Marine Sniper

by Charles Henderson

  It was Land who had recruited Hathcock and Burke and fifteen other men as snipers, and he 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 that 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 light. But he was going to see to it that even their presence in this area would be unknown to the enemy.

  3

  Elephant Valley

  BAIE 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 the 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 upriver 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 Baie 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 tromped 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 1, 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.

  Now the young Communist soldiers realized that the war might rage for years. They were valiant enough, these young men, but they were new to combat. Their uniforms looked fresh, their turtle-shell-shaped helmets showed no dents or scars, and each man’s Kalashnikov rifle looked as if it had just been unpacked.

  They were a far cry from the typical National Liberation Army soldiers who had no uniforms other than khaki shirts and shorts, or black pajamas, and whose rifles were old and well worn. Men like these had often been in the jungle for years, and they waged war with whatever they could steal or capture, and with what little they could carry over the mountains from Laos.

  These youngsters followed an officer who had only a little more experience than they did and who was assisted by a few subordinate officers and NCOs, who had seen some combat. Each officer and NCO carried a pistol—a symbol of authority—on his hip.

  As the company route-stepped* along the rice fields, the commander kept his position at the lead. Behind him his senior NCO followed closely. The young officer who led the company planned to join his battalion in the jungles on the northern side of Elephant Valley, and rather than climb through the rough mountains at a cra
wl, he marched his men through the flat valleys at a rapid pace. This cut days off his trek, getting badly needed soldiers to his commander, whose battalion’s numbers had been cut drastically by the search-and-destroy attacks that the growing American forces had launched against them.

  Concealed in the thick jungle growth at the valley’s edge, the two Marine snipers peered from behind a tree fall covered with broad-leafed vines, scanning the open fields through which the Ca De Song snaked. They rubbed light and dark green greasepaint on their faces, necks, ears, and hands. The whiteness of their eyes contrasted sharply with the mixture of green hues that surrounded them, like pearls laid in a mossy pool.

  The white feather festooning the senior sniper’s bush hat lay motionless in the still morning air. Soon dawn’s first gray light began to reveal more and more of the wide and flat river valley to Carlos Hathcock’s and John Burke’s shifting and searching eyes. Both snipers felt knots tighten in the pit of their stomachs. As the early morning brightened, they could hear the muffled sounds of men on the march.

  A thick fog hung just above the valley, hiding the upper reaches of the mountains that surrounded this place, offering the two snipers a field of fire that faded into grayness eight hundred yards from where they hid.

  The distant sound of many voices became audible to the Marine duo. Hathcock searched for scouts who might be moving ahead of what he now concluded was a large unit that he knew could not be friendly. The brashness of their march puzzled him. Was it a ploy by an even larger organization to draw fire and expose an ambush to devastation by a hidden NVA battalion?

  The snipers saw no scouts.

  Hathcock tasted a mixture of salt and camouflage paint that dripped from above his upper lip into the crease of his mouth. He wrestled with a decision to shoot or wait, as dark silhouettes appeared through the fog directly before him in a lengthening column of march. The men were marching straight across the dried-out paddy fields that lay between the river and the hills and jungle beyond.

  Hathcock glanced left at Burke who rested prone behind his M-14, aiming at the line of targets that grew in number with each passing second. In a whisper soft as the still air, he said, “Be ready to call for arty and move out quickly. I’m gonna shoot the one on the far right. Back me up on the left.”

  Burke confirmed receipt of the order with a slow, subtle nod and then trained his aim to the column’s rear, waiting to follow the Winchester’s report. His heart pounded against the mulch of decayed leaves beneath his chest. The Marine’s coursing blood caused his front sight blade to rise and fall with the rhythm of his pulse.

  Hathcock’s heart pounded too, sending the rifle scope’s cross hairs rising and falling over his target—the man who walked at the head of the column and wore a pistol. The sniper waited for his pulse to again settle. He had faced the same dilemma at Camp Perry, Ohio, when he won the Wimbledon Cup in 1965. This shot was not nearly as difficult as firing at a 20-inch V-ring from one thousand yards away.

  As his concentration narrowed more and more on the accuracy of this first shot, the pitch of his sight’s cross hairs grew less and less erratic until the steadiness of a national champion marksman held the scope’s center point steadily on the NVA commander.

  The surprise of the sniper rifle’s discharge caused Burke to blink, and as he heard the sound of Hathcock’s bolt ejecting the shell and sending a second into the Winchester’s chamber, Burke fired at the suddenly frozen figure on the far left of the advancing column.

  The NVA leader lay dead at the feet of his company. A seventeen-year-old recruit lay dead at the company’s rear. A third shot cracked from the distant jungle, and another NVA soldier wearing a pistol reared back with a .30-caliber hole in his chest.

  A short dike, approximately one hundred yards long, ran parallel with the column of soldiers. Other than the nearest tree line, nearly one thousand yards away on the base of the mountain slopes, nothing else offered cover to the company. They scrambled to the dike, and as they ran, Hathcock’s and Burke’s shots followed them, claiming soldiers with each report.

