Silent Warrior

by Charles Henderson

  CARLOS WAS LIVING at his grandmother’s house when he joined the Marine Corps. His mother worked in Little Rock and his father was somewhere else, welding for the railroad. His seventeenth birthday. What a day! His mother and grandmother had taken him into town where Mom signed the waiver allowing him to join the Marines. May 20, 1959, that same day he took his first plane ride to bootcamp in San Diego and began the first day of service in an organization that to him became more a family than a career.

  Memphis, Tennessee, he recalled as his mind drifted back into his dreams. How could he ever forget the day he decided to be a Marine? Only eight years old, and he knew then what he wanted in his lifetime.

  During those days, Carlos’s father welded train parts for Tennessee Fabricating Company in Memphis. His mother worked in a department store. The Hathcock family resided in an upstairs apartment. Downstairs a Marine Corps recruiter lived with his wife.

  The Marine stood straight and tall beneath a white barracks cap with its bright gold eagle, globe, and anchor emblem. He dressed in blue trousers with red stripes sewn down the side of each leg. The trousers never showed a wrinkle, and always hung straight with their sharp creases breaking just above the Marine’s spit-shined shoes. His fine wool shirt had two sharp creases down the front and three sharp creases down the back. The recruiter had three stripes and a rocker sewn on his sleeve, and several rows of colorful ribbons. Beneath the ribbons, Carlos was awestruck by the two silver badges that dangled crossed rifles and crossed pistols.

  Carlos knew the first time he saw the man in uniform that he, too, would be a Marine and wear that awesome uniform. He had never seen anything so grand, and never saw another uniform nearly as handsome. It spoke to Carlos of toughness, of courage, of discipline. Carlos could not imagine being anything better than a Marine.

  At fifteen years old, Carlos had dropped out of school and gone to work shoveling cement for the H. W. Tucker Company of North Little Rock. He was as hard as the hundreds of pounds of concrete that he lifted each day. From the time he could first speak, his life was structured and disciplined. He always said, “Yes, sir.” So bootcamp, for Carlos, presented few challenges to his body or his mind. He felt at home in the rigid structure that surrounded him.

  He was proud the day he graduated recruit training and was then allowed to finally call himself a Marine. Carlos strutted in his tan tropical wool uniform, wearing a matching barracks cap, and the crossed rifles of a sterling silver expert shooting badge hanging from his sharp-creased shirt.

  CARLOS OPENED HIS eyes for a moment, hearing the voice of the person still talking on the telephone. Every few minutes he saw the figure of someone walking to the side of his bed, leaning over him, adjusting things and saying something he could not understand. He closed his eyes to the confusion and drifted back into his past.

  WIND RATTLED THE tin on the roof of the hooch where Carlos Hathcock sat at the foot of a cot writing a letter to his wife and son, who waited for him to return from Vietnam. New Bern, North Carolina, seemed so far away.

  Sweat left brown trails through the dirt that covered his face, and he felt his legs trembling again. His hands shook, too, and his head felt light, off balance.

  “Had to be that helicopter ride from Duc Pho,” he said to himself. “This heat, too. I just need a good drink of water and some rest.”

  Carlos set the tablet and pencil on his footlocker and took his canteen cup to a large green vacuum can filled with water. He filled the cup once, drank it all, and filled it again. Walking back to his cot, he recalled the chopper flight back to the sniper platoon headquarters on Hill 55 earlier that afternoon. The aircraft had skimmed the treetops to avoid enemy fire, and the wind from the open doors felt cool as the helicopter beat its way through the air with its big twin rotors, racing northward.

  Carlos had looked out the door of the CH-46 Sea Knight helicopter, watching as the green jungle carpet skimmed beneath his feet, and thought of home.

  November 10, 1967, would mark his fifth wedding anniversary. These five years of marriage had passed quickly for Carlos.

  Although Jo was a few years older than he, their marriage had been very happy so far.

  Jo did not like being a “shooting team widow.” But when she married Carlos, she knew what lay ahead: He would be gone from home quite often, competing in regional, state, and national shooting matches, both military and National Rifle Association events, which took place in many cities throughout the United States.

