Marine Sniper

by Charles Henderson

  “1st Battalion, 26th Marines is over there. A good friend of mine, Boo Boo Barker, is with them,” Hathcock said.

  “Since I’ve been here, that’s where a lot of the action has been.”

  “How long have you been here?” Hathcock asked.

  “I reported to 7th Marines in late November. I didn’t really like the idea of coming to Hill 55 because this place stays under constant artillery and rocket attacks and lots of lob-bombs.”

  Hathcock nodded his head. “I know about lob-bombs. Charlie sets off explosives underneath a satchel charge and lobs the thing in your lap. It’s kind of like blowing a firecracker under a tin can.”

  “Right. It seems like every day we get hit. So when I came up here, I was anxious to get with a unit that would be off the hill more often than on it. But Sergeant Major Puckett, bless his soul, wants to keep me up here as the company gunny and career planner. He gets mad as hell when I go off in the bush.”

  Hathcock laughed. “Career planner in Vietnam? I don’t envy you your job.”

  “That’s the way I felt when he told me I was the career planner. Right off the bat, I decided to make the best of it and be just like the career planners back in the World—always out. I got me a boxful of those Mac Marine cards—the ones with ‘It’s a Good Career, Stick with It’ printed on one side and the pay scale printed on the other. I walked down to the LZ and caught a chopper out to the battalions, right in the middle of Operation Meade River.”

  Sommers started laughing. “I got out there and started passing those cards out to the troops on line. Bullets and mortars were flying everywhere, and there I was standing over a hole, handing these two Marines those cards and telling them to come see me. I heard a little zip, zip, zip blowing past my head, and one of the Marines down in that hole gave me a funny look and said, ‘Gunny…You’re the braaaavest man I eeeever saw!’”

  Hathcock roared and Sommers fought to finish his sentence between bursts of laughter. “It suddenly dawned on me that the zip, zip, zip were bullets whizzing past my ears. You should’ve seen how fast I jumped in that hole. I guess word got around about me because I have the highest reenlistment rate in I Corps now.”

  “Sergeant Major Puckett must like that,” Hathcock said.

  “Are you kidding? I thought Puckett was going to kill me. My only saving grace has been the reenlistments. He told me that I must stay close by the home fires. And that’s why I stay in dutch with the man. I still get off this hill every chance I can, and he stays mad at me. I want to give you fair warning, I lead the sergeant major’s hit parade.”

  Hathcock laughed. “I usually hold that distinction myself. I guess I’ll meet the sergeant major tomorrow. That’s when I get to see my new platoon.”

  “Yeah, you’ll see ’em, all right,” Sommers said a little grimly.

  “By the way, I think you ought to know that Colonel Nichols doesn’t like snipers. He stays up there in that air-conditioned hooch, and from what I hear, snipers just don’t figure in his scheme of maneuver.”

  “What’s the colonel’s name again?”

  “R.L. Nichols.”

  “You think he might come around?”

  “I wouldn’t count on it. Your best bet would be to get after Charlie and win over the sergeant major. If he’s on your side, he’ll keep trouble off your doorstep. Besides, Colonel Nichols is on his way out. His replacement, a colonel named Gildo S. Codispoti, is already inbound. He’s due to take over in a month. Work on impressing him.”

  Sommers looked down the hill at the rusted tin roof of a distant hooch and said, “Part of the reason the colonel has bad feelings about snipers is what you’re going to see tomorrow. That platoon is nothing to write home about. But before we get into that, let’s get you checked into the company. You’ll step into that rats’ nest soon enough. You got your orders?”

  17

  The Tribe

  HATHCOCK WIPED SWEAT FROM HIS FACE AS HE WALKED FROM the 7th Marines command post, now on his way to the more familiar finger four where the sniper platoon’s hooch still stood. He had spent the morning waiting to see the sergeant major and the commanding officer. When he finally did, he’d been given a typical welcome aboard filled with the standard rhetoric told to all new officers and staff NCOs and culminating with the cliché, “My door is always open. I’m glad to have you aboard.” The meeting confirmed Hathcock as the new sniper platoon leader and gave him the license to walk down the hill and begin assuming responsibilities.

