Charles Henderson - Marine Sniper

The targets came up, and the three minutes began.

“Get aligned, sight on the target, and then concentrate. Watch the cross hairs. Watch the clock. Watch the wind.”

The lump left him. He thought of nothing but what he had to do to make his shot find black paper within the center ring, one thousand yards in front of him.

Two other shooters, one of them Sergeant Sanchez, lay contemplating the same puzzle—when to shoot and where to hold.

The wind continued blowing, and Hathcock watched the second hand on his watch finish its first sweep around the dial. Crack, came the sound far to his left where Sanchez lay. Hathcock glanced through his spotting scope at the rolling heat waves and then looked at the range flag. He wondered if Sanchez had allowed for that much wind. Hathcock continued to wait while the second hand on his watch ticked on and the wind blew the range flag straight.

Boom. The sound of the other marksman with a bolt-action rifle sending his round downrange caused Hathcock to again glance at his watch and follow the second hand as it completed its second trip around the dial.

“Less than a minute left,” Hathcock told himself. He leaned to his side, taking a quick glance at the mirage, and then lay back into his position. He focused on his rifle’s cross hairs and watched the range flag continue to ripple in the periphery of his vision. The second hand ticked, forty-five seconds left. Now thirty… now twenty seconds.

Hathcock looked at the watch as the second hand swept past the fifteen-second mark, pulled slightly with his right toe, shifting his reticle to the seven-o’clock position of the bull’s-eye, and began squeezing the trigger.

Focused on the cross that the fine wires inside his sight formed, Hathcock noticed the range flag dip somewhat as the wind’s speed dropped. A sudden feeling of relief filled him.

Jim Land sat on the bleachers with Hathcock’s other teammates, nervously counting the ticks of the sweep hand of his watch. “Shoot, damn it, Carlos,” Land said aloud as the second hand drew itself across the final few seconds of the three-minute time limit.

It was almost as though Hathcock had heard Land’s tension-filled plea, the report of the rifle following on his last syllable. The target dropped as the bullet ripped through the target and disappeared into Lake Erie. “Cease-fire, ceasefire,” the voice from the public address system again commanded.

Two minutes later, the tops of three targets emerged together from the pits and stopped at their half-mast position.

“Ladies and gentlemen, at this time we will disk all misses. There are no misses.

“At this time we will disk all threes. There are no threes.

“At this time we will disk all fours.”

Two targets emerged from the pits. Both had black spotters three inches to the right of bull’s-eye.

Hathcock kept his eye fixed in the rear lens of his spotting scope, waiting to see his target. He did not hear the grandstands filled with cheering people, applauding his victory.

“Ladies and gentlemen, we will now disk the score of the 1965 National Champion, Marine Corporal Carlos N. Hathcock III of New Bern, North Carolina,” the voice from the tower at the center of the line announced. And as Hathcock’s target emerged from the pits, a red disk rose to the center of the target, covering the bull’s-eye. Hathcock looked through the scope, and when the disk lowered, he saw a white spotter in the outer edge of the black. He thought to himself, the wait for the slight break in the wind had been worth the gamble. He had won by a matter of four inches.

BURKE LOOKED OVER his shoulder at Hathcock, “What did you do when you found out you won?”

“I had completely shut out everything. You could have walked up and stood on my back and yelled at me. I wouldn’t have heard you. I was so intent on looking at where I had hit the target and so disturbed that I had landed outside the V-ring that I hadn’t even stopped to realize that the other two guys were out and I had won.

“I was still staring through the spotting scope when one of the other shooters grabbed my shoulder and wanted to shake my hand. Then everything was like a whirlwind. I don’t think that it soaked in until they handed me that big trophy and took my picture. The rest of that day is still a blur.”

Burke smiled and put his eye back to the scope, “Boy, that’s something—really something. No wonder you busted so many of these hamburgers over here.”

“You ready to switch over?” Hathcock asked.

“Sure. Not a thing moving out there.”

Hathcock eased himself through the tangle of vines and jungle growth to where the rifle lay benched on a fallen log; he tucked it into his shoulder while Burke rolled to one side.

“If they don’t try something tonight, what are we going to do tomorrow?” Burke asked.

“We need to be moving out of here by ten o’clock, no matter what. We’ll signal the sweep team at about nine thirty. One way or another, those hamburgers are gonna get some relief tomorrow.”

Burke chuckled. “Too bad we won’t be around to watch the round-up. This has wound up pretty slow.”

“Don’t count those guys out. They may just be a waitin’ for us to lull off. When that sun goes down, you better be on your toes.”

Burke closed his eyes and caught up on his sleep.

Hathcock lay behind the sniper rifle and glassed the short dike with the weapon’s telescopic sight. He searched for a target to shoot that would remind the NVA that he remained their adversary-ready for whatever the night might bring.

As the afternoon wore toward evening, the sky turned hazy. By the time the sun set forty-five degrees above the horizon, the hazy sky had turned gray with thick clouds that threatened rain.

“Burke,” Hathcock whispered. “Sun’s going fast, and it looks like rain.”

“Yeah, we’ll probably get wet about midnight or so,” Burke answered, opening his eyes and raising on his elbows. “Those clouds will make watchin’ Charlie a lot tougher. Light from the illumes won’t break through the clouds until they’re right down on top of us.”

“Some just might slip through the crack tonight,” Hathcock said. “We have to stay on our toes tonight. At this stage of the game, the tables could turn real easy. Just about the time we start thinking we got ’em whipped, they could wipe us out.

“Just keep this in the back of your head, those bastards are gettin’ more and more desperate the longer we sit on ’em. I think that if somebody was going to rescue them, they would have been here by now, and I think they realize that, too. Plus, they’re probaoly runnin’ a mite short on vittles and real short on water. Those hot dogs are at the point where they either have to do something or get off the pot.

“We ain’t got a whole lot left either. Our food is running short, and the way we been pot shootin’ the past four days, our ammo won’t stretch a whole lot further.”

The two snipers waited for the sun to disappear behind the mountains and usher in their final and their darkest night in Elephant Valley.

Behind the low dike, fewer than one hundred bewildered and desperate soldiers of the NVA company remained. They continued to huddle and wait behind the protective wall like frightened puppies in a storm, cowering beneath a house’s eaves to stay dry.

The youthful soldiers who sang songs of triumph as they marched through Laos along the Ho Chi Minh Trail now finalized their plans for one last desperate act. They, too, watched the overcast sky grow dark and knew that the heavy cloud cover gave them a greater chance for escape.

“It’s startin’ to smell like shit out there,” Burke told Hathcock, wrinkling his nose after catching a whiff of the breeze that drifted across the wide valley. “They’re gonna have a hell of a time sneakin’ through the dark like that.”