“Burke,” Hathcock whispered. “Sun’s going fast, and it looks like rain.”
“Yeah, we’ll probably get wet about midnight or so,” Burke answered, opening his eyes and raising on his elbows. “Those clouds will make watchin’ Charlie a lot tougher. Light from the illumes won’t break through the clouds until they’re right down on top of us.”
“Some just might slip through the crack tonight,” Hathcock said.
“We have to stay on our toes tonight. At this stage of the game, the tables could turn real easy. Just about the time we start thinking we got ’em whipped, they could wipe us out.
“Just keep this in the back of your head, those bastards are gettin’ more and more desperate the longer we sit on ’em. I think that if somebody was going to rescue them, they would have been here by now, and I think they realize that, too. Plus, they’re probably runnin’ a mite short on vittles and real short on water. Those hot dogs are at the point where they either have to do something or get off the pot.
“We ain’t got a whole lot left either. Our food is running short, and the way we been pot shootin’ the past four days, our ammo won’t stretch a whole lot further.”
The two snipers waited for the sun to disappear behind the mountains and usher in their final and their darkest night in Elephant Valley.
Behind the low dike, fewer than one hundred bewildered and desperate soldiers of the NVA company remained. They continued to huddle and wait behind the protective wall like frightened puppies in a storm, cowering beneath a house’s eaves to stay dry.
The youthful soldiers who sang songs of triumph as they marched through Laos along the Ho Chi Minh Trail now finalized their plans for one last desperate act. They, too, watched the overcast sky grow dark and knew that the heavy cloud cover gave them a greater chance for escape.
“It’s startin’ to smell like shit out there,” Burke told Hathcock, wrinkling his nose after catching a whiff of the breeze that drifted across the wide valley. “They’re gonna have a hell of a time sneakin’ through the dark like that.”
“I know. It’s gotten worse today. I think a bunch of them may have a bad case of the squirts, being hunkered down back there for so long. And they can’t have much water left, if they got any at all. With diarrhea, on top of the effects of cooking out there in the sun, dehydration is gonna start taking its toll on ’em.”
The sun was setting over the western mountain tops as a platoon of weary boys crouched at the eastern end of the dike, hoping to make a run in the gray evening twilight—ahead of the nightly barrage of illumination rounds.
Hathcock and Burke watched as the dike faded from view.
“There’s something moving,” Hathcock whispered as he shifted his rifle scope’s reticle onto a dark lump that appeared to the right of the wall. He had already called the artillery battery to request flares.
Burke put his binoculars to his eyes and saw the motion.
“It’s too dark to be sure of my shot,” Hathcock said, “I can barely pick up my cross hairs. Where’s those illumes?”
High overhead, three muffled pops echoed through the valley, and three bright spots appeared in the clouds.
“They’re running,” Burke cautioned, and just as he spoke, Hathcock’s Winchester broke the silence with a shot that sent the cluster of dark shadows rushing across the open terrain.
“Shoot, Burke, shoot! They’re getting away!” Hathcock said as he rapidly drew his rifle’s bolt back, ejecting a smoking brass casing. As he shoved the bolt forward, chambering a second round, Burke’s M-14 began to pop and flash in the darkness.
“I can barely see ’em, Sergeant Hathcock, we need more light.”
“Just shoot into the crowd. Those illumes will brighten up pretty quick once they drift to the bottom of these clouds.”
Three muffled pops ignited more illumination rounds. As the glowing flares, swinging beneath small parachutes, flooded light across Elephant Valley, the soldiers who remained behind the mud wall sprayed a broadside hail of bullets at the tree line, hoping to suppress the snipers’ fire and allow their comrades to reach the huts. Once there, they would set up a second base of suppression fire, allowing the men behind the dike to follow them.
Beneath the forest’s umbrella, and behind the thick knot of brush and fallen timber that had filled with silt and dirt, Hathcock and Burke continued their assault on the fleeing platoon. They had already shot the first few leaders of the escaping band, and now, midway between the mud dike and the huts, the remaining troops fell into prone positions in the dried out rice paddies and began shooting back.
