Marine Sniper

by Charles Henderson

  The sniper arsenal offered him nothing more up-to-date than the weapons he had left behind in 1967, and in fact, he believed he was handling some of the same rifles he’d fired then. Only now they were a little worse for wear.

  “Be nice to have an armorer assigned to the platoon,” Hathcock told David Sommers one hot June evening as the two Marines sat on the front porch in bamboo-bottomed chairs.

  “You talk to the sergeant major about it?”

  “I mentioned it, but he told me that he would be glad to ask for one if I knew where one could be found. I’m out of answers. He did tell me that an assistant platoon sergeant will be coming from division soon.”

  “That’s good news.”

  “Good or bad. You never know. Kind of like a blind date—you expect the worst and hope for the best. My luck, it’ll be an ugly, old, toothless, fat girl.”

  A WEEK LATER HATHCOCK WAS SCRATCHING OUT NOTES WITH HIS black ballpoint pen on a yellow, legal-size pad. The sweat ran down his shirtless back and soaked into his trousers.

  Suddenly the door burst open and two loud feet stomped across the sniper hooch’s plywood floor. Hathcock raised his head as he heard the thud of a hundred pounds of personal gear, bound inside a long, green seabag, hitting the floor behind him. A familiar voice boomed, “The name’s McAbee—Staff Sergeant McAbee. Just call me Mack!”

  “Mack!” Hathcock said, twisting around on his stool. “You old horse thief. What in the world are you doing here?”

  “Carlos! You the platoon sergeant?”

  “Yeah!”

  “Hell! I’m your platoon armorer.”

  To have as his assistant a man who was not only his best friend, but one of the very best high-power rifle armorers in the Marine Corps was a good deal beyond his wildest dreams.

  “Look out Charlie!” Hathcock said, laughing and embracing his friend.

  “The first project on the agenda is to overhaul all these old sticks we’ve been shootin’ with. You’re gonna have your work cut out with them. They’re in pretty humble shape.

  “What this platoon needs is a set of rifles to choose from like a pro golfer picks clubs—the right one for the right job. Custom-fitted for each man. If you can get our weapons tuned up like that, we’ll be the hardest thing to hit this country yet.”

  “Carlos, you get the parts and machinery and I’ll do the rest.”

  “Soon as you get settled, you’re gonna get a truck from 11th Motor T and head down to 1st Force Service Regiment at Da Nang and use their shop. I’ll get the sergeant major to grease the skids.”

  It took three trips to Da Nang before McAbee completed the major work on the rifles. From then on, he passed time at a bench he built in the sniper hooch, fine-tuning each weapon. It was a job that had no end, and he knew it. But with the new glass* jobs and refitted and matched receivers and barrels, suddenly the sniper platoon’s kills rose to the level that rivaled battalions.

  July ended with the 7th Marines sniper platoon confirming seventy-two kills. Hathcock felt certain it was a record.

  For Hathcock and his snipers, McAbee’s arrival had turned their lives sweet. His fine gunsmithing coupled with the keen training and leadership that Hathcock provided resulted in a platoon that became one of the best in Vietnam. For their outstanding achievement the platoon received a Presidential Unit Citation, one of the few platoons to ever receive such recognition.

  SERGEANT MAJOR PUCKETT HAD A DIFFERENT VIEW OF THINGS. OUT of sight meant trouble to him. He felt that Hathcock or his second in command, McAbee, should be available—and accountable—at any given moment. It was a sound command-and-control philosophy shared by most Marines, and Puckett was undoubtedly right in feeling that the sniper sergeant had to take the responsibility of command as seriously as he took the business of getting out in the field and zapping “Charlie.”

  Hathcock had a hard time sitting in his hooch and pushing papers, remaining by his radio and being always available for the sergeant major’s beck and call. Once Hathcock delegated assignments, he and McAbee grabbed their gear and went to the field too. As Hathcock saw it, the sergeant major could always reach him by radio. Most often he would be with Bravo Company, 1st Battalion, 7th Marines.

