May 20, 1942 White Feather Sniper

The world of the elite sniper is different from anything most of us will ever experience. Able marksmanship (“one shot, one kill”) is only the beginning. The sniper must be expert at camouflage, field craft, infiltration, reconnaissance, ex-filtration and observation. He or she must be skilled in urban, desert and/or jungle warfare. They must be able to bear heat and insects and rain and a thousand other torments, all while hiding in plain sight from people who want more than life itself, to kill them.

Carlos Norman Hathcock, born this day in Little Rock in 1942, was a Marine Corps Gunnery Sergeant and sniper with a record of 93 confirmed and greater than 300 unconfirmed kills during the American war in Vietnam.

The Viet Cong and NVA called him “du kich Lông Trắng,” translating as “White Feather Sniper”, after the object he wore in his bush hat.

At another time and place, a white feather was bestowed as a symbol of cowardice, an often misplaced emblem of feminine patriotic zeal. Not with this guy.  Hathcock once took four days and three nights to cross 1,500 yards of open ground, stalking and killing a North Vietnamese General before withdrawing without detection. He was almost stepped on by NVA soldiers who were frantically searching for him, and nearly bitten by a deadly Bamboo Viper. It was the only time he ever removed that white feather from his bush hat.

Hathcock once took out an enemy soldier at a distance so great, the man couldn’t be seen with the naked eye. One shot, one kill.

The sniper’s choice of target could at times be intensely personal. One female Vietcong sniper, the platoon leader and interrogator called ‘Apache’ due to her interrogation techniques, would torture Marines and ARVN soldiers until they bled to death. Her signature was to cut the eyelids off her victims. After she skinned one Marine alive and left him emasculated within earshot of his base, Hatchcock spent weeks hunting this one sniper.

One day, Hathcock was tracking an NVA patrol, when he spotted the enemy sniper from the length of seven football fields. “We were in the midst of switching rifles,” he said. “We saw them. I saw a group coming, five of them. I saw her squat to pee, that’s how I knew it was her. They tried to get her to stop, but she didn’t stop. I stopped her. I put one extra in her for good measure.”

At a time when a typical NVA bounty for American snipers ranged from $8 to $2,000, the North Vietnamese set a  bounty of $30,000 on Hathcock’s head, so great was the damage he had done to their numbers. Whole platoons of counter snipers were sent to kill him. Marines in the area began to wear white feathers of their own, preferring to draw enemy fire on themselves rather than lose such a valuable asset.

The elite Vietcong sniper known as “The Cobra” had already taken the lives of several Marines, when he was sent specifically to kill Hathcock. The two elite snipers stalked each other for days when the Marine fired on a glint of light in the jungle, 300 yards distant. They found the enemy sniper dead, the round having traveled up the man’s scope and into his eye.

Such a shot is only possible if the two snipers were zeroed in on each other at the precise instant of the shot.  Let the man tell the story in his own words.

A through-the-scope shot is supposed to have taken place during the “War of the Rats” (“Rattenkrieg”) phase of the siege of Stalingrad, between Russian sniper Vasily Zaytsev and the Wehrmacht sniper school director sent to kill him, Major Erwin König.  There is some controversy as to whether such a shot ever took place.

A 2006 episode of Mythbusters “proved” that the shot is impossible, but I enthusiastically disagree.   Adam Savage, Jamie Hyneman et.al. used a multiple-lensed scope for their test, while the Soviet made scope used by the Vietnamese sniper had only one or two internal lenses.

History.com and Marine Corps sniper Staff Seregeant Steve Reichert, USMC Retired, conducted a more realistic test at the at the T1G tactical training facility in Memphis, TN, with assistance from the appropriately-named mannequin, “Dead Fred”.  Reichert’s test (below) demonstrates that the “through the scope” shot not only Can happen under the right conditions, but that, in all probability,  it Did.

Carlos Hathcock developed Multiple Sclerosis in his later years, and passed away on February 23, 1999. He was decorated with the Silver Star, the Purple Heart and Navy and Marine Corps Commendation Medal. The honor he would perhaps have treasured most, was that of having a rifle named after him, a variant of the Springfield Armory M21 called the M25 “White Feather”.

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