“We try,” he answered, blindly struggling to his feet.
Then another voice that belonged to a Marine captain said, “No. Call the chopper down here.”
A CH-46 sat on the roadway, beyond where the devastated amtrac burned, and there crewmen, corpsmen, and Marines helped carry the other seriously burned Marines inside it.
“Sir,” Boone said, “the chopper pilot says he can’t get in down here. We have to carry Hathcock over there.”
“Can you walk?” the captain asked.
“Try,” Hathcock said.
“You’re gonna be okay, Carlos,” Boone said. He stood on Hathcock’s left, and the captain stood on his right. They put their hands on Hathcock’s hips, where his cartridge belt had protected his skin, and held him upright as he struggled each step toward the waiting helicopter.
Hathcock was burned to some degree over nearly every inch of his body. His brick-red face was sore and swelling. His chest and arms and hands and back were opened, crackled, and bloody, and caked black. His legs fared little better, blisters rising on the skin beneath the tattered rags that once were trousers.
As the helicopter lifted away from the land and the war of bullets and bombs, it carried Carlos Hathcock to another war: a war fought with needles and scalpels and chemicals and drugs. A war in which pain was the terrifying constant, the companion of every waking moment—and the enemy.
“I’m still on fire!” Hathcock thought. Every place where anything touched him now felt as though it was covered with white-hot steel. He stood and refused to sit.
“Got to get these clothes off,” he thought. “That will help.” And he looked at a corpsman who stood in front of him, writing on a tablet. Scissors hung from his pocket, and Carlos pointed a black and bloody bent finger at them, and then at the burned rags that were his trousers. The corpsman went to work.
When the helicopter landed, Hathcock stood completely naked and hesitated to move. He had to find Perry. He had searched during the entire trip and had not seen his partner. “He can’t be dead!” Hathcock thought.
As a hoard of doctors, nurses, corpsmen, and Marines filled the helicopter and began taking the injured men away, Hathcock finally saw Perry. He looked well and smiled and waved.
“Sit down, Marine” a voice told him.
Hathcock sat.
“Lay back and we’ll go for a ride.”
Hathcock looked at the rear ramp of the helicopter where a pile of burned rags that were his clothes slid down to the deck of the hospital ship, USS Repose. In the midst of the rags, Carlos saw his cigarette lighter. “That’s mine!” he said pointing at the silver-colored Zippo. A nurse picked it up, and Carlos managed a smile for her with his swollen lips.
“Get word to Master Sergeant Moose Gunderson over at 1st Division G-3. Tell him I’ve been hurt, but I’m okay!” Hathcock said to the nurse. She nodded and he smiled again.
A hand pushed him gently back on the gurney, but when his bloody and cracked back touched the sheet, he popped back up. A hand would push his forehead back and he popped back again, and again and again, all the way to the emergency room where a doctor, masked and dressed in surgical garb, waited.
“How you feel, Marine?”
“I’ll be okay, Sir. Got a little hot,” Hathcock said, trying to sound as though he was in complete control of his life.
“What do you do?” the doctor asked as he inserted the needle on an IV tube into Hathcock.
Fighting back the urge to shout, Carlos panted, “Scout/Sniper, Sir. I lead a platoon.”
“I think you may be out of action for a couple of days, Marine.”
Hathcock felt something happening to his back and arms. He did not look. He did not want to see those parts of him that he would never have again disappear.
“What’s going on back there,” Hathcock asked.
“Cleaning out a truck-load of gravel,” a voice answered from behind him.
“What do you think about giving every corpsman a jeep, Marine?”
Hathcock thought a moment and said, “That would be a terrible idea. I mean it would be outstanding for the corpsmen and those people who needed help. But the logistics of something like that would be terrible. I don’t see how…”
WHEN RON MCABEE’S DRIVER PULLED THE JEEP TO A STOP IN FRONT of the operations tent on LZ Baldy, a Marine shouted to him, “They finally got Staff Sergeant Hathcock! I think he’s dead!”
Mack raced inside the operations tent where the gunnery sergeant, who sat scrawling notes, said, “Hathcock and Perry were on an amtrac that got ambushed. The VC set off a five hundred-pound box mine under it. Blew that sucker sky high. All the Marines were burned bad—real bad. I don’t know whether he is dead or alive. He looked bad when they put him on the medevac chopper and sent him out to the Repose. I didn’t get any word on Perry, but he’s on the Repose, too.”
