Action

The riveting start of Mike D’Orso’s “The Sniper,” The Virginian-Pilot, 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 Hathcock’s 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. For two days the Asian had eluded their sight, hunting them as they hunted him, sniper on 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 a 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 crosshairs of his scope were on the point of light, and he squeezed the trigger.

Only when he reached the dead man’s body did Hathcock realized that the NVA soldier, too, had been zeroed in for the kill. The point of light had been the lens of the Asian’s rifle scope. Hathcock’s bullet had whistled cleanly into that lens, entering the man’s head through his eye.

Hathcock was alive for one reason: he had fired first.