 He taught himself to shoot as a boy, just like Alvin York and Audie Murphy before him. 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.