Silent Warrior

by Charles Henderson

  “The place has got to be littered with mines,” Carlos thought, watching the soldier avoid the more likely channels where a person might walk. He thought about the ambush earlier in the afternoon, how it had begun with an explosion. Boredom and complacence—not a shot heard all day—may have steered that patrol down the easy path.

  Carlos thought about Burke earlier that day, standing with his shirt unbuttoned, his arms out like a large bird, cooling himself in the wind on a wide open beach. What a foolish act, brought on by both their complacency and their boredom.

  “It won’t ever happen again,” Carlos said to himself. He still held his sights on the Viet Cong soldier, who had now stopped and squatted on the slope of a dune, half-hidden in the grass.

  “Hmm,” Carlos whispered under his breath. “Looks like old Homer, there, is waiting to meet up with somebody.”

  Burke smiled.

  As the distant mountains began to eclipse the sun, the wind fell to a breeze, sending much cooler air across the backs of the two snipers as they lay hidden. From their vantage point, they could see well above the hills in the distance, although most of the troughs remained hidden.

  However, from the point where the Viet Cong soldier waited, 400 yards in front of them, the Marine snipers had a clear field of view for several hundred yards.

  Carlos still felt concern that if he fired only one shot, the remaining soldiers might possibly reach cover, and then maneuver in a circle behind his and Burke’s position for a counterattack.

  “Should I shoot as many as I can and let them identify my position?” Carlos thought. “Or should I make one shot, sit tight, wait for them to move, and hit them again?”

  Neither choice seemed a good one. He had anticipated just hunting stragglers, one or two Viet Cong sneaking through the sand hills and dunes from the American patrols. He could take his shots, slip out of the hide, move to another. If this platoon had more than five or six men, he knew he and Burke would face a much higher risk than he had ever found acceptable.

  “Scary and exciting,” he whispered to Burke.

  Burke knew exactly what Hathcock meant. The sand hills provided too much cover and room for a platoon to maneuver on them. Furthermore, if he and Carlos tried to move out low, and stay well-hidden, they risked the mines that possibly lay in their path. Perhaps holding this hill until dark offered the best chance of getting out alive against any significant number of VC.

  “If there is a bunch,” Carlos whispered, “we got to drop as many as we can. Four or less, and it is one shot and wait.”

  Carlos glanced down at the M-14 that Burke carried.

  “When was the last time you zeroed that stick?” he asked under his breath.

  “Two days ago,” Burke said softly. “It’s within a foot at 700 yards. I’ll hold a little low here.”

  “Don’t hesitate if there’s a bunch,” Carlos warned. “I’ll be cranking this bolt as fast as I can, too.”

  Carlos hated the close distances and ample cover that this place presented. Any sort of patrol through this land that Marines had come to know as the “Riviera” faced high risk. The sand and soft soil easily hid mines. The maze of troughs winding and crossing among the hills and dunes offered plenty of room for a VC ambush to hit-and-run, and then hit-and-run again.

  Hathcock decided that after today, he and Burke would hunt farther south and more west, where the terrain better suited a sniper’s long shot.

  Clouds spread orange and purple across the sky as the sun disappeared behind them. Grayness lay across the land beneath when the first Viet Cong guerrilla appeared in the distance.

  The man who squatted raised his hand. Then the man approaching came forward and squatted, too. Shortly thereafter, two other men appeared, one behind the other, edging along the sandy slopes, working their way to where the two now waited.

  Three more VC appeared in the distance, each well separated from the other.

  Carlos looked at Burke and nodded toward his M-14, affirming that he expected the lance corporal to shoot as well.

  The man who walked at the head of the group of three, joined the other four squatting while the second man walked fifty yards ahead, and the third man remained about fifty yards behind them.

  “They mean to sit here a bit,” Carlos whispered, “right in the back of our shooting gallery.”

  Burke offered Carlos a slight nod, agreeing.