  He had built a bond with that company and its commander, a captain named Hoffman who had reached the enlisted rank of gunnery sergeant and received a battlefield commission. After the war the Marine Corps withdrew his temporary commission and made him a gunny once again. But because this captain “spoke the enlisted man’s language,” and was a “straight arrow,” Hathcock trusted him completely.

  While Sergeant Major Puckett fumed because he could not reach anyone at the sniper hooch, Hathcock and several of his snipers spent the first ten days of July working the bush along Western Route 4, between the hamlets of Hoi An and Thuong Duc, supporting Lieutenant Colonel Dowd and his 1st Battalion Marines.

  During that brief period, they cleared the area of all enemy positions, and on July 10 escorted the first convoy to successfully pass along this route in more than four years.

  July 10 found Hathcock and McAbee peering from behind tall shafts of dry elephant grass, searching a broad clearing. They had moved away from Route 4, looking for signs of enemy movement. McAbee carried the radio and held the handset next to his ear as Hathcock scoured the landscape with his twenty-power M-49 spotting scope.

  “Mack, I don’t see a thing moving out there. But there is this little hump six hundred yards out there that I want to stay and watch just a bit. It strikes me a little curious—somehow it just don’t fit.”

  The grassy hump rose from the ground fifty yards from a cluster of trees and much taller grass. Hathcock thought it a likely spot for an enemy patrol to break out. It was the most narrow point in the clearing and seemed to be the most likely place for anyone to cross.

  “Perry got a kill,” McAbee whispered to Hathcock as the two men lay cooking in the afternoon sun. Hathcock glanced at his watch and noted the time—3:30 P.M.

  “How long ago?”

  “About fifteen minutes.”

  “I never heard a thing.”

  “Yeah, he stayed with Charlie Company when they moved on down by that river. He set up there on a bluff, overlooking that big bend in the river. Perry said he no more than settled in and this Viet Cong laid down his rifle, shucked off his clothes, and started taking a bath right there. One shot put an end to his bath.”

  “Where’s Perry now?”

  “He had just moved out when he came up on the net. He’s got a patrol covering him, so he’s moving out in the direction that the VC he killed came from.”

  “Look!” Hathcock whispered urgently.

  McAbee put his eye to the spotting scope and saw a head rising out of the hump.

  “Told you that looked funny.”

  Hathcock snuggled behind his rifle and laid his cheek against the old Winchester’s humped stock. He found his proper eye-relief behind the Lyman 8-power scope that he had selected for this particular mission. Mack had come across with the fine-tuned rifles and now Hathcock did select them like a golfer selects clubs. For this mission, he chose a Model 70 Winchester, shooting a 180 grain, 30-06 bullet, and the Lyman scope for what he called medium range shooting—three hundred to seven hundred yards.

  McAbee could hear Hathcock’s slow and steady breathing stop, followed by the sudden explosion from the muzzle of the Winchester. The Viet Cong guerrilla, who had begun climbing out of the hole, suddenly fell on his face. Hathcock waited, staring through his scope. He waited for anyone else who might have been in the hole with the man.

  “Look to the left,” McAbee whispered.

  A man wearing black shorts and a khaki shirt trotted across the open field. He held an AK-47 in his right hand, and when he knelt next to the dead comrade, Hathcock dropped him too. He waited again.

  “Here comes another one,” McAbee whispered.

  “Got him,” Carlos said, waiting for the Viet Cong soldier to reach that point where the
earth rose slightly and the two men lay dead. The rifle cracked and the third man joined the other two, and Carlos waited.

  “Somebody’s peeking out of the grass where those two hamburgers came from.”

  “Got him.”

  Hathcock followed the soldier, who carried an AK-47, as he cautiously edged from the grass and walked toward the hole. He knelt to one knee, and before he could stand, Hathcock killed him too.

  “Four. Any more?” Hathcock asked quietly.

  “Yes, looks like three others. They’re just sitting on the edge of the clearing trying to see what’s happening. With the wind blowing in our faces, I don’t think they can figure out where the shots are coming from. That must be their hole, and they’re trying to get in to take cover.”

