 He dreamed of being a U.S. Marine his whole life and enlisted, as I said before, at the age of 17. Hathcock was a world-class sharpshooter by then, winning the Wimbledon Cup Shooting Championship in 1965, the year before he would deploy to Vietnam and change the face of American warfare forever. I like shooting and I love hunting, but I never did enjoy killing anybody. It's my job, he said famously.