  It seemed strange to Carlos that the outgoing platoon sergeant had not come to meet him. As he walked down the trail to the low hooch and the bunkers on finger four, he began looking for signs of life—anyone who might tell him where he could find the platoon sergeant.

  “Anybody here?” he shouted as he walked close to the old canvas-covered hooch—the same hooch that he helped build two and a half years ago.

  “In here!” a voice shouted back.

  The place looked dirty and worn now, just like much of the country. Several tears in the canvas hung loosely open and the roof revealed hundreds of small holes, made by years of harassing small-arms fire. As Carlos stepped near the door, he lifted the torn screen with his hand and wondered why no one had tacked it down again. The unpainted door frame was now dark from weather. Black streaks stained the wood from the rusting nails that held the door together—the same nails that Hathcock and Burke had driven in in the fall of 1966.

  The door screeched as Hathcock pulled it open on its rusty hinges and stepped inside. The room was filthy. It smelled like a combination of mildew, body odor, and stale beer. Odd gear leaned against the walls and littered the floor. Boxes and bins overflowed with empty beer cans, cigarette butts, and trash from C-rations.

  “Where’s the platoon sergeant?” Hathcock asked, standing in the open doorway.

  “I’m him. What ya need?” the sergeant said, lying on a cot at the rear of the hooch. He slurped a beer and gave a healthy belch. The Marine wore a dirty green T-shirt and cutoff trousers. His jungle boots lay topsy-turvy on the dirty floor, among the cans and men’s magazines.

  “I’m your replacement.”

  The sergeant leaned on one elbow. “Welcome to the war.”

  “You guys just get back from the bush?” Hathcock asked.

  “Naw,” the sergeant said, gulping more beer. “They don’t have any idea of how to use snipers. We just burn the shitters, fill out the mess-duty quotas, and stand perimeter security.”

  “Where are all your snipers?”

  “Out, I guess.”

  “Where?”

  “Don’t know,” the sergeant said, and opened up a Playboy.

  “How many men you have?” Hathcock said. He could feel the muscles in his neck tensing. “You do know how many men you have, don’t you?”

  “About twenty or so, I think.”

  “How many rifles you have?”

  The sergeant shook his shaggy head. “Hell, I don’t know. Ask the troops when you see ’em.”

  “How many scopes you got? How may M-49s you got? Don’t you know anything?”

  “Yeah,” the Marine said spitefully, looking at Hathcock. “You’re pissin’ me off, hassling me about this shit. Where you comin’ from anyway? We’re doing just fine. Nobody bugs us and we don’t bug nobody. We pull our details, do our time, and go back to the World…alive.”

  “I remember you,” Hathcock said. “You were here in ’67. I taught you myself.”

  “Yeah, that’s right. I got twenty-one confirmed kills and that’s plenty.”

  “In two years you got twenty-one kills. In six months I got eighty confirmed. In two years you ought to have a hundred. You must have just quit as soon as you got this platoon. You found a good deal, hiding out here, drinking beer, and collecting tax-free pay.

  “Well, I don’t need you. You go on up to Gunny Sommers and tell him I kicked your butt out of this platoon. Maybe he can find some use for you for the next couple of weeks.”

 
; Hathcock took a deep breath and tried to control the anger in his voice. “I’m going out to find my platoon. You be packed out of here when I get back. You got any problems with that, go talk to Sergeant Major Puckett.”

  Slamming the door shut, Hathcock stormed toward the bunker at the base of the sniper encampment. A suntanned Marine was lying across a long row of sandbags wearing nothing except a pair of utility trousers with the legs cut off at the lower seam of the pockets. He wore sunglasses and was smoking a hand-rolled cigarette. Around his neck dangled a German iron cross and a metal peace symbol.

  “You a Marine?” Hathcock asked walking up to the man.

  “Yeah.”

  “You a sniper?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Where is the rest of your platoon?”

  “Here and there.”

  “Can you find them?”

  “Sure. No problem. Who wants to know?”