“I’m headed out to the ship to see Hathcock,” McAbee told the gunnery sergeant, and in two giant steps, the tall Marine jumped in the jeep and roared away, slinging gravel and dirt. Ron McAbee spent the remainder of the day trying to hitch a ride out to the ship. He never succeeded.
A day later, Mack got word from Moose Gunderson that Hathcock was badly burned but alive, and he wrote him a letter.
On the day that Ron McAbee wrote Hathcock, Maj. Gen. Ormond R. Simpson, 1st Marine Division’s commanding general, pinned a Purple Heart medal on Hathcock’s pillow. The general’s aide took a Polaroid photograph of the event.
When the general departed, a nurse took the photo and the medal, and said, “I’ll put these in your ditty bag so that you can find them when you wake up.” A person dressed in white inserted a needle in Carlos Hathcock’s pain-ridden body, and in a moment he was asleep.
He never knew when they loaded him on another helicopter and lifted him to the Da Nang air base, where air force medics put him and the seven other burned Marines on a jet bound for Tokyo. Hathcock never knew that he also spent several days in the hospital at Yakota Air Force Base while the world-famous burn center at Brooke Army Hospital in San Antonio, Texas, awaited his and the seven other Marines’ arrival.
And even when he awoke on September 24, more than a week after the terrible fire that would change his life forever, Hathcock did not realize that he was away from Vietnam.
On the afternoon of September 16, (Stateside time) a message arrived at the Navy Annex of the Pentagon, located up the hill, next to the national cemetery, on Columbia Pike in Arlington, Virginia—a complex of buildings where Gen. Leonard F. Chapman commanded the Marine Corps. This message went to the casualty branch of the Marine Corps’ manpower division, bearing the names of eight Marines, their next of kin and home addresses: eight Marines burned on an amtrac a day ago, half a world away. And at the top of the list appeared the name Staff Sergeant Carlos N. Hathcock II.
A day later, at 3 P.M., a Marine captain, a Casualty Assistance Call Officer, wearing his dress blue uniform and carrying a message from Headquarters, U.S. Marine Corps, with Staff Sergeant Carlos N. Hathcock’s name and condition listed on it, left his office in Norfolk, Virginia, and drove to Virginia Beach. He took the Independence Boulevard exit off Route 44, and drove past the Pembroke Shopping Mall on his way to 545 Sirene Avenue and the house that Carlos and Jo Hathcock bought just before Hathcock shipped out to Vietnam. He had no way of knowing that Jo was out shopping since he avoided telephoning beforehand for fear of exposing his grievous message. It is Marine Corps policy and tradition that all such messages will be made in person, without exception.
19
Beating the Odds
THE SEPTEMBER AFTERNOON HEAT SENT JO HATHCOCK SHOPPING at Pembroke Mall in Virginia Beach. It was cool there, and it helped to take her mind off Carlos and the dangers he faced in Vietnam.
It was well after 3 P.M. when she walked across the hot, asphalt, parking lot to get into her car and drive the few blocks home. The mirage made the cars look liquid and surreal, and the heat made her head throb.
&
nbsp; Traffic was its normal afternoon jam. As Jo waited for the red light to go dark and the green light to flash on, she saw an olive-colored Chevrolet cruise past, just making the yellow light, as she moved out on Independence Boulevard. At the second light, just before her turn, she read the yellow lettering on the trunk, “U.S. Marine Corps.” She saw the driver clearly—a captain wearing dress blue and a white hat. “He’s no recruiter,” she thought. And as the green car made a left turn, ahead of hers, and swayed into the drive at 545 Sirene Avenue, she cried aloud, “My God! Carlos is dead!”
She saw the Marine casualty officer walking toward her door, and halting on her front walk, waiting for her to get out of the car.
“Mrs. Hathcock?” the Marine softly asked.
IN A FEW DAYS, JO RECEIVED A MESSAGE FROM BRIG. GEN. WILLIAM H. Moncrief, Jr., the commander at Brooke General Hospital, Fort Sam Houston, in San Antonio, Texas, that Hathcock had arrived there on September 22 and that she could be with him there. She immediately made plans to go.