“Damn,” Hathcock said.
“Those guys gonna lay there?” Burke asked. Both snipers dropped their heads behind the upper edge of the log that they had used as a bench-rest for their rifles. Above them hundreds of bullets sang and popped as they struck the broad leaves and branches along the tree line.
“I reckon,” Hathcock answered. “I suppose we’re gonna have to pick at ’em down there until they decide to go back to the dike.”
“Reckon we ought to radio operations and tell them what’s happening?” Burke asked.
“Let’s give the gooners a chance to regroup behind the dike. I’d a whole lot rather wait until daylight before we drop our people in on them. We would stand a better chance of sweeping them out with fewer casualties.”
Placing his rifle on the log, Hathcock put his eye to the scope and fired another carefully placed round. Then he said to Burke, “If you think that the calvary can ride to the rescue for us if we start losing ground down here, you better think again. I ain’t about to wait around if things start to fold up too fast. That happens, I plan for us to be up on the ridge, looking down and moving out.
“If the sweep team catches the bastards after that, then good for them. I’m not about to let anybody come in here and die trying to save you and me. Besides, those hamburgers ain’t worth a thing, except maybe to those shaved-headed bozos at ITT” (Interrogator Translator Team).
Burke laughed.
“What’s so damn funny?”
“I’ll bet that ugly gunny at ITT would love to hear you call him a shaved-headed bozo. As big and mean looking as he is—what with his head shaved slicker than a peeled onion and that long black handlebar mustache curling out past his jaws—he’d probably melt you into the ground with just a look.”
“Burke…shoot.”
“And you better not say anything to him either, or I’ll tell him what you said about his face and you shaving your dog’s butt.”
Above the firefight, more flares burned their way through the clouds. Hathcock and Burke continued picking at the platoon of soldiers who hugged the earth. The Marines were connecting with one shot in four, and now once again the North Vietnamese rushed back to cover.
Huddled behind the dike, a second platoon of young Communist soldiers crouched ready to run. They counted on their comrades to provide a more effective suppression fire this time.
At exactly 8:20 P.M., just as more illumination rounds exploded in the clouds, the NVA opened a hail of fire that struck much lower in the trees and sent dirt flying from the deadwood behind which Hathcock and Burke lay hidden.
“We’re gonna move out of here and take up positions higher up the hillside and on down toward those huts so that we got those hot dogs running right down our barrels,” Hathcock told Burke. “Let’s turn them back behind that wall and then scoot.”
Both Marines began firing at the east end of the dike, daring anyone to venture past its corner.
The hail of fire began to concentrate into the downed dead tree and tangle of brush, yet the two Marines continued to pop the end of the dike with single shots that kept the waiting platoon sitting in place.
“Let’s go, Burke,” Hathcock said, and began to low-crawl from behind the log barrier and through the vines and thickets that lined the hillside.
Burke continued shooting until Hathcock reached a sheltered point, where he opened fire and
allowed his partner to move away from the cover that now attracted the majority of enemy bullets.
As the two Marines leapfrogged their way to a small ridge that jutted out ahead of the group of mud-and-straw huts, the desperate platoon emerged from behind the dike and began running toward them.
Hathcock sat cross-legged behind a tree fifty feet away from Burke and opened fire. Burke hurried past him and crawled into a sinkhole surrounded by roots and brush that were piled with dirt and covered with vines. He laid his rifle across the mound and fired.
Hathcock swiftly crawled to a small rise and lay behind it, resting his rifle across its top and aiming at the soldiers who now ran through his field of fire at a forty-five-degree angle toward him.
His first shot sent the lead soldier tumbling head over heels. It reminded Hathcock of when he shot jackrabbits on the run in Arkansas—how they seemed to roll like a ball when his .22-caliber, hollow-point bullets struck them. This time it was a teenage boy who lay kicking and screaming as he died from a bullet that had ripped through his middle, disemboweling him.