  Carlos would leave on Thursday and come home on Sunday night. Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday he worked from five A.M. until six P.M. at the rifle range. In the evenings, he lay on the floor, in front of the television, and practiced “getting into position”—the tightly contorted stances (standing, sitting, kneeling, and prone) from which he fired in the matches.

  It seemed to Jo that from March through April he did nothing but shoot. And he did.

  However, she had resigned herself to that lifestyle—at least for a while—when she decided that she wanted to spend the rest of her life with him as Mrs. Hathcock.

  Had anyone asked her if she would ever make that decision when she first met him, she would have laughed in their faces. Carlos, on the other hand, thought Jo was swell—nice looking and a great personality.

  Carlos formed that opinion the day that he walked into the bank in New Bern where she worked as a teller. That was in January 1962. Carlos had just reported to the Marine Corps Air Station at Cherry Point from the 1st Marine Brigade in Hawaii.

  That had been a dramatic change for Carlos—departing that tropical paradise, with its brown-skinned girls and wonderful liberty nights, for coastal North Carolina, with its tobacco-lined country roads and gas station entertainment.

  Gas station entertainment was nothing new to him, rural Arkansas had offered little more during his youth. And he had enjoyed those teenage years, too. But after graduating from recruit training, during Infantry Training Regiment at Camp Pendleton, California, Carlos discovered the world of entertainment that surrounds military bases and large cities.

  Southern California offered its own special brand of “liberty” for the new Marine.

  Following the rigors of infantry training, and like many of the Marines there, Carlos and his buddy Private David C. Holden joined the staging battalion at Camp Pendleton, a unit where overseas-bound Marines awaited their port calls to arrive.

  During bootcamp, while on what had seemed an endless tour of mess duty, he had become fast friends with David Holden. Holden was a happy-go-lucky kid from Chicago who graduated Infantry Training Regiment with Carlos and later accompanied him to Hawaii.

  While at ITR Carlos and David spent their first liberty weekend following along with the usual stream of Marines to Disneyland—looking for girls.

  After a fruitless weekend at the land that Mickey Mouse built, Carlos and David met a couple of California Marines who took them along on liberty to the Norwalk and La Mirada area of Los Angeles. There, Carlos and David met girls.

  Disneyland could not compare with what the two Marines encountered in Norwalk, and there they returned weekend after weekend for liberty.

  But this weekend liberty—their last weekend in Southern California before they shipped out for Hawaii—was going to be different. They were going to do this weekend up right. It was going to be a weekend at a motel—girls and good times, and no platoon sergeants to barge in and stop their fun.

  The summer of 1959 lingered hot on that September Friday afternoon when Carlos and David picked up their liberty cards and headed for the bus station where they caught a ride into Oceanside, California. There Carlos had arranged to rent a 1953 Chevy coupe with a reworked engine.

  As the two Marines cruised up the coastal highway to La Mirada, the old car purred as the sounds of Bobby Vee singing “Rubber Ball” drifted from the radio. David and Carlos felt excited about what the weekend promised.

  The breeze from the Pacific Ocean whipped in the car’s windows, ruffl
ing the sleeves on their khaki-colored uniforms. But Carlos kept hearing a bump, bump, bump—something was wrong.

  Carlos wheeled the old car to the highway’s shoulder. “What’s wrong?” David asked.

  “Don’t know. I keep hearing this bump or something. I want to look under the hood. It sounds like something’s loose.”

  Carlos raised the hood and then slammed it down. He walked back and sat down behind the steering wheel and looked at David. “No tie-down on the battery.”

  “Any problem with that?” David asked.

  “Don’t think so. It looks like it’s riding all right. Just bangs against the fender now and again. That’s the noise I heard. Let’s get on to the motel.”

  “You bet!” David exclaimed. “I can’t wait to get there and get started.”

  The neon light flashed VACANCY in the fading orange of the late-summer afternoon as Carlos and David wheeled the old Chevy into the motel driveway where they would unwind for the weekend. Their liberty would expire at noon Sunday, so for the next forty hours they planned to have the time of their lives.

