Marine Sniper

by Charles Henderson

  He screamed for the woman to stop, but she kept running. Her temples throbbed with blood, and the shouts of her comrade seemed muffled and unintelligible, as though they came from a drowning man, pleading with his last breath beneath the water’s surface.

  She looked back and, as she did so, Carlos, coming to his natural respiratory pause, let his finger complete the roll of the rifle’s trigger. The recoil sent the Unertl scope sliding forward in its mounts as the bullet cracked across the open land, crossed the narrow stream, and shattered the woman’s collarbones and spine, sending blood and gristle spraying over the low, green ferns that lined either side of the trail.

  The Marine sniper pulled the scope back to the rear position, cycled his bolt and centered his sights on the woman’s body heaped in the center of the trail. The next bullet ripped through her shoulder and into both lungs, scrambling vital organs to a pulp.

  The man who followed her reeled on his toes when the first shot blew the woman off her feet a few yards ahead of him. In leaping steps, he sprinted back up the hill. A single shot that Carlos aimed squarely between the man’s shoulders killed him instantly.

  An enormous smile passed across Hathcock’s face. Land threw his arms around his sergeant’s shoulders and shook him hard. “You got her, Carlos! You did it!”

  Hathcock laughed in jubilation and then, suddenly, he pounded his fist angrily on the hard-packed earth, and said, “Ya, we did it. We got that dirty bitch. She ain’t gonna torture nobody no more!”

  10

  Rio Blanco and the Frenchman

  AT THE NVA COMPOUND FAR TO THE WEST OF HILL 55, THE squat, stockily built old commander rose early. He had not slept well. The forces that he commanded had not enjoyed the success that he had anticipated, and the tension this caused gave him a grizzly’s disposition.

  Today he hoped for good news.

  When the old man walked into his office and sat behind a table covered with papers, a soldier stepped through his door carrying a leather pouch containing intelligence reports and dispatches from the regiments under his command. As the soldier left, an officer came to attention before the general and informed him that the commander of the guerrillas who had so successfully harassed the enemy near Da Nang had been killed, with four of her men, by snipers. The same snipers about whom she voiced concern a month before.

  Her death was a sharp loss. Guerrillas of the National Liberation Army were now reluctant to go on patrol in the country where they encountered these snipers, one of whom was gaining recognition for the white feather he wore in his hat, as well as for his marksmanship.

  This woman, who had begun as a Lao Dong party worker in the north, meant much to the old warrior. He had the determination, and he believed he had the means, to see to it that her assassins did not go unpunished.

  FAR TO THE EAST OF WHERE THE NVA COMMANDER SAT BROODING, Hathcock walked briskly into the sniper school’s command hut.

  “Sir,” he said, “me and Burke, we want to go back out.”

  “Funny you should come waltzing up here so chipper,” Land said. “You get wind of something?”

  “Could be, Sir. You tell me.”

  “You ever hear of Rio Blanco?”

  Hathcock had. He constantly kept attuned to all the operations throughout southern and central I Corps, and he knew that Rio Blanco was big. But he liked to antagonize his captain.

  “John Wayne movie. Right, Sir?”

  “John Wayne my ass, Carlos. That was Rio Bravo, and you probably know more about Rio Blanco than I do.”

  “Oh, no, Sir! I just heard the name, that’s all,” Hathcock said, trying to sound innocent.

  Land rested his arms across the desk and cleared his throat. “Rio Blanco is a major operation that will clear out a wide valley over by Hill 263. The river Song Tro Khuc runs right through the middle of it, and word is that Charlie has a reinforced regiment, or larger, down there.

  “Division is massing Bravo, Charlie, Delta, and Mike companies out of 7th Marines, plus two and a half batteries from 11th Marines—a MAU-sized outfit. They will link up with the ROK Marines’ Dragon Eye Regiment and the Lien Ket 70 Division from the ARVN. They aim to kick ass.”

  Wilson, who had been sitting at the table with Land, looked at Hathcock and rolled his eyes. The sniper smiled and said nothing.

