Are you sure that's what he wrote? If so, I really hate to question Sgt Hathcocks memory of his no doubt deadly sniping exploits in Viet Nam, but the account of shooting out the tire of a moving bicycle at a range of 1-1/3 miles is simply preposterous no matter how skilled a marksman he was or how accurate his equipment was.
It would have taken at least the mathematical computations required to land a vehicle from the orbiting earth on a certain spot of orbiting Mars or Venus to have even come close to making that shot, and I have to seriously doubt that he could have made those computations in his head on short notice even if he could have seen the tire at that distance. Just the unknowable variables of numerous factors such as wind speed, bicycle speed, and the difference in elevation of the area between shooter and target would have been enough to make the shot so highly improbable that it stretches credulence past the breaking point.
I don't have the audacity to say that Sgt Hathcock possibly stretched the truth a bit in his memoirs, but if what you say is what is in his book, I will suggest that evidently somewhere between his writing the story and the publisher's printing it someone made a mistake in transcribing the account of his bicycle tire shooting incident.
“Are you sure that’s what he wrote?”
All I can tell you is to read his book. It’s called Marine Sniper. The thing is, that is not even the wildest story in the book. He has a tale in there about taking out an NVA general where he crawls 1000 yards across an open grassy field to get in position to take a shot. This open field is patrolled by NVA personnel with dogs and it takes him four days to crawl that distance without anyone seeing him.
There’s another story there where he and his partner pin down a whole NVA company.
I could be wrong on the exact details of the stories as I read it a long time ago. However, that is generally how the stories go.
There are other stories in there also that are pretty amazing.
IIRC, Hathcock's shot (from a scoped Browning .50 caliber, pre-zeroed to the spot were the target was hit) struck the front of the bicycle frame, below the handlebars. Or perhaps it struck the bundle of AKs slung there, I don't remember the account word for word. I'm pretty sure that the shot was verified by a spotter, so the distance claimed by Hathcock is in all likelihood factual.