Charles Henderson - Marine Sniper

“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.

MAY 7, 1954—it was only thirteen days before Carlos Hathcock’s twelfth birthday.

The boy was going out to play in the woods with an old German Mauser rifle. Its barrel was plugged shut but, even though he couldn’t shoot with it, he loved the gun. His father, Carlos Norman Hathcock, Sr, had brought the rifle home as a war relic nine years before and given it to three-year-old Carlos II. Carlos’s family background was WASP with a touch of Cherokee Indian, and no one knew quite why the first name of Carlos had become traditional for the men in the family.

As young Carlos walked toward the woods that stood behind his grandmother’s rural home, a white frame house next to a gravel road in a tiny farming community near Little Rock, the hourly news that crackled from the radio could have been reporting that the French Union Army’s 167-day defense of a place called Dien Bien Phu had ended. That was the day the French fell to Gen. Vo Nguyan Giap’s Viet Minh forces. General Giap had managed to starve them out and now the Geneva Conference, called that spring, seemed heavily tilted toward die Communists.

But, if that was the news on the air, Carlos cared nothing for it. That conflict did not involve America or the U.S. Marines. He had John Wayne, Japanese, and a real war on his mind today. Sergeant Stryker in the Sands of Iwo Jima was one of the few movies in which the “bad guys” had killed “The Duke.” Carlos mourned Stryker’s death, and he cheered as Marines from Echo Company, 28th Regimental Combat Team, raised the Stars and Stripes atop Mount Suribachi.

He, after all, was a Marine, too. He had decided four years earlier, when he was eight, that he would join the United States Marine Corps someday. Carlos felt certain that no greater calling could exist in this life.

He hummed the Marines’ Hymn as he marched toward the woods, his Shetland collie dog, Sassy, trotting at his heels and Carlos squarely holding the rifle at “right shoulder arms.”

Carlos saw his first Marine at age eight, in the Memphis apartment building where he and his parents lived. His father had quit his Arkansas railroad job to work in the Mississippi River port city as a welder for the Tennessee Fabricating Company.

A young Marine and his wife lived downstairs from the Hathcock family then, and from the first time that Carlos had set eyes on the trim and straight man who had a square jaw and rock-hard arms, he could imagine no greater thing than to become a Marine.

Bill Monroe sang nasally about his “Brown Eyed Darlin’” following the radio news. Carlos’s grandmother hummed along with the bluegrass melody as she opened her kitchen’s screen door, causing its rusty spring to sing out when the old door swung wide.

“Carlos!” she shouted in a voice that cracked slightly from age—a sing-song grandmotherly voice that young boys, now grown old, associate with barefoot memories of warm summers and goodness. “Supper’s gonna be ready soon. Don’t you go mnnin’ off and gettin’ yourself dirty. You hear me?”

“Yes ma’am,” Carlos called back. “I’ll be right out here—me an’ Sassy.”

Now, once behind the dense, green cover of the weeds and bushes and trees that grew on the edge of his grandmother’s backyard, Carlos dropped to his knees. He knelt next to the thick trunk of an old pine that overlooked the yard and magically projected his imagination through space and time to the jungles of Guadalcanal, where he joined the 1 st Marine Raider Battalion in action.

The skinny, black-haired boy no longer wore jeans and T-shirt but Marine Corps herringbone and boondocker boots. He faced the Japanese enemy alone. They hid behind every tree, stump, and rock.

Quietly, Carlos shoved the muzzle of his rifle through the prickly vines of a blackberry bush. Pushing with his toes, he slid across pine needles and damp earth without making a sound. There he lay hidden beneath an umbrella of tangled vines.

Today, he hunted the Japanese, much the way he stalked squirrels and rabbits with his J. C. Higgins .22-caliber, single-shot rifle, which he had gotten for his tenth birthday. He rarely missed a shot.

Carlos hunted small game to put meat on the family table. His mother and father had separated, and now he and his two-year-old brother, Billy Jack, had accompanied their mother here to live with their grandmother. They were poor.

But peering down the old Mauser’s sights on this warm spring day, Carlos did not think of food as he drew bead on a tortoise. A tortoise, which now became a well-camouflaged Japanese sniper—the deadliest sworn enemy of Edson’s Raiders, heroes of the Pacific.

However, the young warrior’s dog failed to appreciate the intense situation, and she trotted over to the tortoise, nudged it with her nose, and began barking. The tortoise clamped shut, Carlos rolled from under the vines and thorns and stood erect, holding the long rifle by its muzzle and resting its butt on his toe. “Sassy!” he shouted, frowning at the dog. Then he glanced down at his clothes. No longer in the South Pacific, but back in the woods of Geyer Springs, Arkansas, he realized feat he had trouble. Muddy circles outlined the knees on his once-clean jeans. His T-shirt had fared no better. He frantically dusted off the loose soil, but the muddy stains on his knees and T-shirt remained. That meant a problem at home.

Carlos’s grandmother never understood that Marines cannot fight in combat and keep their knees clean—especially twelve-year-old Marines.

“Canr-looos,” her voice sang through the woods.

“Commm-inggg,” he answered apprehensively.

May 20, Carios celebrated his twelfth birthday and opened his gifts. He found one special present that dwarfed the importance of all the others-a Remington 12-gauge, single-snot shotgun. His mother and grandmother both thought that he should have something for his twelfth birthday that required more responsibility, something that would give him a better edge than his .22 rifle.

Carios Hathcock had an exceptional ability to shoot a rifle well, even at age twelve. When he saw the long and narrow box, he knew that its contents could only be one thing—a new rifle or a shotgun.

There was a certain fineness about firearms for the young shooter. He never saw them as toys but as tools crafted for a purpose mat he greatly respected and enjoyed—hunting.

Now, with a shotgun, Carios’s grandmother thought, be could hunt dove and pheasant and quail when they came in season. Carios saw the shotgun as a more efficient firepower to snap-shoot the squirrels and rabbits that often flashed through the brush before he could draw down on them with his rifle.

Carios opened the box containing his new shotgun and shells at nine o’clock mat morning. By nine thirty he walked in the woods with the gun resting over his forearm, its breach broken open and a shell chambered.

A sudden gray flash caught his attention. In a single motion, Carios snapped the breach shut and raised the gun to his shoulder. He heard the rabbit skitter through the weeds ahead, so he waited for another flash of fur. This time he would be ready.

The flash again caught his eye, but this time it was several yards away. He fired the gun and watched the rabbit run up and over a hill. He had missed.

By eleven o’clock Carios had killed nothing, and he had missed several shots—easy shots. He put the shotgun away and returned to the woods with his single-shot rifle. The .22 may not have had the spread, but with it Carios never failed to bring home meat. Just past noon, he returned home with two squirrels and a cottontail rabbit dangling from a tether.