A second soldier fell to his knees at the screaming youth’s side and Hathcock sent a round straight through the young man’s chest, reeling him backward with his knees folded beneath him.
Realizing that they now ran directly into a new field of fire, the remaining NVA soldiers turned and retreated to the dike.
“Burke,” Hathcock whispered into the darkness.
“Yo,” Burke responded.
“You okay?”
“Yeah.”
“Let’s move on over to that ridge.”
Quietly the two snipers crept through the jungle to a hump on the ridge and settled behind it. They looked at the dike surrounded by open terrain and at the small mud-and-grass huts at their right.
“Let me see your map,” Hathcock told Burke, who lay five feet away, at his right. “If I’m not mistaken, these are the same huts that we have marked as on-call targets for the artillery battery.”
“You’re right, Sergeant Hathcock. We gave them these huts here and the set of huts around the bend to the west as primary targets. They should have these spots bore-sighted.”
“If what I have in mind works, we’ll send most of the rest of these hot dogs back to Hanoi in pieces. We’re gonna let them eventually reach these huts…just about daylight.
“We’ll defend these huts for now. Later on, we’ll move up this ridge and go back over to where we first caught these hamburgers on the march, but just a little higher up the slope. We’ll start hammerin’ on ’em and let them see that we moved to the opposite end from the huts. Once they start out, we’ll have the arty hit our on-call targets, while we do a Hank Snow and go a movin’ on, over the hill.”
“What about the sweep team?” Burke asked.
“We have to call operations and ask them to move up their timetable a couple of hours. We’ll leave the sweep team a real easy operation, once we’re done.”
By midnight, the NVA had made a fourth push toward the group of huts and each time lost men. Each time they turned back, the two Marines ceased fire—encouraging the retreat.
For three hours after midnight, neither side fired a shot. And, for three hours after midnight, a drizzle soaked Elephant Valley and the men who lay imprisoned behind the mud wall, as well as their captors. Other than the drip and patter of the light rain, only the sound of the Ca De Song’s rushing water and the intermittent popping of the illumination rounds overhead broke Elephant Valley’s silence.
Both snipers lay quiet, their rifles trained at the end of the dike now nearest to them. Nothing but stillness met their eyes as they monotonously watched the low mud wall through the night.
“Burke,” Hathcock whispered.
“Yeah,” came his quiet reply.
“Let’s get ready for the big adios. It’s just past four o’clock and I’ll bet those shovel heads are sleeping. When we get to the other end, we’ll wake ’em up.”
Slowly and silently, the two Marines crept up the ridge and edged across the lower face of Dong Den.
Two hours later, they reached the ridge that overlooked the western end of the paddy dike. Hathcock slipped through the thick vines and brush like a snake, hardly making a sound as he pushed himself up to a place where the ground leveled off. Carefully he pulled a thick branch from one side and bench-rested his rifle across it, focusing his scope on the west end of the mud wall.
Above and to the right of Hathcock, Burke bellied himself behind a fallen tree where he sat cross-legged with his body following the contour formed by upward-turning roots that jutted at a right angle from the fallen trunk. He took out his binoculars and began searching for movement along the low dike below him.
Hathcock looked at his watch and offered a thumbs-up sign to Burke. Burke smiled back, and taking the handset, he called the artillery battery, warning them to ready their guns for the fire mission.
Hathcock looked at the thick black clouds that hid the sunrise and allowed only dim gray light to usher a new day into Elephant Valley. He hoped that the clouds were high enough to allow helicopters to land the sweep team into the eastern end of the valley, near the tree line.
He pointed at the sky and shrugged at Burke.
Burke took the signal and radioed the sweep team, which now sat mustered in the landing zone south of Dong Den with their three CH-46 Sea Knight helicopters prepared for takeoff. He glanced back at Hathcock and put his thumb straight up.