  “We better move before they figure out what’s going on,” Hathcock whispered to Burke, expecting this company to react as a seasoned one might.

  “Right,” Burke said—his first words in nearly a day.

  “We’re going over to the other side of this little finger we’re sitting on,” Hathcock told Burke. “They might buy the bluff that we are spread out along this ridge. We’ll pick at ’em right and left. Keep your eyes and ears open. They could have friendlies closing on our flanks.”

  Hathcock moved first and took up a position fifty feet to the left of his previous firing point. Burke followed.

  Behind the dike, an NCO raised his head above the mud wall. He tried to locate his enemy’s position in the silence that now met his ears. Wondering if the attackers had gone, he slowly stood. Lifting his leg to step onto the dike, he suddenly bounded backward and crashed into the thick grass—his throat torn away from his collar bones. The fatal crack of another rifle shot echoed through Elephant Valley.

  On the right and left ends of the dike, eight frightened soldiers leaped to their feet, set their rifles into action, and charged toward the mountain’s tree-covered base and their enemy.

  “Here they come,” Burke spoke.

  Hathcock answered with a shot that dropped one young soldier, and Burke replied with a crack that dropped another. Hathcock worked his rifle’s bolt so rapidly that his fire kept pace with Burke’s, whose bolt operated automatically.

  After they had downed six men, the charge evaporated; the last two retreated toward the dike but were shot before they reached it. All the enemy fire was wild.

  At that moment, one of the North Vietnamese officers scrambled to his feet and ran toward the river, which was five hundred yards behind the company. After he had gone fifty yards, he leaped into a flooded rice field. His cries echoed across the valley as he splashed and churned his way through the knee-deep bog. Just as he was about to disappear in the fog, a rifle shot cracked from the tree line, and he fell on his face with a .30-caliber boat-tailed bullet lodged in his spine.

  The officer frantically struggled to raise his head above the rice paddy’s slime, but the paralysis caused by his shattered spine made it impossible, and he sank beneath the muddy water.

  Now none of the frightened soldiers moved, for they saw that cowardice and valor purchased equal plots in the snipers’ killing field.

  The two snipers crept cautiously and silently around the broadly curving base of Dong Den mountain, hoping to expose the NVA’s left flank. The three-hundred-yard move took the pair more than two hours to complete. It offered only a slightly new angle of attack.

  The sun climbed in the March sky, lifting and clearing away the morning’s foggy shroud. It revealed a blue heaven scattered with white puffy clouds that towered above the mountains and grew ever higher on thermal currents, reflected from the earth’s surface. By mid-afternoon, the towering cumuli changed to cumulonimbi with great anvil-shaped heads and broad, black bottoms that flashed lightning and rumbled thunder down the Ca De Song and through Elephant Valley.

  Hathcock listened to the rumble of the approaching storm. He caught the refreshing scent of rain, carried into the deep valley by a breeze that drifted down Dong Den’s slopes. The first few drops of rain pattered on the broad leaves that hid the two snipers. They continued to watch the short mud dike where the North Vietnamese soldiers awaited the night and the possibility of escape.

  The afternoon wore on, and Burke lay back to rest while Hathcock continued to observe the dike. The enemy had remained still and quiet for more than seven hours. It was clear the snipers held the upper hand.

  With each passing hour, the Communist soldiers’ situation became more desperate. They lay unshaded and baking in the midday heat. The sound of the river’s refreshing coolness teased them with its inaccessible nearness. Their water supply was being quickly consumed. They impatiently watched the
thunder shower’s black cloak sweep down Dong Den and wished that it would hurry toward them.

  In the lush shade where Hathcock and Burke lay hidden, alternating shifts of observing and resting, the heat also rose, raising sweat on both men. Hathcock took a slow sip from his canteen. “Those guys have got to be miserable out there, cooking under that sun. It’s way over ninety degrees right here. It’s gotta to be close to a hundred out there.”

  “Think they’ll make a move with this storm blowing in on us?”

  “Not unless it gives them enough of a screen. They might make a run for it then. It would have to get pretty bad, though.” Hathcock capped the canteen and looked down at the long line of the dike.

  “My guess is after dark. We’ll let them try to slip out and then catch them with illumes—light up those hamburgers and rain all over them.”

  “Rain would feel good,” Burke said, wiping sweat off his head.

  “These few little drops just make you wish it would hurry up and turn loose.”

  “Think of what it’s doing to them,” Hathcock said.

  ON HILL 55, AN ASSISTANT OPERATIONS OFFICER DROPPED A STACK OF yellow message slips on the intelligence chief’s field desk. The gunnery sergeant took the stack and peeled through the first few until he saw Hathcock’s sniper report.

  “What’s going on with Hathcock and Burke?” he asked the young lieutenant.

  “They reported contact this morning and asked for illumination rounds on call through the night. They say they have a sizable NVA unit pinned behind a paddy dike in Elephant Valley. Division wants to wait and see what develops.”