It was nearly noon when Hathcock opened his eyes. The ship wasn’t rolling. He could not move. He cried out from the horrible pain that blanketed him. His legs and arms and shoulders and neck and back, even his ears, crawled and boiled with intolerable pain.
“Carlos?” Jo cried out. “Carlos!”
He turned his eyes toward her and blinked. They were sore and red, and his vision was blurry and tilted. “Jo?”
“Oh, Carlos,” she said softly. She had tried to imagine the worst possible image of her husband’s burns. She felt that if she imagined the worst that when she confronted the reality of his injury, it would not shock her. But it did. She felt guilty because she could not even recognize the man she had loved for nearly seven years. She stood and looked down at him. “Carlos.”
He raised his mummy-wrapped arm and pointed to a table where a green bag sat. Each man had a green bag with black plastic handles, an item similar to the R-and-R bags given to Marines headed for two weeks liberty away from the war.
“Look,” he mumbled, pointing at the bag.
“Yes, it’s a nice bag. They give that to you?”
“Look,” he said again, pointing. “Look inside.”
Every effort to speak sent daggers of pain through him. Raising his arm tore open the eschar—the hard crust of scab and dried body fluid—that covered the third-degree burns there, leaving him breathless.
Jo brought the bag back to Hathcock’s bedside and opened it. On top she found the blue leather box with gold trim. She opened it and saw the Purple Heart medal.
“The medal is pretty, Carlos,” she said holding it up for him to see too.
“Yes,” he said in a soft whisper. “Look more.”
The only other thing was a small, square photograph. She held it up for Hathcock to see. “This?”
“Yes. Look. Look.”
It was the Polaroid photograph that General Simpson’s aide took that day on the USS Repose when he presented Hathcock the Purple Heart. Hathcock was always proud when a general officer presented him with anything, and he wanted to share that feeling of pride with Jo.
Hathcock smiled as Jo looked at it. She saw the general and saw her husband’s burns and bandages. It made her cry. To her, the photo looked horrible. She fought back the urge to scold Carlos for making her look at it, but she restrained herself. “That’s real nice, Carlos. Is he your commanding general?”
“Yes,” he struggled in a whispering, raspy voice. “He commands the whole division and came to see me.”
Hathcock closed his eyes. Jo sat again in the chair. The afternoon drifted away.
Hathcock had been lucky. During the fire his lungs had not suffered any severe burns. The immediate attention that he received from the corpsman greatly increased his survival odds. And the fast action taken to stabilize him on the USS Repose gave the doctors good prospects and hope for his recovery. They had set the stage for the burn specialists at Brooke to do the job of rebuilding the broken man, of keeping him alive through the long healing process that severe burns require.
The day Hathcock arrived at Brooke, he had a 102-degree fever, weighed one hundred fifty pounds and had second-and third-degree burns on his head, neck, anterior-trunk, posterior trunk, right upper arm, left upper arm, right lower arm, left lower arm, right hand, left hand, right thigh, left thigh, right leg, and left leg. More than 43 percent of his total body area suffered “full-thickness” burns with several areas where that full thickness of the skin had burned completely away (third degree burns).
With a partial thickness burn, a patient’s skin can regenerate from the epithelial* cells lining the skin appendages—hair follicles, sweat glands, and sebaceous glands. Full-thickness burns destroy all these cells and prevent any regeneration. Small full-thickness burns can heal from the skin margins, but large areas require skin grafting.
They moved Hathcock to Ward 13B. There he made daily trips to the Hubbard tank where he could soak and soften the hard, crusty eschar that covered his burns, while the burn specialists examined them. There they noticed a black spot on his hand, an infection that a biopsy later revealed was phycomycosis. But they felt that this fungal disease did not explain the fever that he could not shake—a fever that rose from 102 degrees on his first day there to 103 on the second and 104 degrees on September 24. They suspected malaria and treated him for it.
To complicate problems, on September 30, before doctors could begin burn therapy, Hathcock developed bronchopneumonia in his left lung. That deferred the therapy until October 6 when the pneumonia finally began to clear.