Hathcock sighted down his scope, picking the corner of the west end of the low dike, and sent a round whining toward the river after it ricocheted at a right angle off the wall. Moving his scope along the dike, he found a tuft of black protruding from behind. One of the soldiers attempted to peek over the top and locate the snipers’ position. Hathcock took a short breath and held it, bringing his scope’s reticle on the black tuft. Slowly he tightened his grip around the small of the rifle stock and began squeezing the trigger.
Burke winced as Hathcock’s bullet struck the soldier’s skull, showering the young NVA troops who huddled beside him with blood, bone, and brains. The sudden bloody shower sent a dozen soldiers scurrying down the wall toward the eastern end, and Burke followed them with three shots from his M-14.
Hathcock shot once more and sent two soldiers dashing from the dike’s east end toward the distant huts. Both snipers concentrated their fire toward the middle section of the wall as more of the soldiers saw the escape unfolding and followed their brothers’ lead.
“Call the artillery, Burke.”
Burke called the fire mission, instructing the battery to fire for effect.
“Let’s go,” Hathcock said.
Both men moved quickly up the ridge and began their trek around Dong Den to their rendezvous with the patrol that would take them back to the fire base and their helicopter ride home.
THE TWO MARINES WALKED UP HILL 55 TOWARD THE OPERATIONS TENT.
“You two look like shit!” the stocky intelligence chief called out to the pair. Between laughs he said, “The word’s out on you two—all the way up to General Walt. Pinning down those NVA like that. What were they, a Boy Scout troop?”
“Durn near, I suppose,” Hathcock responded. “Their big mistake was walking smack down the middle of that valley. I was going to watch the other side of the river where that opening runs between the hills at the big turn. I had that all staked out to catch a patrol crossing there.
“When these hamburgers come marching down the middle of the valley—on my side—just like a Saint Patrick’s Day parade, I knew I had them. But one thing that I can’t figure out is why didn’t they move out at night. All they had to do was run out to the river and jump in. I couldn’t have gotten more than a dozen of them like that. They kept going for those huts that sit on the east end of the bend, you know, just out of the trees where that ridge runs down into the valley.
“I let that work in my favor when we had to pull out. We called in the fire mission and dropped over the ridge.
We never saw what happened, but I know plenty of artillery dusted them at those huts, if the rounds were on target.”
The gunny put his arm over Hathcock’s shoulder and said, “Come on in my house. We’ll debrief and I’ll tell you about that artillery mission.”
The three Marines sat down inside the tent. Hathcock took a cigarette from the gunny’s pack, which lay open on the field desk, and lit up.
“What about that artillery.”
The gunny chuckled and said, “You boys were real smart getting out before the H-Es* hit—all over that valley. You probably would have taken a few. When Lance Corporal Burke radioed for the fire mission and said ‘fire for effect,’ they did. Those cannon cockers opened every gun they had and hit every one of your on-call targets at both ends of the valley…and everything in between, too.
“By the time the shooting stopped and the sweep team got in there, that NVA company scattered over every mountain around that valley, and they may still be running. The sweep team picked up one prisoner. And nobody can make heads or tails of any kind of body count out there.”
“What did the prisoner have to say?” Hathcock asked.
“Well, that company was close to being a troop of Boy Scouts. They had just finished training in the north when their captain—whom you killed right out of the gate—marched them south to join up with an NVA battalion that was supposed to be waiting for them on the north side of Elephant Valley.
“We had pretty well ground that particular battalion down to nothing in the past two weeks—they needed these guys bad. But not bad enough to come down and face whatever it was that had them pinned. They figured you controlled the high ground on the south side, and they didn’t want to screw around with you guys. That NVA prisoner said that they had no idea what in hell they faced up on that hillside, but whatever it was, it was deadly.”
Hathcock took a final draw off the cigarette and crushed it into the brass ash tray that sat on the corner of the gunny’s desk. Exhaling a cloud of smoke, he smiled and then tucked his bush hat back on his head, stroking the white feather in its band.
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