  “I figured they had some sort of tunnel there. That patrol was headed home.” Hathcock waited quietly for ten more minutes, and then the three soldiers rose to their feet and walked cautiously toward the hump and the four dead men.

  “Three-round rapid fire,” Hathcock said, chuckling as he sighted through his scope. His first shot surprised the group, and the two still-living men turned to flee. A second shot dropped one, leaving him kicking on the pile of bodies. The last man pirouetted in confusion. He was still spinning when the bullet shattered his breast bone, exploding his heart and killing him as he whirled in his death dance.

  “Damn! Carlos,” Mack whispered in wonder. “I’ve never heard of a sniper killing more than seven at a time!”

  “I took on a company a long time ago. I don’t know how many I killed then. But there was this one sniper I knew back in ’66 who killed eleven at one time—all confirmed. I guess that’s the official record, if anybody really cares about things like that.”

  “I guess you’re right. You start shooting for record, like it’s the Marine Corps Matches or something, and you could go off the deep end. Anybody who enjoys this has got to be crazy.”

  “Yeah,” Hathcock said quietly. “Crazy.”

  McAbee buried his face in the crook of his arm, and Hathcock watched the big man’s body tremble.

  “You okay?”

  McAbee raised his face from his arm and looked at Hathcock.

  “I’m ashamed. I was laughing.”

  “Why?”

  “That was the stupidest bunch of gooks I ever watched. They were about as dumb as I’ve ever seen, walking up there like that.” He started chuckling again and Hathcock smiled, seeing the humor in the midst of the ugliness.

  “It is kind of funny, come to think about it.”

  The two Marines moved further up Route 4 and hid on a hill, in a twisted mangle of shattered trees, devastated from heavy shelling and now covered with low, new plants that found sunlight in the absence of the trees’ umbrella. There they spent the day waiting for any unlucky enemy who tried to cross the narrow stream that flowed five hundred yards away from them.

  “Except for yesterday, this whole operation has been slow as syrup,” McAbee said, squinting through the spotting scope, examining the tangled and fallen jungle for signs of a hidden enemy.

  “Looky, looky, here comes Charlie,” Hathcock said.

  A Viet Cong soldier wearing an open white shirt and black shorts walked along the edge of the stream, holding his rifle over his shoulders like a yoke. He walked with a staggered gait, and even at five hundred yards, the two snipers could hear him singing.

  “He drunk?” McAbee asked.

  “Don’t matter,” Hathcock said as he sighted through his scope.

  “He’s gonna be dead soon as I crank this round in him.”

  The rifle recoiled and Ron McAbee expected to see the man drop, but after a jolt that sent the enemy soldier to his knees, he began to run. He ran straight for them, shooting blindly.

  Hathcock shot again, and the man dropped but bounced up and again ran, shooting and yelling.

  But before Hathcock could shove a third shot into his chamber, McAbee fired his M-14, dropping the man temporarily to his knees. This time the soldier dropped his rifle, but got up again and continued to run toward them, yelling.

  Hathcock fired once more and McAbee fired twice, and the man kept coming, blood streaming from both his shoulders and his groin. McAbee could see large chunks of flesh torn away from his chest, yet he kept coming at them.

  Taking one long, slow breath, Hathcock took careful aim, laying the center of his scope’s reticle on the man’s head. Hathcock watched his eyes, flaming and wide. His mouth gaped open, and his arms dangled broken in their joints. Ron McAbee stared through his spotting scope, not believing what he saw. He too saw the eyes—the eyes of a man crazed. Dead yet still alive in his final attack. His mouth wide with a scream that echoed more and more loudly through the once quiet valley.

  When the soldier began to climb the slope, three hundred yards below the blind where the two snipers hid, Hathcock sent the seventh shot into the man’s face. He stopped at that moment and moved no more.

  “He had to be on opium!” McAbee exclaimed. “No normal man could take that many shots.”

  Hathcock sweated. It was as though he had encountered a devil and in the last moment won.

