A large tree grew to the Marine sniper’s left and offered enough cover to allow him to raise himself to a sitting position and possibly see behind the rock and log. Grabbing around the tree with his right hand and clutching his rifle with his left, Hathcock began to work his way up the tree’s trunk to where he could sit and point his rifle scope at a high enough angle to see if his adversary had indeed moved into the two Marines’ vacated hide. “Hathcock had almost positioned himself and was about to work his legs into a cross-ankle shooting stance when the ground gave way beneath the edges of his boot soles and he sat hard, crunching twigs and leaves with a noisy plop.
The brown man who hid behind the rotted log peered through his rifle’s scope and saw the sudden flash of movement—the head of a man, wearing a hat with a white feather.
He had the American who could make him a wealthy hero clearly in his sights. And like the old fisherman who, after trying time after time to hook that grandfather trout, finally sees the great silver-and-green fish nipping at his lure, only a tug away from catching him, suddenly yanks too soon and misses his catch, the dark-faced man jerked his rifle’s trigger, bucking his shot wide and low.
The sudden crack of rifle fire sent a surge of adrenaline through Hathcock’s system. He raised his rifle and put his cross hairs on the log, where he saw the dark green flash of the enemy sniper disappear behind the foliage that cloaked his hide. “Damn!” Hathcock said under his breath, and then he looked down and noticed his partner lying motionless at his side, with an expression of wide-eyed alarm on his face.
“Sergeant Hathcock! I’m hit!”
“Where?”
“My butt. He shot my left cheek! It’s bad! It’s burning like a hot iron, and I can feel the blood running all over my legs!”
Hathcock dropped on his belly, crawled to where he could examine the wound, and then said sharply, “Buike, get up! That ain’t blood, it’s water. The bullet just grazed your hip and blew the bottom out of your canteen. Let’s go! He’s getting away!”
Both snipers could hear the brush breaking as their enemy crashed his way through the woods. They, too, jumped to their feet and hurried along the hilltop to a ridge that sloped down the windward side and overlooked a broad, treeless gap that extended down the hill. Beyond the gap, another ridge sloped to the forest below, and there Hathcock saw a gully where the runoff from the rain had eroded a route of escape for their enemy.
“Get down,” he told Burke, as they crawled to the edge of the tree line, near the top of the ridge. “Bet you everything I own that he’s in that gully.”
Resting on his elbows, Burke scanned the full length of the gully with his binoculars, while Hathcock lay at his side, prone behind his Winchester, looking for the slight flash or motion that would reveal his quarry.
They watched the long gully for an hour without seeing anything, yet Hathcock felt certain that their man had not fled, but hid in waiting for them.
Hathcock was angry. His sudden movement had put them in this predicament. It was his turn to shoot now, and he wouldn’t quit until he had taken it.
The sun lay low in the afternoon sky, sending its light down the hill at Hathcock’s and Burke’s backs and casting long shadows across the wide, grass-covered gap that sloped toward the gully where two almond-shaped eyes squinted behind a pair of black binoculars.
The enemy sniper slowly searched each tree trunk and bush for the white feather. “The arrogance of such a thing will cost this man his life,” the sniper thought, as he picked apart the cover opposite him. “I will teach you to flaunt yourself. It is the humble man who wins here, my friend.”
As he trained his binoculars again at the top of the hill where the trees met the crest of the gap, something caught his eye, something small, yet bright, fluttering in the shadows. The little man squeezed his eyes shut and looked again through his binoculars, squinting to see through the blinding rays of the low sun. “I think, maybe, I have found you, my young warrior with the white plume.”
In a smooth and deliberate motion, the North Vietnamese sniper raised his rifle from the gully and tucked it into his shoulder, steadying it with his left hand, which he rested on the ground above the trench. He concentrated on the pointed sight-post inside the scope, but his target disappeared in the sun’s glare, causing him to tilt and cant the weapon as he tried to pinpoint the Marine through the small scope and kill him.
“What’s that?” Hathcock said, catching a flash of light in his scope.
“What’s what?” Burke responded in a hoarse whisper.
“There, again. Down in that guilty. Something’s flashing down there. Reflecting the sun. Something shiny.”
“Reckon it’s him?”
“I can’t tell, but something is sure sparkling in the sun. You got your field glasses on it?”
“Yeah.”
“Make anything of it?”
“No. It’s like somebody shining a mirror in the sun. I can’t tell any thing.”
“Hold tight. Burke. I’m gonna gamble a shot.”
Carefully, Hathcock centered his scope’s reticle on the glimmer of reflected sunlight. He released his breath and let the cross hairs settle on the target, and, as they settled, his .30-06 cracked down the hill, echoing through the wide, treeless gap.
“Holy shit, Sergeant Hathcock! You got him,” Burke said as the glimmer disappeared and revealed the now dead man whose body had bounded against the opposite side of the gully when the bullet struck.
Hathcock smiled at his partner and said, “One shot—one kill.”
Although there was no sign of any other enemy, the two Marines avoided open areas and took the extra time to move along a covered route to where the dead soldier lay in the gully.
Burke reached the body first. He looked at his sergeant and said, “Nobody is gonna believe mis unless they see it. Look at that. You put that round straight through his scope!”
Hathcock took the Russian-made sniper rifle from his partner and looked into the hollow tube of a telescopic sight that had had the glass blown from it as his bullet passed down its length and entered the enemy sniper’s head through his eye.
“Burke, I just had a scary thought. What’s the only way a person could make a shot like this?”
Burke looked puzzled. “What do you mean, Sergeant?”
“Stop and think about it. He had to be sighting his rifle right at me in order for my bullet to pass clean through his scope and get him in the eye like that.”
“Why, then he almost had you!”
“Yeah, Burke, when you get down to it, the only difference between me and him is I got on the trigger first.”
With the last remaining daylight, Hathcock next to the man’s body and marked the exact position of the kill on his map. He would pass the information to headquarters, should they want to recover the body. As for the rifle, its lensless scope and bloody stock were a grim reminder to Hathcock of how close he had come to losing this duel, and he carried it away with him.
“Damn you, Hathcock,” Captain Land shouted in the blackness of the sniper hooch as the two Marines crouched in the doorway at midnight. The silhouettes of the two men stood out in the moonlit sky as the captain rose to his feet and bear-hugged them together. “I haven’t slept for two days, worrying about you two! What happened?”
“Got that boogerman for you, Sir,” Hathcock said, proudly holding out the long rifle. “Shot him in the eye. Thought you’d like to go back to the World with that problem solved.”
“That’s one hell of a good going-away present, Carlos, but I’ll tell you both, I’m a lot happier to see you two back here alive.”
Hathcock put his name on the tag on the bloodstained, Mosin-Nagant sniper rifle and turned it into the command headquarters. He was hoping to save it as a special souvenir, but he never saw the rifle again.