Marine Sniper (6 page)

Carios never mastered the knack of hunting with the shot-

gun, although he tried shooting dove and pheasant and quail. He hunted with the shotgun often, but always wound up get-teg his old single-shot rifle to bring home the game.

Warm damp air hung heavily in the morning stillness when pleasant childhood memories blurred into conscious thought • aad Hathcock awoke. He felt sticky and uncomfortable. The nun, which had lulled him into a restful sleeo, now heralded Ike beginning of another humid day in Vietnam.

Outside Hathcock's hooch, Lance Corporal Burke sat quietly whittling on a stick. Hathcock saw the back of Burke's bush hat resting against the wire screen and called out drowsily, "You been there long?"

"No, not really. Figured you weren't in any special hurry . since we're going for the week. Thought I'd let you sleep some."

• "Let me grab my pack and rifle, and Til be with you. What's the timeT'

"Almost six thirty."

Hathcock and Burke walked to the Combat Operations Center, where radios crackled around the clock and a tired-eyed gunnery sergeant sat at a field desk jotting notes on a yellow pad, assembling bits and pieces of an intelligence report from messages scrawled in pencil on flimsy, yellow slips of paper.

"Morning, Gunny," Hathcock said in a low voice to the intelligence chief.

"Hi there, Sergeant Hathcock. Want some coffee? That jog's fresh."

Each man poured himself a cup and then Hathcock looked Over at the sergeant. "Anything going on north-up around Elephant ValleyT1

"Happenings everywhere, Sergeant Hathcock. Take your pick. Ream's sighted lots of movement. Already had reports , Of contact this morning from two patrols-one up toward Ele-fhant Valley. You planning to work up there?" i-
   
"Had that in mind, unless someone has something else to flffer. Lance Corporal Burke and I coordinated a long-range nassion up that direction." v
    
"Good. I could use some intel-reps from up there. Let me know your call sign when you check out with operations. And be careful -Charlie's up to something."

Hathcock finished checking out in the operations center and joined Burke outside in the drizzle.

"What's the plan on getting up there?" Burke asked.

We chop north to a fire base where we join a patrol. They'll take us to a good drop-off point. After that, we'll be by our lonesome. A long-range patrol will pick us up on its way in Sunday, at the edge of Elephant Valley. That's six days alone with no rear guard.

"We're Bravo-Hotel on the radio net. We will only make contact on the move or when departing our position."

"Or in case shit hits the fan?" Burke added with a sarcastic smile.

Hathcock unfolded a map that he had made waterproof with a clear-plastic laminating film. "We've got a battery of 105s here," he told Burke, pointing to a hill located southeast of Elephant Valley. "They'll fire on our call, if we need help. If we need air or some other kind of help, we call the S-3."

"Sounds good, Sergeant." The rain was ending, and Burke looked up at the brightening sky. "Weatherman says possible light showers off and on in the evening, and sunny days."

"Good. We ought to be able to move pretty fast. Shouldn't make any noise with the world soft and soggy."

In less than an hour, the two snipers were climbing out of a helicopter at the fire base* where a rifle squad stood in a U-shaped formation. A tall, black corporal moved from man to man, checking each rifle and inspecting each Marine. Two Marine sentries sat behind sandbags, near a gap in the barbed wire that encircled the compound. The corporal turned toward the approaching snipers. A Marine standing in the squad crowed, "Looky here. It's Murder Incorporated!"

"Shut the fuck up, asshole," the black corporal snapped. "You the snipers we're taking up toward Dong Den and Nam Yen?"

"I'm Corporal Perry."

The men shook hands, and, in less than ten minutes, the patrol set out, moving quickly through the wire, one man at a time. Once they reached the far side of the tangled maze of barbed wire surrounding the fire base, stretched in crisscrossing patterns, each Marine took a covered position, widely spaced and on line along a hedgerow near a well-traveled road.

Perry took a quick head count and motioned to the point man to move out. One at a time, each Marine stood and followed the lead, the men taking positions staggered from right to left and spaced thirty feet apart. They maintained mis discipline of wide dispersion to lessen the effects of ambush or booby traps.

Hathcock and Burke joined the column near the patrol's rear guard-a heavyset and already sweating Marine whose boots had worn nearly white from lack of polish. Hathcock had seen many Marines like this one-Marines who neared the end of their tours, their domes showing the wear of a year at war. He could see beginnings of the telltale one thousand-yard stare, the stoic expression on a face that had seen its fill of combat.

Hathcock looked at his own faded uniform-Marines called it "salt." That lance corporal walking rear guard looked salty, but, except for his boots, no more salty man he or Burke did. The snipers used plenty of Mack paste wax on their boots, but they left it unbuffed so as not to reflect sunlight and draw fire.

Hathcock thought about the wisecrack the Marine had made when he and Burke turned up. It was the sort of thing he had had to get used to. He remembered Capt. Jim Land, the man largely responsible for selling the sniper program to the Marines, saying, "When you react to their brand of bullshit, you just buy more. Keep this in mind, they don't understand snipers because snipers are new. They may be a little scared of you, too. Show them you're a pro by not letting their crap get in your way."

It was Land who had recruited Hathcock and Burke and fifteen other men as snipers, and be had known perfectly well what he was doing. Land looked for a special breed of Marine to join his unit-the 1st Marine Division's Scout/Sniper Instructors. Good marksmanship was important, but that was a skill one could acquire. He picked men like Hathcock because they possessed the more important skills-great knowledge of nature and the outdoors, a sense of belonging to the wilds, extensive field-craft skills, and, most important, strong mental stability and extreme patience. So far Land's judgment had paid off.

