with names of fishing line companies and boat companies and tobacco companies sewn on their fronts. The calloused-handed men talked of fishing, all right. Carlos had fished for bass and trout and brim, but these men, who dressed in short-sleeve shirts and khaki trousers and had tan, freckled arms and hard fingers, these men who laughed as they talked, spoke not of bass or brim or crappie or trout. They spoke of sharks.

  Hathcock sat in a lawn chair and looked at the rods and giant hooks and nets and trays of lead sinkers and huge spools of line and shelves filled with boxes of giant lures. He looked at the ceiling and the walls clustered with long-handled dip nets and gaff hooks. And among the busy work of hardware and tackle—gear to catch every kind of fish that swam past the shallow Virginia Beach waters—he saw the shark tackle. He saw the hooks as big as his hand. He saw steel line and leader and huge reels and stiff rods. Hardware more than fishing gear, but weapons made to wage an individual battle of one man against one fish, each trying to end the other’s life. These tools spoke adventure to him, and his heart soared.

  A salty looking man stood next to the counter and leaned against it, resting one hand on his hip as he crossed one foot over the other. It was Steve, and he talked of an ordeal in the shallow water, just off the shores. He told of the shark that refused to quit fighting. And when he got his fifteen-foot motorboat near the dangerous fish, the shark threshed from the water, his jaws spread wide, and lunged up and over the boat’s stern, engulfing the motor.

  It was awesome, and Hathcock returned to this place of tales nearly every day, where he watched and listened as the men hauled in their catches: giant lemons and tigers and makos and sand sharks. Sharks from the distant deep and from the shallow shoals where unknowing weekend anglers searched for other sport fish, unaware that gigantic lemon sharks, known to eat man, lurked there too.

  It seemed like a game, this sport of teasing disaster—of dancing on the wings of doom, tempting death and tasting that special part of life that only the adventurer can know. And for Hathcock, it was only a matter of time before he too would be out in the shallows, tempting the sharks. It frightened Jo, but she knew her husband was again alive—again “The Man in the Arena,” a paragraph that he had kept among his personal possessions for many years, and now turned yellow on his Bunker wall.

  It is not the critic who counts, not the one who points out how the strong man stumbled or how the doer of deeds might have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred with sweat and dust and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, and spends himself in a worthy cause; who, if he wins, knows the triumph of high achievement; and who, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat [emphasis added].

  Virginia Beach now appeared small on the horizon as the silver and red boat slid to a gliding stop. Steve stood and dropped the anchor in the shallow w
ater. “Let’s get at it, Carlos. They’ll swim right by us if we don’t get at em.”

  As Hathcock worked his way up on his unsteady legs, he looked across the brown water and wondered what long and sleek body with his deadly jaws agape might be resting just below, awaiting his bait. The water seemed so calm, yet when the hook would set, it would boil and churn. It was like life, he thought, it’s not always like it appears. His impression of the Marine Corps forsaking him had been like that.

  It was only when life became more meaningful that Hathcock noticed that his beloved Marine Corps had been there all along. Marines wrote to him and called him and came to his home to visit all during the time that he hid in the Bunker. And they never stopped. These friends drove him to Quantico to the Distinguished Shooter’s Association’s annual banquet, and home again. The Marine Corps League named its marksmanship award in honor of Hathcock—a trophy that the Commandant of the Marine Corps presents to the enlisted Marine who had made the most outstanding contribution to marksmanship each year.

  But the most significant event came in the spring of 1985. A capacity crowd jammed themselves elbow to elbow, standing along the walls and filling every seat on a steamy Virginia afternoon to watch the Marine Corps Scout/Sniper Instructor class graduate and to hear a legendary Marine speak.

  On that sunny third day of May 1985, Carlos Hathcock stood just outside the door, unsteady in his spit-shined cowboy boots. With crooked and stiffened, burn-scarred hands, he pulled and readjusted the dark brown tie around the crisp, beige collar of the new shirt that he wore with his brown suit. Jo had gone to Pembroke Mall and bought both the shirt and tie for this special occasion. Moments earlier, he had joked with Lt. Col. David Willis about wearing a suit and tie. “You should have left the price tag on the tie,” Willis told Hathcock, “that way, when you’re through wearing it, you can go get your money back.”