Apache

According to the American sniper Carlos Hathcock, Apache was a female sniper and interrogator for the Viet Cong during the War in Vietnam. While no real name is given by Hathcock, he states she was known by the US military as "Apache", because of her methods of torturing US Marines and ARVN troops for information and then letting them bleed to death.

According to Hathcock, he killed her in 1966, when serving as part of a Marine Corps sniper team.

Hathcock's account In an interview conducted by John Plaster in 1984 and 1985, Hathcock stated that Apache led a platoon of snipers near Hill 55, just outside of Da Nang near the middle of present-day Vietnam, and had tortured Marines.

In dramatised versions of Hathcock's life story, published by Charles Henderson, Apache is described as torturing captured US soldiers within earshot of their comrades. However, academics studying the Vietnam war consider these accounts to be untrue. Hathcock's narrative suggests he shot Apache from a distance, working with Jim Land as a spotter.

Ugo Fracassa considers Henderson's recounting of Hathcock's narrative to be sexualised, given its focus on Apache's physical appearance which he views as displaying an attraction combined with repulsion. He also considers the narrative to contain aspects of voyeurism, in view of its description of Hathcock and another US Marine spying on her while she urinated. He views Hathcock's account of Apache's cruelty, involving sexualised violence against men, to be an inverted representation of the reality of American rapes and sexual violence against local women. Lembcke views the story of Apache to have been the inspiration behind the female sniper in Full Metal Jacket.