  “I do,” Hathcock said, narrowing his eyes. “I want you to have them all back here by sixteen hundred today. Will that be a problem?”

  “Naw. Most of the guys are goofing off or on work details around the hill. I can get them here in an hour.”

  “That’s even better. You do that.”

  “You never told me who you are.”

  “Staff Sergeant Hathcock. Carlos Hathcock. Your new platoon sergeant.”

  The Marine stood and smiled. “You mean we finally got another platoon sergeant?”

  Hathcock nodded.

  “We ain’t all shit birds, Staff Sergeant Hathcock. You hang tight, I’ll round up the platoon.”

  As the Marine jogged up the hill, Hathcock yelled to him, “Tell them to bring all their sniper gear when they come to my muster.”

  The Marine waved his hand, acknowledging the last order, and continued jogging in his scuffed white jungle boots.

  Hathcock sat down on the sandbags and waited for his platoon.

  Less than twenty minutes passed, and one after another, his snipers began to appear. They stood together near the old hard-back tent and kept their distance from the new staff sergeant who wore a small white feather in his bush hat and sat staring quietly at the ground between his feet as if he were by himself. He was no stranger to them. They had heard of Hathcock during training sessions at both Da Nang’s and Camp Pendleton’s two-week sniper schools. He was one of several Marines that their instructors had cited as frightening, superhuman examples of what they should be striving to attain for themselves. Now the man with the white feather was here and owned them body and soul. Without saying a word, Hathcock had already gained their undivided attention.

  Hathcock looked at his watch as he heard the suntanned Marine in the cut-offs shout to him, “Staff Sergeant Hathcock, we’re all here—twenty-two snipers, including you.”

  The vision that met Hathcock’s eyes would remain vivid the rest of his life. He had to grind his teeth to keep from laughing. His men stood before him dressed in the widest array of color and costume that he had ever seen. Most of the Marines wore berets, some brown, some black, some red, and others green. One Marine wore a bush hat but had it covered with such an array of pins and buttons that he looked more like a fly fisherman or conventioneer. Many of the men wore wire-framed sunglasses with lenses that ranged in colors from blue to dark green and yellow to pink and cherry red. Their dog-tag chains supported a wide assortment of hardware from beer openers and gold rings to religious medals and protest symbols. Flowers adorned several berets while feathers and beads dressed others.

  None of the men wore shirts, all wore cutoff trousers. Their boots showed no sign of ever being polished, and they all needed hair cuts.

  “Take off all those ridiculous hats and throw them in a pile right here,” Hathcock said, pointing to the ground at his feet. He looked at the tan Marine and said, “You see that generator up the hill?”

  “Yes, Sir.”

  “You see that gasoline can set out there by it?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Bring it to me.”

  The Marine charged up the hill, grabbed the can, and returned, huffing out of breath.

  Hathcock shook the little bit of fuel that was left in the bottom of the can on the pile of berets. He tossed the can back to the tan Marine and then removed his Zippo cigarette lighter from his pocket. He flicked it open and set the berets ablaze.

  “The only reason that I don’t make you strip off those cutoffs is I know you ain’t wearing any skivvy shorts, and I don’t want you running around here bare-assed naked. But when we hold muster from now on, you will be dressed in a complete utility uniform. I want you looking like Marines, not clowns.

  “From now on you’ll look and act like snipers. You’re no better than any other line troopers so we don’t dress any different. But, because you are snipers, those line troopers expect more out of you. They’ve been told that snipers are disciplined and tough, that they’re elite troops. It took a lot of good Marines to develop that respect, and I am not going to let you foul it up.

  “The only hardware you’ll wear around your necks will be your dog tags, taped together so they don’t rattle. If you wear glasses, they’ll be the ones issued to you or ones that I personally approve. Get rid of the rest of that garbage. Any questions so far?”

  One Marine raised his hand and Hathcock pointed to him. “Yes?”

