In a field of bamboo and tall grass, the wind picks up and sways the long grasses for a
few moments.
In those precious few moments, an American sniper dressed head to toe in a camouflage
ghillie suit inches forward a few centimeters.
When the wind dies, he stops dead in his tracks, and will not move forward again until there
is a fresh breeze.
If no wind comes though he resolves himself to continue towards his target, a mile and
a half away, by crawling at the incredible rate of twelve inches an hour.
His moves are so slow and methodical that even the local wildlife fails to spot him,
and deer feed directly in front of and around him.
A deadly viper slithers past and over the American soldier, completely oblivious to
the sniper's presence.
Four days later his agonizingly slow crawl will be complete, and his high value target-
a North Vietnamese general- will be dead, a single round through his chest, compliments
of the “White Feather” Carlos Hathcock, the legendary Vietnam War sniper.
Carlos Hathcock grew up learning how to shoot and dreamed of being a US Marine his entire
life, hearing of the heroic tales of valor performed by American marines in places such
as Okinawa, Midway, and Guadalcanal.
At just seventeen years old, he joined the US Marines, and in 1965, six years later,
he won the Wimbledon Cup shooting championship, designating as one of the top marksmen in
the United States.
In 1965 President Johnson ordered ground troops to Vietnam and signaled the start of the American
ground war against the North Vietnamese and their Vietcong allies.
A year later, Hathcock was deployed to Vietnam where he would serve as a military policeman,
but upon arriving he immediately volunteered for combat duty.
Given his incredible marksmanship he was transferred to the 1st Marine Division Sniper Platoon,
at the time stationed at Hill 55 south of Da Nang.
So near the front lines, Hathcock would very quickly put his elite shooting skills to use,
and he even went so far as to wear a white feather on his bush hat so as to dare the
North Vietnamese to spot him, a move that would earn him his lifelong nickname.
Hathcock was soon dispatching enemy snipers, and his preferred time to hunt was sunrise
and sun down.
As he'd go on to explain later, “First light and last light are the best times.
In the morning, they're going out after a good night's rest, smoking, laughing.
When they come back in the evenings, they're tired, lollygagging, not paying attention
to detail.”
Hathcock would take advantage of the drop in the enemy's guard during these crucial
hours to great effect, scoring 93 confirmed kills and over 300 unconfirmed kills.
His skills soon made him a unit trainer, and he started training other snipers how to move
silently through the thick jungle, marksmanship skills, and the all-important art of camouflage.
His skills would soon be put to the ultimate test when a top secret mission came down the
pipe and Hathcock volunteered for it, remarking that he knew nothing about the details except
that it was extremely dangerous and extremely important.
That mission turned out to be the elimination of a North Vietnamese army general, an all-important
link in the command and control chain of the North Vietnamese army which had so far eluded
capture or destruction.
All the Americans had to go on was some rough intel that said the general was safely tucked
away in a large North Vietnamese encampment, though they didn't know where exactly.
Hathcock's job would be to do what platoons of infantry and squadrons of strike aircraft
couldn't do- sneak up to the encampment, locate the general, and eliminate him.
For days he hiked through thick bush in the direction of the encampment, avoiding North
Vietnamese patrols the entire way.
This would be a solo mission, he turned down a spotter fearing that any additional soldiers
accompanying him would only increase the odds of discovery.
Deep down inside, the mission felt like a suicide mission, and Hathcock did not want
to endanger fellow Marines if he could help it.
At last, Hathcock arrived to the target area, and here he had to make a choice.
Thick woods surrounded the camp on three sides, and would be the most obvious approach for
a sniper as it gave the best cover and concealment.
However, that was exactly why Hathcock opted not to make his approach from the thick woods,
it would be the most expected avenue of attack and if he made his shot, it would be directly
where enemy forces would head trying to flush him out.
Instead Hathcock opted to approach the camp from a different direction, an area of grassland
that offered some cover in the form of bamboo shoots and tall grasses, but in many places
offered little to no cover as the grass thinned.
To a casual observer the fourth approach was completely suicidal, but Hathcock was confident
in his abilities to remain undetected.
He would need to move in to at least seven hundred yards to make his shot, and that would
mean that he needed to cross over fifteen hundred yards of open ground to get into a
good shooting position.
To do this, Hathcock stashed most of his equipment and loaded himself only with several canteens
of water, his rifle, and a few rounds of ammunition.
Then he began to low-crawl to his objective using a technique he called “worming”
which saw him move forward at the painfully slow rate of just inches every hour.
This would make his movements so impossibly slow that they would be all but imperceptible
to the enemy.
Hathcock, covered in his full-body ghillie suit, would seem to be nothing more than another
mound of grass, and it would take someone with a photographic memory to notice the incredibly
gradual change in the landscape as he crawled forward.
For four days and three nights Carlos went without food or sleep, inching ever closer.
Even animals were unaware of his presence, with wild boar and deer grazing just inches
away.