  “Gunny Wilson and I have been putting together a roster of twelve snipers to take down there. The four we leave back here will check in with Top Reinke over at his hooch and operate with 1st Battalion, 26th Marines while we’re gone.”

  Hathcock stood at the doorway, with a long expression on his face. He knew they wouldn’t leave him behind, but he needed to hear it.

  “We leave at zero six, day after tomorrow,” Wilson said firmly.

  “You be sure the troops are up and packed, Sergeant Hathcock.”

  “Aye, aye, Sir!” Hathcock said, saluting with his palm turned outward in crisp British fashion.

  Two days later, when the sniper team arrived at the 7th Marines command post on the afternoon of November 20, the operation had already begun. A busy major greeted Land and told him that it made no difference to the command where he disbursed his snipers, as long as they remained north of the river.

  “General Stiles* will be in and out of this command post, so you might do yourself a favor and establish your CP on one of these fingers just down the hill so you can be close, if something pops. The ITT and CIT folks are set up where they can overlook the operational area from their CP, and they have room for your guys, too. You might consider that.”

  Land thanked the major and led his snipers down the hill to where he could see the counterintelligence Marines’ shaved heads shining in the afternoon sun. “That’s right, Major,” Land sarcastically thought to himself as he walked away from the command post, “put all the oddballs in one spot where you can keep an eye on ’em, and at the same time, keep ’em out of sight.”

  “Gunny Wilson,” Land said aloud.

  The gunnery sergeant jogged down to where Land walked. “Yes, Sir.”

  “You, me, Hathcock, and Burke will stay up here. I’m farming the other eight snipers out to the four companies down there on the operation. They’ll work in direct support of the companies. We can keep ourselves busy around the hill.”

  Hathcock was walking on the heels of his captain, mouth shut and ears wide open. Already the wheels were turning. He liked this country. He had patrolled it from trucks as an MP and knew that as a sniper he could do some real good.

  A SKINNY AND WEATHERED OLD FARMER IN HIS FIFTIES, WHO looked a hundred, worked in a cane field below Hill 263. He kept his head down and swung his hand scythe through the tall stalks, cutting down the crop that he had planted a full growing season ago. The man did not want to appear out of the ordinary to the Vietnamese government troops who walked past him while he worked. Sweat trickled down his face, hidden beneath the large, round straw hat that he wore. The perspiration came not so much from heat or work, but from the fear that turned in the pit of his stomach.

  Had the passing soldiers talked to him, they would have known at once that he had something to hide. He was such a frightened man.

  During the days that Hathcock had patrolled the fields as an MP, riding atop a truck with a mounted .50-caliber machine gun in hand, this man had waved to the Marines as they drove past. He was a simple farmer whose life revolved around the large cane field and two flooded paddies in which he alternated growing rice and lotus. He measured his wealth by his family and by the one water buffalo that he shared with a neighbor, who in return shared with him a cask of rice wine.

  The war had already taken his son, but his son’s widow and children remained with him. His wife had passed away in her sleep ten years ago. Now his daughter, her two children, and his son’s widow and her four children were the family who looked upon him as father, protector, and provider.

  In that past summer of 1966, he did not speak of politics. It was a subject about which he knew little. He
could neither read nor write, nor could anyone else in his family. They were farmers, not scholars.

  There were those in his village who did speak of politics and war. They spoke of Ho Chi Minh and his dream of once again uniting Vietnam. But would a united Vietnam make his cane or rice or lotus grow? Would a united Vietnam return his dead son or his wife to him?

  He worked in the three fields, planting and harvesting his lotus, sugarcane, and rice. That was his life. He counted on nothing more.

  During that summer, the Viet Cong came for rice and pigs and to lecture the villagers. The old man stood in the crowd and listened to them for a while and then walked away.

  The Viet Cong commander noticed him leaving. That night the Viet Cong killed the old man’s water buffalo and threatened to kill his family and burn his house if he did not cooperate.

