Virginia Beach's legendary sniper Carlos Hathcock

By Mike D'Orso The Virginian-Pilot January 30, 2015

Originally published March 22, 1987

The sun lay low in the Vietnamese sky. Steam rose from the damp jungle mulch. The only sound in the sweltering stillness was the buzzing of flies and gnats as they swarmed above Carlos Hathcocks body, collecting on his neck, probing the corners of his eyes, digging into the creases of his mouth. His knees and elbows were blistered and bleeding. His pants were soaked with urine. But Hathcock felt nothing, He had moved beyond feeling. He had climbed into the bubble, and he was ready for the kill.

For two days Hathcock and his partner Johnny Burke had crawled through ferns, mud and rotting leaves, silent as snakes, stalking their prey, a lone North Vietnamese army sniper. And now it had come to this, the two Marines lying flat on their stomachs, their eyes trained on the tree line across a grassy clearing. Burke saw nothing. But Hathcock, his body frozen, his right eye glued to the telescopic sight of his Winchester, his mind locked in on the hunt, caught a flash, a quick glint of angled sunlight bouncing off a point in the foliage.

He needed nothing more.In an instant the cross hairs of his scope were on the point of the light, and he squeezed the trigger.

Only when he reached the dead mans body did Hathcock realize that the NVA solider, too, had been zeroed in for the kill. The point of light had been the lens of the Asians rifle scope. Hatchcocks bullet had whistled cleanly into that lens, entering the mans head through his eye. Hathcock was alive for one reason: He had fired first.

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One shot. One kill.

That is the snipers creed and no man in any war embodied it more than Gunnery Sgt. Carlos Norman Hathcock II. During two tours in Vietnam, he was credited with 93 confirmed kills. By Hathcocks own count, jotted in the dog-eared notebook he carried in his shirt pocket on each mission, the number was actually three times that. But some bodies were carried away by the enemy and others were obliterated by ensuing artillery fire. And some of Hathcocks kills were simply too extraordinary for his commanding officers to believe.

It was hard to believe a man could live in the Vietnamese jungle for days at a time, creeping through areas controlled by the Viet Cong, stalking and shooting unsuspecting enemy soldiers from distances that were rarely less than three football fields and were sometimes as far as 1 1/2 miles.

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Virginia Beach's legendary sniper Carlos Hathcock