Marine Sniper (43 page)

3. Probably there are very few Marines within the Corps capable of supporting the Marksmanship Program as well as GySgt Hathcock. Knowledge can only be acquired over a period of time and he has devoted many years to the establishment of his skills by actual participation vice reading material. The success of our teams largely depends on our coaches and he is one of the finest coaches we have. He has asked for no special favors and we have granted few. He is constantly called upon for advice and to perform in the interests of Basic Marksmanship and he has never failed us.

4. By his determination to overcome his physical disabilities, acquired while in combat, he is a constant inspiration not only to our younger Marines but to everyone he serves with.

5. Without any reservations we will continue to respectfully request that he not only stay on active duty but remain with the Marksmanship Training Unit. We are proud to serve with him.

The medical board did not vote on his case until June. Then they sent him the answer for which he had prayed. Yes, he could stay. The board placed him on Permanent Limited Duty-no physical training or physical fitness tests. He could not be transferred because the stipulations of his continued service required monthly visits to the National Naval Medical Center at Bethesda. And finally, to assure the best possible care for him, the chairman of the Department of Neurology, a captain in the Navy's Medical Corps named W. L. Brannon, Jr., assumed care of Hathcock as his doctor.

Hathcock would have been a happy man if the multiple sclerosis had not continued to advance.

July 1976 came hot at Quantico. On Range 4, the thousand-yard range that competitors from all services and NRA shooting clubs called Death Valley, Maj. David Willis lay strapped behind a 300 Winchester Magnum sighting down the powerful scope at the targets a thousand yards away. Carlos Hathcock lay on a shooting pad next to him, tightly wrapped in a shooting jacket and strapped hard to a rifle of similar design.

They practiced for the Interservice individual and team long-range rifle championship matches.

The temperature passed 95 degrees before noon and kept climbing. Willis had the shooters hang thermometers on their scope stands as a reminder to be on guard for heat stroke. The reflected heat sent the mirages boiling and waving so strongly that many of the shooters swore in frustration as they tried to see the targets.

Behind each pair of shooters, a coach sat with his eye fixed to the back of a gigantic, gray spotting scope made by the John Unertl Company.

Ron McAbee, now a gunnery sergeant, stood behind Hathcock, watching and listening to the coach call out the number of clicks to the two men in front of him. When he would call out a wind change, both men were to react by turning the windage adjustment knobs on their scopes and calling the numbers back to the coach.

"Come three right," he said.

"Three right," came a single voice from the right. Hathcock lay on the left.

"Hathcock!" the coach shouted. "Three right!"

Hathcock did not move.

Willis raised on his elbow and slipped the leather rifle sling off his arm.

Hathcock's cheek lay against the raised stock, his eye closed in position behind the scope. His jaw hung open and his breathing was faint.

The frantic Marines unstrapped Carlos from the rifle and began popping the buckles loose from his jacket. Blood dripped from its sleeves, and when they opened it, they saw his sweat shirt was soaked in blood. As the Marines exposed Hathcock's bum-scarred body, they saw his injuries. At every bend in his body, his elbows and shoulders and upper arms and chest, the skin had split open. They could see the old splits and the new splits, and knew that every time Hathcock shot, he bled, yet ignored the pain.

"Jesus Christ! Hathcock is gonna die on us! Get him to the reloading shed," Willis commanded. The small reloading shed at the end of the road that bisected Death Valley, just behind the 600 yard line, was the only building which had air conditioning. They took him there and soon after an ambulance arrived.

Major David Willis left Quantico in October of 1976 for a tour in Okinawa as the executive officer of 3rd Battalion, 9th Marines. And when he returned to Quantico's ranges a year later, Carlos was still trying to pull triggers. He still had not given up. But something else had begun in that year that took his mind off competition. Something attainable.

Major E. J. Land was now the Marine Corps' Marksmanship Coordinator, and he was based nearby at Headquarters Marine Corps. He visited Hathcock often during these new Quantico days and discussed a project that Colonel Reynolds was also involved in. It was a Marine Corps-wide sniper program.

There were independent sniper schools such as Colonel Dickman's 4th Recon Battalion school at San Antonio, but there was no organization that put the sniper schools and the sniper programs within the regular establishment of the Marine infantry battalions.

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 bush-whack 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 "Counter-Sniper" 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 counter terrorist 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," WilUs told him. "You've had a long and illustrious career. You are a living legend. People respect you. All the snipers want to be Catios 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 jather 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.