  “You shoot the one standing guard up-front, he’s the closest shot, and I’ll take the guard in the rear,” Carlos told his partner. “Then start working on their circle from the right and I will from the left. They’ll either run at us or over the top of that hill. I’m hoping on ’em taking a chance for the hill.”

  The shot from Hathcock’s rifle had just broken the evening’s silence when Burke’s followed so closely that it sounded nearly like a single report. Both snipers found their marks, dropping the two Viet Cong standing sentry.

  When the first shots struck their targets, the remaining five soldiers scrambled to their feet, rifles in hand and ready to fire. The men at first thought that a squad might have enveloped them, attacking their flanks. Their immediate reaction to that idea sent them running straight at Hathcock and Burke.

  “Here they come,” Carlos said as his second shot struck the soldier on the far left. That man had just stood up and tried to run when the bullet dropped him dead.

  Burke caught the man on the far right as he sprang to make his dash. He had launched himself in flight when the shot struck him squarely in the chest. It stopped him in midair, and the momentum sent the dead soldier plowing facedown in the sand.

  The remaining three guerrillas opened fire toward the two snipers and ran for cover behind a small dune on their left flank.

  “Hold ’em and squeeze ’em,” Carlos said to Burke, dropping his third man.

  Simultaneously, Burke hit his third, and before the last man could disappear behind cover, Burke settled his M-14’s open sights on the man’s back and killed him, too.

  “Seven rounds, seven dead VC,” Carlos said. “Not bad for beginners. That just proves my point that there is nothing on the battlefield more deadly than one well-aimed shot.”

  While Carlos jotted notes hastily in his logbook, Burke scanned the hills and lanes surrounding their position, searching for enemy patrols advancing toward them. Certainly, the gunfire had alerted any Viet Cong within earshot that some Americans still lurked here in the fast-closing darkness.

  Both snipers knew well that each minute they remained on this hilltop brought potential disaster closer.

  Throughout the night, the two Marines silently crept westward, carefully moving to the higher hills and more accommodating hunting ranges that lay beyond Highway 1.

  By midday, the sniper team had turned southward, and now rested in a shady hide below the crest of a hill that dominated several miles of open rice land, crosshatched by hedgerows and tree lines. Carlos knew that country well. He had patrolled it frequently as an MP during his first five months in Vietnam.

  They took turns catnapping while one of them kept watch over the flat land and dry rice fields covered in stubble from a crop recently harvested. If nothing crossed the openness that outstretched beneath the hill where Carlos and Burke hid, the two Marines had decided to remain in their well-hidden seclusion through the night. Secretly, each man hoped that nothing would cross their sights this day. They were very tired.

  At midnight, raindrops fell against the thick jungle canopy above the two snipers. Soon water began to drip and run off the broad leaves and limbs above the men, showering them. The splattering drips from overhead awakened Carlos Hathcock, and he looked to see if Burke had remained awake.

  He should have known better—both men kept their discipline high while on patrol. Yet Burke had walked out of the cover of the dunes and onto the beach this afternoon, exposing himself to the enemy, if one had been around to see him.

  How did they know an enemy had not seen Burke, and told others abo
ut it? Perhaps they had moved from that place at exactly the right time, Carlos considered.

  Perhaps the enemy patrol that they had wiped out with seven shots had not earlier attacked the Marine patrol south and west of them, but had come to that place to hunt the two snipers. It was possible, Carlos thought.

  Rain clattered overhead and thumped the ground around the two men, laying a mask of noise over them. Carlos liked that. Dampness made the sound of their walking disappear by softening the dry mulch under their feet. It washed their dusty, dry world, and made it different and strange. Rain makes all places strange, even places where you live.

  The cooling downpour brought out smells of fertile soil and decaying leaves and wood. The freshly cleaned air carried a sweet aroma. It reminded Carlos of the earthy fragrance of the black, moss-filled, composted soil that his grandmother had used to plant her geraniums in large, red clay pots that she then set on her front porch in the spring, and in which the flowers bloomed bright red and pink and white.