  They checked into their room and then headed for the local drive-in hamburger haven to see who they could interest in unwinding with them.

  It didn’t take long before Carlos and David were hosting one of the more active parties La Mirada or Norwalk teen life had seen during the summer of 1959. There were girls and light rum, music and laughter.

  Just before midnight, a loud banging on the motel door brought the revelry to morgue silence, except for the giggling of a girl who sat on the corner of the bed, sipping on a rum and Coke, oblivious to the sudden intrusion.

  Someone said, “Who is it?”

  “Police. Open up.”

  David dove across the bed, grabbed the rum bottle from the nightstand and rolled off onto the floor, shoving the bottle up into the box springs—hiding it from the law.

  Even though Carlos and David were both old enough to join the Marines, they were still teenage boys—too young to legally buy or consume alcoholic drinks. And certainly their guests were not legal-aged drinkers either.

  One blonde girl, whose hair hung in stiff tangles, which a few hours earlier had sat neatly atop her head, peeked between the louvers of the blinds and screamed, “My mom’s out there.”

  Carlos calmly opened the door, barefooted and wearing only his uniform trousers and T-shirt. When he opened the door, he saw the angry faces of the mothers of the La Mirada and Norwalk girls they had lured to the motel room for drinks and dancing.

  “Yes, sir, could I help you?” he quietly asked the police officer who stood between Carlos and the group of irate mothers.

  “Julie! You get out here now!” one woman commanded her daughter with a shrill cry that made Carlos cringe.

  The blonde struggled to pull a brush through her ratty nest of hair. The embarrassed girl slung her long-strapped, saddle-style purse over her shoulder and walked toward the door, hanging her head and still pulling the brush, now less hastily, through her hair.

  A stream of troubled girls followed, accompanied away from the motel room by their angry mothers who cautioned them about “boys such as these.”

  One woman looked Carlos squarely in the eye. “You soldiers ought to stay where you belong—away from proper people. Don’t you ever come back here, corrupting our daughters! There ought to be a law to keep you people away!”

  The words stung. Carlos had never considered himself anything but upstanding, although not always proper. And Marines were beyond reproach in his book. He thought most Americans believed that, too. With that sudden scorn, however, he learned that not everyone shared his opinion of Marines or servicemen. Carlos learned that being in the service of his country also carried a stigma for which he, like most servicemen, would suffer discrimination. Carlos wondered if the hatred would have been the same if he and David had been La Mirada teens themselves. If anyone had checked ID cards, they would have discovered that Carlos, at seventeen, was the youngest of the group.

  And it had been the rat-haired blonde who had gotten the bottle of light rum, bought by her older sister.

  The policeman looked at Carlos and David and said, “I got out of the Corps last year so I’m not going to check your room, but you two better be more careful. Word about this bash spread pretty fast.”

  “Thanks a lot, sir,” Carlos told the policeman. “We won’t be any more trouble. I promise.”

  He closed the door and fell into a plastic-covered chair.

  David looked at Carlos, reached under the bed and pulled out the half-full quart of rum. “Buddy. You need a drink!”

  Two girls suddenly burst out of the bathroom, laughing and shrieking. Both Carlos and David laughed, too. They had nearly thirty-six hours of liberty left.

  The Friday night party carried over into Saturday night, La Mirada and Norwalk teens coming and going, and Carlos and David enjoyed the bawdy weekend for which they had hoped.

  Late Saturday night, the two Marines, accompanied by two girls, drove their rented Chevy through the backstreets of the La Mirada neighborhoods. They made drinks from a fresh quart of rum.

  Del Shannon whined loudly over the radio about his “Runaway, run run run run Runaway.” The four carefree youngsters sang along in high-pitched voices as the old Chevy cruised from curb to curb on the backstreets.

  The joyous singing stopped with an abrupt thud as the car crashed through a wax-leaf hedge and skidded to a halt on the front lawn of a white, hacienda-style home with red curved tiles on its roof. Lights flashed on behind the decorated ironwork that covered the windows.