  The Viet Cong left for him a Chinese-built K-44 rifle. It was covered with rust, and the stock was cracked from the top of the hand guard to the trigger housing. His bullets would do well to strike anywhere near a target at which he aimed, even if he had been a marksman. Each night, the Viet Cong left twenty rounds for him to shoot at the Americans who camped atop the hill. When the Viet Cong returned, they took the twenty empty brass shells.

  At that darkest time of morning when the moon had set and the sun remained well below the horizon, he took the rusty rifle, with its broken stock and badly worn barrel, to the edge of his sugarcane field. There, he hid behind a dirt bank and rested the old gun over it. Aiming at the hilltop, he fired twenty shots, one after the other.

  Cloaked by dawn’s black shadows, the old man collected the spent brass and hurried back to his hut, where he hid the rifle beneath straw mats and dropped the empty shells into a pot inside his tool shed. Once this chore was done, he walked to the fields and worked—hitching himself to a heavy wooden sledge, or plow, that he could pull only inches at a time through the deep mud. These were implements that his water buffalo had once drawn with ease.

  ON NOVEMBER 21, CAPTAIN LAND SENT OUT HIS EIGHT SNIPERS AT 3:00 A.M. to rendezvous with the four rifle companies. He, Wilson, Hathcock, and Burke stayed on the hill.

  Hathcock had pointed out to Land the fields that lay along the river and told how he used to watch for smoke rising from tunnels that the VC had dug beneath the dikes. Despite the fact that many of those same fields, which lay directly below the hill, were considered under control of friendly forces, the snipers knew this country was rich with Viet Cong.

  Hathcock sat down on an ammo case.

  “Skipper, what’s the plan of attack?”

  “Gunny Wilson and Lance Corporal Burke will move down to the river’s edge. You and I will spend the day scoping the world from on high. We’re gonna watch for smoke signals. We have to come home with a few scalps on our belts so we can stay in business. There are people at places like Quantico and Camp Pendleton who are trying to get snipers organized as a regular part of every infantry battalion in the Marine Corps. This is our chance to sell the program by showing that one man with a rifle can do as much damage as a company on patrol.”

  Hathcock said nothing. He knew that sniping was highly cost-effective in terms of materials and lives. He also knew its impact on the enemy. Snipers denied the enemy leadership and access to communications and heavy weapons. But mostly, snipers demoralized the enemy. Made them quit. Made them hide and not want to fight.

  “Sir, I can’t imagine anybody not wanting to make snipers a regular part of the battalion. Just think if every company had a platoon of snipers who doubled as scouts. How could anyone not want that?” Hathcock asked Land.

  “They don’t want to consider that you, in a single month, killed more than thirty enemy soldiers, confirmed. Forget probable kills. Compare your success—one man—against an entire battalion’s during the same period.

  “Operation Macon started back on the fourth of July down near An Hoa. That’s real hot Indian country. Third Battalion, 9th Marines worked extra hard clearing the area around the industrial complex. They lost twenty-four Marines from the time they started until the end of October, when they wrapped it up. In the four months that Macon lasted, they confirmed 445 enemy dead. That is a little more than 110 per month. It’s a damn good result for a battalion. They’re proud of it, too.

  “From mid-October to mid-November you confirmed thirty kills, nearly a third of what an entire battalion accomplished patrolling day and night.

  “Look at October alone. Operation Kern netted seventy-five VC kills and cost eight Marine KIAs. Operation Teton nailed thirty-seven VC and two Marine KIAs. And Operation Madison blew hell out of Cam Ne hamlet—looking for a VC battalion—and got nothing, not even a sack of rice.

  “In the first month we’ve been in business we have more than sixty kills. That’s between seventeen people, and most of them students.

  “What if those battalions had snipers working ahead of their operations, or keeping security around their camps. I think the results would have been much more impressive and would have had longer lasting effects against the enemy. Lord only knows how long Charlie keeps on ducking and dodging after we’ve worked an area.

  “If we sell the sniper system, battalion and company commanders won’t want to go to war without a sniper platoon to keep the boogeyman out of the bushes.”