  THE NEXT TWO MONTHS WEREN’T EASY ONES. HATHCOCK MOVED WITH his snipers to the Que Son hills as did the 1st Battalion, 7th Marines. In August, Lieutenant Colonel Dowd was killed in battle, and Carlos, who had regarded him as both a friend and an ally, felt devastated at the loss. On the day of Dowd’s death, Hathcock took a bullet in the thigh when the helicopter he was traveling in was fired upon. But the sniper recovered quickly from that and was back in action before the month was out.

  18

  The Sacrifice

  SEPTEMBER IN QUANG TRI PROVINCE FEELS COOLER THAN SEPtember in Da Nang. The high mountain passes that overlook Laos sometimes pick up cool breezes from their lofty altitudes and allow a respite from the uncomfortable 95 percent humidity and 95 degree temperatures of the lower elevations. At a place that Marines named The Slot, one could sit in that cool breeze and watch North Vietnamese and Viet Cong caravans sweating beneath the loads of supplies that they carried over the steaming plait-work of jungle paths that the world called the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

  On a rounded hilltop where trees and vines still grew in a green, thick tangle, Carlos Hathcock and Ron McAbee silently slithered their way to a rocky sinkhole hidden beneath the dense jungle’s umbrella and surrounded by ferns and vines and slime-covered roots. The monsoon rains of a year ago and the frequent summer showers kept this rocky depression filled with water, warmed by the beams of sunlight that shone between the overhead boughs. Slugs, leeches, worms, algae, and slimy moss made the water look like a puddle of green oatmeal.

  Hathcock wrinkled his nose. The watery slime had a distinct odor that Hathcock associated with a neighbor’s outhouse near his grandmother’s home in Arkansas.

  Carefully, he brushed the top layer of lumpy slime away until he saw the black water, clear and almost drinkable, in the small opening he had made. Extending his lips, he put his face down to it and took tiny sips.

  “Pew!” Hathcock whispered softly. “It tastes exactly like it smells.”

  “You done?”

  “That’s all I can stand.”

  “You keep watch while I get me a drink too. As thirsty as I am, I could drink piss.”

  “I think that might taste better.”

  “I’ll try this do-do flavored stuff for now. Here, hold my glasses.”

  Mack lay over the pool and brushed the slime away to expose the water. He took several sucking gulps and raised his face, dripping wet. After pulling a long string of moss off his tongue, Mack looked at Hathcock and whispered, “It’s probably full of liver flukes and we’ll be dead in a couple of years.”

  “You didn’t want to live forever, did ya?”

  “Yes.”

  “I hear that a big helping of nuc-mom* will get rid of any case of liver flukes you might pick up in the water.”

  Mack frowned at Hathcock. “I don’t care how h
ungry we get. I’ll eat dog shit before you get me to touch a drop of that nasty crap!”

  “Shhhhhh!” Hathcock whispered with a grin, putting his finger next to his lips. “You get loud and we won’t need to worry about liver flukes.”

  Mack put his glasses back on his face, slipping the black elastic strap back around his head. “I gotta be careful with these, they’re my last pair. I break ’em and I’m no help at all.”

  “Keep ’em on your face then.”

  Hathcock recorded his ninety-third confirmed kill that morning—a lone Viet Cong who climbed a slope, rigging booby traps along a patrol route. Hathcock called in the position to the Marines on a mountaintop observation post, who verified the kill with their powerful binoculars and plotted the positions of the anti-personnel mines that the man had laid.

  When Hathcock and McAbee reached the observation post on that peak a lance corporal met them and handed them a yellow slip of paper.

  “Sergeant Major Puckett’s looking for us,” Hathcock said, grinning.

  “I told you so!” said McAbee. “Sergeant major always gets mad when we take off together. You know…first and second in command.”

  “You’re the only other man in the platoon who can shoot my zero.* Only one other sniper I worked with could do that. And, just like you, he could almost read my mind. To me, we’re the ideal team. I don’t want to trust my life to someone else, Mack.”

  The lance corporal seated in front of a table covered with radios and a spaghetti-work of black wires running to power and antennae passed the handset across the table to Hathcock. “Staff Sergeant, your sergeant major is coming.”

  Hathcock put the black receiver against his ear, waiting for what he knew would come.