On October 13, the doctors began the burn therapy—thirteen different operations in which they stripped away the burn eschar and damaged flesh, and applied skin grafts. The operations continued until November 17. Hathcock received eight homografts (skin grafts taken from donors), three autografts (small grafts of healthy skin taken from his own body), and two heterografts (skin grafts taken from animals).
Hathcock’s right side suffered the worst and required the greater portion of skin grafting. His grafts included the use of dog skin and pig skin on his right arm and thigh on November 3 and 6.
During this period, Hathcock also developed staphylococcus infections and his red blood count dropped 28 percent. Doctors began waging a battle against the infections and gave him transfusions of 1500 cc’s of whole blood. To combat the effects of the pain and infection, they gave him daily doses of narcotics.
For the six weeks that Carlos Hathcock balanced on a tightrope above the abyss, Jo sat at his bedside. She fought his lapses into hallucination and coaxed him back out of the misty black cloud that would have led him into the peacefulness of death. She coaxed him back again and again.
“Mack,” he said. He saw Mack back at Hill 55 and there were shells incoming. “Mack! Mack! Incoming!” And Mack kept walking down the finger to the sniper hooch with Yankee, who trotted at his heels.
There was Burke. “Burke!” Hathcock shouted from his dream. Burke had covered his face with camouflage paint and smiled. “Don’t let your mascara run,” Hathcock heard Burke say. Then he laughed.
“Don’t go in there. Stay down!” Hathcock shouted from his bed.
“My rifle, my hat. Where’s my hat?”
“Carlos! Wake up!” Jo shouted, shaking Hathcock’s bed. He opened his eyes, yet he still dreamed. He did not see Jo, he saw Mack.
“Mack! You gotta take care. You gotta be more careful!”
She kept shaking the bed. “Carlos! You listen to me!” But he was moaning about Que Son and Route 4.
“Carlos!”
Finally he blinked and said nothing more.
“Carlos,” Jo said in a loud voice. “Where are you?”
“Hill 55, Vietnam.”
“No! You’re at Brooke General Hospital in San Antonio, Texas!”
He blinked, not knowing what to believe. He had just seen the hooches and the shooting and the smoke. It didn’t make any sense. He was in Vietnam.
&nbs
p; “Repeat after me, Carlos!”
“Whaaa…?”
“You are not in Vietnam!”
Hathcock looked at Jo. It was Jo. He recognized her. He felt the pain. He was alive.
DURING THE LUCID MOMENTS, JO WOULD OPEN A LETTER FROM ONE of a hundred friends who wrote to him while he fought for his life, and she would read it. It seemed that everyone who had ever shot a rifle in Marine Corps or Interservice or National Rifle Association competition wrote to him, telling him to get well.
There were letters from Jim Land, filled with lines borrowed from great coaches. He called Hathcock a winner. There were letters from Vietnam—from Moose Gunderson and Boo Boo Barker. And several letters from Ron McAbee.
Mack’s first letter told Hathcock how he tried to get out to the ship but could not find a way. In other letters he told Hathcock that Yankee was well and David Sommers too. He told him about the platoon and how it had been a good thing that they had not traveled together that day. This way the platoon did not suffer a break in continuity of leadership. Mack told Hathcock how he pushed the platoon hard—he wanted vengeance. So did the men.
By November 10 Hathcock stopped hallucinating. His infection had retreated, and much of the grafted skin was now healed and showed great promise. His grafts had nearly all taken. The only bad spots were on his right shoulder and right leg. The doctor had removed the animal skin grafts and placed donor skin on the debrided areas.
But the pain continued. He cried out when he saw the doctors coming with the bundles and tools. The pain of debridement sent chills of horror through him. The peeling of flesh and scab from a burn renders a pain that is indescribable.
Hathcock had endured and had suffered not just to survive, but to recover. To become a whole and vital man again. To hunt and to shoot. To become an Olympic champion and fulfill a dream.
On November 10, 1969, Carlos woke out of a sound sleep. Jo was sitting beside the bed.
“What day is it, Carlos?” Jo said happily.
Hathcock thought for a moment and began to look anxious. He did not know. Was it Wednesday or Thursday or Saturday?
Marine Sniper Page 28