The patrol walked for two hours through the bush, and engaged in one fire fight that could have been costly but wasn't because they had approached an area that seemed ideal for a Viet Cong ambush with caution. The ambush had come, but the Marines hadn't been where the enemy expected them to be. Result: six dead Viet Cong and a massive string of mines the Cong had laid along a trail set off by one of their own men.

The Marines departed from the scene of the action and moved through more acres of hills and thorns and tall grass. The sun baked the ground dry from the morning rain. The weeds crunched under their steps as the patrol approached a stream mat led northwest, toward Elephant Valley.

"Sergeant Hathcock, I guess this is it for now," the black corporal said to the snipers. "I hope I see you again. You two Marines take care of yourselves."

Hathcock and Burke dropped away as the patrol moved westward. This was the start point from which the sniper team moved into Elephant Valley for the week.

They had a long trek ahead that would be at a much slower pace. Beneath the thick undergrowth they went forward cautiously, on constant alert for the slightest hint of Charlie's presence. Hathcock faced the inner struggle of speed versus stealth. He wanted to be hidden by nightfall-in position and ready to start hunting Charlie at first tight. But he was going to see to it that even their presence in this area would be unknown to the enemy.

Elephant Valley

BATE DE TOURANE, as the French called it, serves as the city of Tourane's gateway to the South China Sea. When the French left Tourane, the Vietnamese, and later the Americans, called the city Da Nang. The muddy water of the Ca De Song- known to U.S. Marines as the Cade River-finds its end at this city, emptying into the bay that is guarded by a prominent peak the Americans named Monkey Mountain.

Ca De Song flows wide from the west's high mountains, into the thousands of rice fields that border the northern edge of Da Nang. During this region's monsoon season-November through February-more than one hundred inches of rain swells the river, flooding the rice fields along its banks. Those farmlands, vulnerable to the river's monsoon ravages, stretch from Da Nang's northern limits to where the river's valley begins gashing between the Annamite Cordillera's eight thousand-feet-high peaks.

Along the southern bank of the river, a dirt road winds just above die highest points that the monsoon floodwaters reach. This road serves the farmers, who grow rice along this river, as a pathway to Da Nang's market. During the monsoon floods, it also serves as their escape route from the deep, rushing water as it courses eastward between densely forested granite mountains. No one knows who first built the road. For the Vietnamese farmers, it has always been there-the only trafficable route out of this mountainous jungle. Because it is the only road, the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese Army depended on it for supplies and reinforcements from Laos.

More than twenty kilometers northwest of Da Nang, heading up river to where the Ca De Song bends north and then west again, rises a velvety green mountain, thirty-three hundred feet high, called Dong Den. Below Dong Den stretches the narrow, elbow-shaped run that infantrymen from the 3rd Marine Regiment named Elephant Valley.

It got its name one June night in 1965 when the Marines atop Dong Den's jungle-covered ridges heard the trumpeting of elephants. An illumination round was fired to light the valley, and it revealed a train of eight elephants, loaded with heavy cannons. The Marines called for naval gunfire, and after two spotter rounds, the eastern horizon came ablaze with the flash of the ship's broadside fire. In the valley, the barrage struck, obliterating the Viet Cong and their elephants.

The elephants died near the hamlet of Nam Yen, the heart of Elephant Valley. There the river runs eastward. Two kilometers downriver, where the elbow crooks southward, is the hamlet of Pho Nan Thuong Ha. And two kilometers below this crook, the river again bends eastward at a hamlet called Truong Dinh-the end of Elephant Valley.

It is here at Elephant Valley's eastern limit that the mountains become hills and the river spreads flat across the rice land, scattering sandbars between its wide channels and dumping silt into Bale de Tourane.

Darkness had swallowed this country as Carlos Hathcock and Johnny Burke slowly made their way over the hills east of Dong Den and descended into Elephant Valley where the Ca De Song bends from its southward to its eastward flow at Truong Dinh. Hathcock planned to move into the big elbow's crook at Pho Nan Thuong Ha where the valley broadened between the dense mountain jungles.

"We have two, maybe three kilometers left before we're at the big bend," Hathcock whispered to Burke as they paused to examine their map and survey this end of the long and crooked valley. "I think we'd be too close for comfort here. Only six hundred meters to work in. Up at the big bend where the valley widens we'll have a thousand to shoot across, and, by moving into a couple of different positions, we have open fields of fire that extend two or three thousand meters up or down the valley." The slim Marine stood up and said to Burke with a smile, "It'll be goooood huntin'."

These were the first words they had spoken since they separated from Corporal Perry's patrol. On the move, they communicated with hand signs and facial expressions.

While Hathcock and Burke slipped along the valley's edge at Truong Dinh, heading toward the big bend, as many as one hundred fifty newly trained North Vietnamese soldiers and their leaders tramped into the western reaches of the valley that follows the Ca De Song.

The NVA company consisted mostly of sixteen- and seventeen-year-old boys. They were the children of the new society of Uncle Ho-its first generation. They began school under the Communist state, established in 1954, and passed from childhood into adolescence following the valiant struggle of the Viet Minh rebels against Ngo Dinh Diem. Diem was overthrown on November I, 1963, by Gen. Duong Van Minh, and unrest lasted through 1964. It seemed as if the National Liberation Front and its National Liberation Army, the Viet Cong, would finally claim victory and bring about the unification of Vietnam. But the United States stepped in following the ouster of Minh, propping up the south's new chief of state, Gen. Nguyen Van Thieu, and premier Gen. Nguyen Cao Ky, and flooding South Vietnam with American forces.