  Burke had covered his and Hathcock’s rifles with a poncho that he had unstrapped from its carrying place beneath his pack. With raindrops dancing across his back, the lance corporal looked through the rear lens of a spotting scope, holding his right hand above the front lens to keep off the water while he searched the dark fields below them.

  “Can you see anything at all?” Carlos asked.

  “Barely,” Burke said. “You get any sleep at all?”

  “A bit here and there,” Carlos answered. “How are you doing?”

  “Pretty good, really,” Burke said. “Amazing what a few short naps can do.”

  “You want to close your eyes awhile?” Carlos asked.

  Burke did not argue. He could still use more sleep. The young sniper handed Hathcock the spotting scope laying belly-down in the wetness with his head on his hands, and closed his eyes. In a moment his breathing deepened and slowed.

  Mud and water oozed beneath him and rain splashed on his back while he thought of his sister and dreamed of home. He wondered if she or anyone else in his family would understand? His life made a difference here. He cared little for the politics, but he cared greatly for the Marines he had come to regard as closely as brothers. Could they understand that? Few could, unless one had also been a Marine.

  The start of a snore two hours later caught Carlos’s ear and he nudged Burke. The young lance corporal raised his head. The rain had stopped.

  Now a steamy dampness filled the still night air with wisps of fog that slowly snaked along dips and ditches. The clouds had long since disappeared, allowing the moon and a sky filled with bright stars to light the puddled land below the mountain where Hathcock and Burke now searched the countryside for movement.

  “Two o’clock,” Burke whispered.

  “No, three-thirty,” Carlos whispered back.

  Then Burke pointed his finger toward a tree line far across the flat land, where a figure sneaked among the shadows.

  Carlos moved his eyes to the right and saw the figure, too, his knees crouched and waist bent forward as he stepped. He held a rifle in his right hand, and kept looking over his shoulder, as if talking to someone at his right. Then as suddenly as he had appeared, he vanished among the shadows and trees.

  Two hours later, gunfire and explosions echoed from the east. In that same direction an orange glow, alternately darkening and brightening, shone above the trees.

  “That’s no sunrise,” Carlos whispered. “You can see signs of that farther to the left, way up from what I bet is a pretty good-sized fire. Ten to one that’s a truck convoy out of Chu Lai headed for Da Nang on Highway 1.”

  “That lonesome Charlie that we let slip by probably had company,” Burke said. “And that’s their work.”

  “A bunch of company, looks like,” Carlos said, still watching the pulsating glow beyond the eastern trees. “They come back this way, probably in about an hour, and we’re gonna be able to see ’em with the daylight, even in those trees.”

  LITTLE BY LITTLE the sky brightened, and the sun quickly rose above the tall forests, casting orange light on the flat land beyond the shadows of the trees and hills. In the hour that passed, water droplets from the night’s rain—that had earlier covered the leaves and grass and rice stubble—dried. Now only large puddles remained, and they shone like odd-shaped mirrors scattered across the open fields, reflecting blue and white among the soft green and yellow and brown that surrounded them.

  Heat sent white clouds, scattered like popcorn, across the horizon, rising in puffy billows that would later tower over the land and send evening thundershowers across the mountains.

  Beneath the leaves and trees and broad-spread ferns the Marine snipers lay silent and motionless. Beads of sweat slid in small rivulets down their cheeks and foreheads and the backs of their hands as they methodically searched the world below them with a telescopic gun-sight and a spotting scope.

  Carlos pushed his heel against Burke’s ankle, drawing his attention with a nudge. Without taking his eye from his rifle scope, Hathcock pointed his finger left, directing Burke to the flicker of movement behind the distant trees to their southeast.

  “Got ’em,” Burke whispered as he followed several more dark forms stepping swiftly behind the tree trunks at the forest’s edge. “They’re staying behind the trees pretty much.”

  “We’ll lose ’em if they stay in that particular cover, since it curves south,” Carlos said, “but if they want to keep going west, where we saw old Homer the Hotdog last night, then they got to break out across those flats to get in these trees down front and to the right.”