  Hathcock looked Land in the eye and smiled. They both knew that if the Marine Corps could be convinced of the value of sniping, they were the ones to do it. Just then, rifle fire began to crack.

  The bullets struck the rocks well below where Hathcock sat, but the surprise sent him diving headlong into the dirt. He heard shot after shot splattering against the rocks.

  The old man who lay at the edge of the cane field fired his twentieth round and gathered the empty brass.

  Land glanced at Hathcock in the gray light that now filled the hillside as November 21 dawned. “I know one place to start hunting tomorrow.”

  Wilson and Burke returned from their day’s stalk with little more than a few blisters. They had not had a good hunt. They had seen Charlie, but by the time they got authorization to shoot into that sector, he had strolled right on by.

  Land looked disgusted. “I swear these rules of engagement get my goat. One place there’s a free fire zone. Shoot anything that moves. Next place you can’t shoot at all unless you get permission.”

  RESTING HIS HEAD ON HIS PACK, HATHCOCK SPRAWLED OUT TO sleep on the bunker’s dirt floor. He thought of how he preferred to work away from the crowd, shooting into free fire zones—places he called Indian country. He felt as though he had just dozed off when Land’s strong hand firmly gripped his arm.

  “Carlos. Time to get up.”

  Carlos jerked at his captain’s touch. He had slept with a coiled spring’s tension, leaving him stiff and sore. Stretching felt good.

  Nighttime left a dampness on everything, including the aching snipers who crawled down Hill 263 into the area that the captain had cleared with operations. The zone included a large cane field that waved in the predawn breezes.

  The gray morning felt chilly as the two snipers built a dummy position a hundred yards to the right of their hide. They counted on it drawing any fire, should Charlie have friends. Land calculated that when they fired, the bullets passing the elbow that jutted out from the hill, just above the dummy position, would cause a crack from the bullet’s supersonic wake. Charlie would look to where he heard the loud pop of the speeding projectile as it passed the dummy position, rather than the more distant and less discernable .30-06 muzzle blast from the heavy semivarminter barrel.

  THE OLD MAN AWOKE LATE THIS MORNING. HE, TOO, HAD SLEPT poorly. He had seen strange-looking soldiers that his neighbor told him were Korean. His neighbor told him to be careful, these Koreans were not like the Americans—they killed with unquenchable thirst.

  The farmer looked across the dark hut at the sleeping children and at the rapidly brightening sky that shone through the window above where they lay. It reminded him that he mu
st hurry.

  He crept to where the straw mats covered the rifle, and, with shaking hands, he rolled them back and took the weapon from its hiding place. In the shed where he stored his plow and hand tools, he lifted the lid off a pot and removed a fresh box of shells, left during the night by the phantom guerrilla who prowled through the village while all others slept. He never saw who left the shells, but they were always there each morning, and the spent rounds were always gone at night.

  Because the early morning light now exposed him, the old farmer chose a hidden route through the tall, green stalks of cane. He slowly crawled to the earthen barrier that held back the rice paddy’s water.

  HATHCOCK TOOK THE FIRST WATCH BEHIND THE RIFLE. HE SCANNED along the dike, searching for a target. As he panned the edge of the cane field, he noticed a dark figure crouched low.

  “We got company,” he whispered to his captain. “He just hunkered down behind that dike next to the cane field. It sure wasn’t a farmer. I saw a rifle.”

  “When he raises his head to shoot,” the captain answered,

  “drop him.”

  The world seemed extraordinarily quiet to the old man, who nervously shoved the muzzle of the badly worn Chinese rifle over the top of the dike. He pulled the rifle’s butt into his shoulder and fixed his eyes to the hilltop where he saw dark figures silhouetted against the gray morning sky. His hands trembled as he gripped the stock and rolled his finger around the rusty trigger.

  “Get the task finished,” he thought to himself as he jerked the trigger.

  The sudden explosion from the rusty barrel sent an echo across the valley to where the two snipers lay beneath their camouflage.

  “Can you see him?” Land asked Hathcock, who now squirmed behind the long scope atop his Winchester.