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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.
     
    The Nature of Things
     
    MAY 7, 1954-it was only thirteen days before Carlos Ham-cock'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