At one point a deadly viper slithered next to and over him, a single bite enough to kill
him in seconds.
Hathcock simply froze and let the viper pass on, then continued on his own way.
As he neared the camp, hathcock began penetrating the outer defenses.
Patrols of enemy soldiers walked by just a few feet away from him completely unaware
of the sniper's presence, and at one point a soldier nearly tripped over him.
Finally he crawled between two heavy machine gun positions and changed his crawling technique
so that he was now crawling on his side so as to leave an even smaller trail behind him.
Then finally on the fourth day, the general stepped out onto his front porch and yawned-
a second later Hathcock's bullet had pierced his heart.
The camp erupted in alarms and all the soldiers rushed to the thickly wooded treelines ringing
the camp, searching for Hathcock for three days.
Meanwhile, hathcock simply crawled back home the way he had come, completely clear of any
enemy activity.
Hathcock's second most famous kill would be his showdown against a Vietcong commander
known as Apache.
A sniper herself, Apache had earned her nickname for scalping American POWs and for her brutality
as an interrogator.
An extremely sadistic woman, she took great pleasure in torturing American soldiers, and
in November of 1966 Hathcock found himself in her backyard.
Earlier that month the Apache had captured a young Marine Private and then tortured him
for a day and a half within earshot of his own unit.
Hathcock was also there, and he could hear the screams from the soldier as the Apache
skinned the private alive, cut off his eyelids, tore out his fingernails, and then finally
castrated him with a knife.
The soldier was then released to crawl back to his unit, but though Hathcock attempted
to save him the young private ended up dying in the bush.
Hathcock swore right then and there that he would kill Apache.
He and his spotter hit the thick bush and began moving to locate Apache and her unit
of elite snipers.
The game was a deadly one, not only was Apache a very skilled sharpshooter, but so were all
the men under her command.
Yet it would be Apache who would make the fatal mistake when one day her unit popped
out of the thick jungle and onto a trail for just a moment.
Apache squatted so she could pee though her soldiers urged her to get back up and keep
moving.
At that very moment Hathcock's bullet dropped her from seven hundred yards away, and as
she lay dying, he put a second round through her just for good measure.
By this time Hathcock's reputation had grown to legendary status, and the North Vietnamese
had taken note.
American snipers were very hated by the Vietnamese due to their deadly efficiency, and bounties
ranging from $8 to $2,000 were placed on the heads of American snipers.
Yet hathcock broke all records with an incredible bounty of $30,000 to whoever could kill him.
Many Vietnamese snipers tried to collect, and Hathcock killed them all.
One Vietnamese sniper with a legendary reputation of his own was eventually sent to dispatch
Hathcock, a soldier by the name of The Cobra.
The Cobra had kills as impressive as Hathcock, often striking targets deep inside American
camps and then disappearing into the jungle.
Perhaps as a warning to Hathcock of his arrival, The Cobra struck at the camp he was staying
at and killed a gunnery sergeant.
Hathcock watched the man die and swore right then and there that he would eliminate The
Cobra.
Baiting Hathcock into a fight, The Cobra began to kill many marines around the encampment
over the following few days.
Hathcock and his partner took off into the jungle after the Cobra and for days the three
men played a deadly game of cat and mouse.
At one point Hathcock made a nearly-fatal mistake and leaned against a rotted tree for
support, but the rot had eaten through the tree and hathcock fell over giving himself
away.
The Cobra immediately fired and struck Hathcock's partner's canteen, making the man believe
that he'd been hit due to the warm liquid spreading down his leg.
Continuing their deadly pursuit, Hathcock managed to work around to The Cobra's position,
forcing the Vietnamese soldier to move to Hathcock's old position.
With the sun dropping in the sky, this put The Cobra in a very perilous position, and
sure enough as Hathcock scanned the jungle in front of him he saw the telltale glint
of sunlight off a rifle scope.
Without hesitating, Hathcock squeezed the trigger.
The Cobra was dead.
As Hathcock and his partner made their way to the corpse, they were shocked to discover
that Hathcock's bullet had actually traveled cleanly through the rifle scope and into the
Cobra's eye, so accurate a shot that the bullet didn't even graze the sides of the scope.
This was only possible though if the Cobra had been aiming directly at hathcock at the
same time that Hathcock was aiming at him, meaning that Hathcock had cheated death by
fractions of a second, being just a hair faster on the trigger than the Cobra.
In 1969 Hathcock's time in Vietnam would come to an end when a vehicle he was riding struck
a land mine.
Hathcock was struck unconscious briefly and when he came to he started helping to pull
wounded Marines out of the burning vehicle, receiving third degree burns over large parts
of his body.
With his sniping career over, Hathcock established the Marine Sniper School at Quantico, where
he dedicated the rest of his career to teaching Marines how to become deadly snipers.
He would go on to die in 1999 at the age of 56 from multiple sclerosis, the disease managing
to do what the Vietnamese never could.
Think you have what it takes to have been a Vietnam war sniper?
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