A gentle breeze rustled the white feather in the Marine sniper's floppy hat as he watched the land below through the telescopic gun sight. The soft stir of air had swept up the hill from the rice paddies and, just moments earlier, had touched a twelve-year-old Vietnamese boy whose khaki shirt hung loose and wet across his skinny back and who struggled to keep his heavily laden bicycle upright.
It was a mild February afternoon in 1967, and Stg. Carlos Norman Hathcock II sat cross-legged behind his M-2 .50-caliber machine gun. A year and a half earlier, at Camp Perry, Ohio, the slim, twenty-year-old marine had won the U.S. 1,000-Yard High-Power Rifle Championship. Now he took aim from the southern finger of a solitary peak in South Vietnam.
He squinted as he stared through the eight-power Unertl sniper scope mounted on the top, right-hand corner of the machine...