  “Staff Sergeant Hathcock. When we got here, we zeroed our rifles for five hundred yards, but in the past three months, I don’t think we got more than a dozen kills between all of us. Now, we haven’t been able to go on patrol all that much because of all the shit details we’ve been pulling, but when we do go, it seems that we miss more often than we hit.”

  “Good point,” Hathcock said. “Right now, I want to get a roster. Tonight I will team you up in pairs. Tomorrow we are going out here and zero all the rifles for seven hundred yards. We will start from scratch. You will be looking like snipers, and I will have you shooting like snipers. Does that answer your question?”

  “Yes, Sir.”

  The flames of the burning berets died in the smoldering ashes, and Hathcock tapped them with the toe of his new jungle boot.

  “When we start fresh tomorrow, I want a fresh area too. The rest of the afternoon, I want you to field day this whole finger. I want all the trash raked out of the hooches and bunkers. I want all the porno pictures off the walls and the porno magazines get put in your footlockers or I will make a fire out of them too.”

  While Hathcock talked to his new platoon, the sergeant who had lain on the cot staggered up the hill beneath the weight of his seabag. Hathcock looked at the departing Marine and felt a flash of sorrow for him. He remembered him as a good Marine and a good sniper, and he wondered what had happened to him.

  “One last thing. The cot in the sniper hooch is for the duty. We will man this post twenty-four hours a day, if possible. That sniper hooch is our headquarters, not a lounge or private room. If you have been living in there, you will move out and live in the proper hooches according to your rank. That clear?

  “Now, turn to and get this area squared away.”

  As the Marines began cleaning up and hauling away the garbage, Hathcock made a list of needed repair materials. He planned to make a stop at the supply tent tomorrow.

  The sun set and the 7th Marines sniper platoon continued working, restacking sandbags, tacking down loose screens, and hauling away a year’s worth of garbage. Hathcock walked toward his hooch, where David Sommers sat on a chair made of pipe and split bamboo.

  “I wasn’t sure how you would take that bunch,” Sommers said as Hathcock stepped up on the small plywood porch in front of the staff NCO hooch. “I guess you started out on the right foot with them, I’ve never seen them work so hard.”

  “Gotta start by giving them some pride,” Hathcock said, sitting across from Sommers. “I never saw the likes of that bunch. I’ve seen hippies that looked better. What on earth is going on, Gunny?”

  “Drugs. Marijuana. Heroine. Yo
u name it. It’s all happening here. Lot of guys on it. We’ve been on them pretty heavy, but I hear of entire Army units that have refused to go on patrol because of the problems with drugs and booze.”

  “You think my platoon…”

  “I don’t know. I wouldn’t start worrying about that right now. You start fresh with them. My point is to be aware that the stuff is real popular among the troops. Just file it away and keep to your plan. Those troops you have are real good men, they just needed some leadership.”

  “I got that right off,” Hathcock answered. “I just solved a big part of that problem.”

  Sommers smiled. “Yeah. I sent that sergeant over to the police tent. He’ll finish out his last two weeks in-country passing out toilet paper and getting the shitters burned.”

  “That was a good sniper when I had him back in ’67. What happened?”

  “He stayed here too long. He’s tired, I guess.”

  “No. I don’t buy that. He had twenty-one confirmed kills and quit. When he quit, he quit altogether.”

  “Too bad,” Sommers said. “He’s had a shit-bird reputation since I’ve been here.”

  Hathcock looked at the gunnery sergeant curiously. “In the conversation I had with my snipers, one Marine mentioned that they haven’t had the opportunity to go on operations, that they’ve been pulling shit detail instead.”

  Sommers nodded. “That platoon has never produced anything that would give anyone an idea of what they do, other than wander around with deer rifles and pick off stragglers. The sergeant major uses them for whatever has to be done on the hill because they don’t seem to serve any other useful purpose. You’ll have your hands full changing all of that.”

  “Gunny, I’m informing you officially that my men are in training tomorrow. That has priority over shit detail. They’ll be zeroing their rifles and getting ready to go on patrol.”

  “I’m all for that. But there’re a lot of folks who’ll bitch because somebody has to burn the shitters. They won’t like filling those quotas that your Marines filled.”