  “Bet they’re not heading south,” Burke said, knowing that most VC strongholds lay more west and northwest of their position.

  “Good bet,” Carlos said as he saw the first guerrilla dash from the forest’s cover and run along a trail on the top of a paddy dike.

  Quickly a second, a third, a fourth, a fifth and then a sixth and seventh and eighth black-clad soldier followed the first, all of them now running on the dike.

  “Bingo,” Carlos said, dropping the last man who had run out of the trees. “If ther’re any more behind these folks, they’re gonna be turning south now.”

  The remaining seven VC ran as fast as they could push their legs, seeing their comrade tumble dead. They kept on the trail atop the dike, knowing that if they stepped off in the rain-soaked bog of the rice fields at either side, they would not have a chance to escape at all.

  “Go ahead and take the leader,” Carlos told Burke, who immediately shot, missing with his first round and sending a rooster tail of mud and water skyward.

  “Damn,” Burke said, missing his second shot, too. Taking aim with open sights on an M-14 at targets 1,000 yards away would frustrate even the best marksman.

  “Damn is right,” Carlos said. “It’s the BAR Team.”

  “BAR Team?” Burke responded, after finally dropping the lead runner.

  “Browning Automatic Rifles,” Carlos said, shooting the next runner at the rear of the line. “Five women with BARs. Gave us fits while I was an MP at Chu Lai.”

  “That’s them?” Burke said, missing again.

  “That’s them,” Carlos said, killing one of the women who had several bandoliers of .30-caliber ammo draped from her right shoulder across to her left hip.

  “Shit,” Burke said, missing again and watching one of the women running with a BAR finally make it to the trees, where she quickly began to fire toward the two snipers.

  “Try to get another one before she gets her range figured out,” Carlos told Burke.

  The lance corporal’s next shot took down a man running with an SKS semiautomatic rifle in his hand. He veered left and splashed into the mud, gliding down like an airplane crash-landing.

  Carlos killed a second woman with a BAR, but watched the remaining pair on the dike run to the trees and join the third BAR Team member, who now sent bursts of automatic fire into the ground and rocks below Hathcock and Burke. With each
burst she walked her gunfire closer to their position. Seconds later, the other two women joined the shooting.

  Both Marines slid on their stomachs behind the large trunks of trees growing at their right and left just as several bullets glanced across the ground between them. There, Carlos and John lay quietly until the shooting stopped.

  After several moments of silence, the sniper duo carefully slid from behind the trees and finally caught a last glimpse of the three women as they disappeared behind a distant low hill.

  WHILE THE TWO Marine snipers hunted the countryside northwest of Chu Lai, the four Americans and their two Vietnamese scouts, who had crashed the previous day, continued to push eastward, trying to elude the Viet Cong and make their way to friendly lines.

  The six men had not stopped pushing themselves since the previous afternoon. Their only rest came during the few moments that they paused whenever they drank water, usually from a clean-looking stream or spring-fed branch. They had no canteens, no radio, no map, no compass. Worst of all, the group had only the four side arms the Americans had worn—two .38-caliber revolvers and two .45-caliber semiautomatic pistols, with two spare loads apiece—and the two rifles that the Vietnamese scouts had carried, each of them with four additional loaded magazines. All total, the six men had 234 rounds of ammunition: 27 rounds for the two revolvers, 27 rounds for the two pistols, and 180 rounds for the rifles—hardly enough to stand up against even one small firefight.

  By noontime the second day, the four Americans had little strength left, pressing onward purely on adrenaline. However, the two scouts never slowed their pace. To survive one had to keep up. To live, one had to run.

  Each of the men knew very well that by now many Viet Cong patrols combed the countryside looking for them. Rather than moving due east, the scouts ran north, then east, then north again. By that tactic, they hoped to avoid ambushes set up anticipating a more directly eastward route of travel. With no radio, however, the odds still lay clearly with the VC.