I had the pleasure of meeting Gunnery Sergeant Hathcock. I asked him two questions.
1. Which shot was most satisfying?
Carlos: That damn Apache (he said it with real venom in his voice and elaborated he gave her another one “for good measure”).
2. You had 93 confirmed, how many would you estimate unconfirmed?
Carlos: I never really thought about it much but I think it’d be safe to say over 300.
Rest In Peace Marine.
Gunney called it: “The Best Shot I Ever Made”
“She was a bad woman,” Carlos Hathcock once said of the woman known as ‘Apache.’ “Normally kill squads would just kill a Marine and take his shoes or whatever, but the Apache was very sadistic. She would do anything to cause pain.” This was the trademark of the female Viet Cong platoon leader. She captured Americans in the area around Carlos Hathcock’s unit and then tortured them without mercy.
“I was in her backyard, she was in mine. I didn’t like that,” Hathcock said. “It was personal, very personal. She’d been torturing Marines before I got there.”
In November of 1966, she captured a Marine Private and tortured him within earshot of his own unit.
“She tortured him all afternoon, half the next day,” Hathcock recalls. “I was by the wire… He walked out, died right by the wire.” Apache skinned the private, cut off his eyelids, removed his fingernails, and then castrated him before letting him go. Hathcock attempted to save him, but he was too late.
Carlos Hathcock had enough. He set out to kill Apache before she could kill any more Marines. One day, he and his spotter got a chance. The observed an NVA sniper platoon on the move. At 700 yards in, one of them stepped off the trail and Hathcock took what he calls the best shot he ever made.
“We were in the midst of switching rifles. We saw them,” he remembered. “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.”