  “Damn! Carlos, let’s get out of here!” David yelled from the backseat.

  “Something’s wrong. Engine won’t start. Something messed up under the hood.”

  Carlos leaped out of the car and popped up the hood.

  “Damn! Dave! Get out here. The battery’s gone through the radiator!”

  David shoved the front seat forward and bounded out the door. “What can we do, Carlos? People will be coming out any second.”

  “Help me get the battery back up on the platform,” Carlos commanded. “Look at that. This thing won’t go far leaking water like that.”

  David reached beneath the battery while Carlos pulled near the corner that was embedded in the radiator.

  “Pulllll,” Carlos grunted.

  “Shit!” Carlos yelled, yanking his hand out and slinging it rapidly at the wrist. He shoved his knuckles into his mouth and sucked hard. “Christ Almighty, Dave! I raked all the skin off my knuckles.”

  “Come on, Carlos,” David pleaded, “you can suck your knuckles when we get outa here. Let’s pull on that battery again.”

  Both Marines reached under the battery and again pulled hard. This time it came free with a thud, dumping acid as it tipped upside down.

  “Damn! That shit burns,” Carlos cried out as acid ran into the fresh wounds on his hand. He dropped to his knees and wiped his skinned knuckles on the wet grass. David set the battery again on its rectangular platform.

  “Can we get out of here? Now?” David begged.

  “Let’s see if she’ll turn over,” Carlos said calmly.

  Carlos sat behind the wheel and turned the starter. It groaned and groaned. David squirmed anxiously, watching from the backseat now.

  “Carlos! The guy’s coming out.”

  At the same moment that a man wearing a bathrobe and slippers, and carrying a flashlight started across his front yard to see what damage the runaway car had caused to his lawn, flower bed, and hedge, the Chevy’s engine fired to life. Carlos popped the clutch, sending turf spraying from under the wheels. Through a cloud of blue engine smoke, the man ran behind the fishtailing car, yelling and waving his flashlight over his head.

  The man only saw one head showing above the car’s windows as it squealed around the corner, white smoke pouring from the rear tires.

  Inside the car, David and the two girls lay low in the seats, hiding until they felt safel
y out of sight.

  Carlos took backstreets and alleys as the quartet of fast-sobering youths returned to the motel, hoping to avoid any police cars that might be searching for them now.

  The angry home owner had reported the incident to police, but he could not give them a good description of the car, and he only saw one youth, who he mistook for an Hispanic.

  The next morning, Carlos and David both awoke late. Their heads ached and Carlos’s hand throbbed from the skinned knuckles.

  At ten o’clock, he and David raced through Garden Grove, heading back to Camp Pendleton on a Los Angeles expressway. Carlos watched the temperature gauge needle go from the C to the H in a matter of minutes as they sped southward.

  The one-hour drive turned into more than two as the Marines stopped at each exit and refilled the leaking radiator. They knew they would be late back from liberty. They both dreaded their inevitable meeting with the first sergeant.

  At 12:30 P.M. Carlos pulled the car off the expressway and coasted down the Oceanside exit. Blue smoke belched from the tailpipe and a white cloud of steam boiled from behind the grill.

  “That’s it, Dave, we walk from here. She won’t make it another ten feet without that engine seizing up.”

  As David stepped out of the car, he shook his head. “We’re dead. We were supposed to have our liberty cards checked in thirty minutes ago. What are we going to tell the first sergeant?”

  “The truth,” Carlos replied. “We had car trouble.”

  Carlos locked the car and the two Marines walked, ditty bags in hand, back to the rental company to explain their problem.

  As Carlos and David walked up the rental agency’s driveway, the manager, an old man who wore a silvery crew cut and smoked foul-smelling cigars, looked at the thin gold watch stretched around his fat wrist.

  “You boys are about two hours late.”

  “Yes, sir,” Carlos acknowledged. “We had car trouble. Your battery wasn’t tied down, and when we were headed down a ramp in L.A., we hit a pothole and it fell through the radiator.