Read Marine Sniper for Free Online

meal for another week, he thought. Tomorrow's chow would be the standard peanut butter-and-cheese entree.
     
    Resting a tablet on his thigh, Hathcock sat on the edge of his cot and wrote another letter home to Jo. She had no idea that he did anything beyond instructing Marines in marksmanship
     
    -the only job that she had known him to do in the Marine Corps outside of competing on the rifle team and being an MP for a while. She had no way of knowing that her husband-a soft-spoken, country boy-was now the Marine Corps' deadliest sniper.
     
    She'd been relieved when he wrote in October telling her that he had been taken out of the MPs and was now with his old shooting teammate Capt. E. J. "Jim" Land, forming a new school to instruct Marines in marksmanship. His letters told her how he missed her, but they never mentioned going into "Indian Country" to hunt and stalk "Charlie."
     
    In New Bern, North Carolina, Jo Hathcock picked up her daily copy of the Raleigh News and Observer from where the delivery boy had tossed it in the front yard of her 1303 Bray Avenue home. She slid the green rubber band off the large, tightly rolled newspaper and opened it to the front page. As she had done each day since her husband's departure for that fax side of the world, she looked for news of the war, turning to the column marked SERVICE NEWS. There she hoped to read about people whom she and Hathcock might know. She sometimes clipped items and sent them to Carlos. Her eyes found a paragraph beaded A SCOUT-SNIPER. It told of the Marine Corps' deadliest gun in Vietnam-Carlos Hathcock.
     
    Jo's hands trembled as she read of how her husband regularly crept into enemy territory alone, or with only one other Marine, and stalked the Viet Cong. The story began:
     
    A SCOUT-SNIPER with the 1st Marine Division in Vietnam earned praise from his commanding officer for "making life miserable for the Viet Cong." Sgt. Carlos N. Hathcock of New Bern is one of several "expert marksmen" credited with killing more than 65 enemy. Firing at ranges up to 1,125 yards, Hathcock and the "crew" have been picking off better than two enemy a day-without a friendly casualty.
     
    Jo quickly folded the newspaper, walked in her house, and slammed the front door shut. She never had liked Carlos's being in the Marine Corps. She hated Vietnam. She only tolerated the Marine Corps because Carlos loved it so dearly. She had often felt jealous of the Marines, especially when he spent nights away from home with the rifle team, competing. Now she felt both fearful and angry.
    Jo Hathcock sat at her kitchen table, her young son playing on the floor near her chair. She sipped a cup of coffee as she wrote her husband a long letter.
     
    In a darkened hut half a world away from New Bern, North Carolina, Carlos Hathcock licked the envelope's flap and pressed it shut. He addressed the letter and jotted the word FREE on the upper-right-hand corner. "No tax, no stamps," he reminded himself. Hathcock laid the letter on his footlocker and flipped open his Zippo to light a cigarette-his last for a week.
     
    While in the bush, Hathcock wanted to smell like the jungle-not tobacco smoke. The Viet Cong could smell the stuff a mile away. As the Marine Corps' best sniper, Hathcock had a healthy respect for the abilities of his foe. A pinch of chew-ing tobacco generally kept his nicotine craving controlled.
     
    With lights out, only the glow of his cigarette illuminated the inside of his hard-backed hooch. He lay and listened to the sounds of the night and the war.
     
    Carlos Hathcock lay back on his air mattress and thought about home and his twenty-fifth birthday. He sighed, 'Twenty-five-my car insurance will go down, and I get a pay raise. Eight years in the Corps. It don't seem like it.
     
    "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