Silent Warrior

by Charles Henderson

  “Aye, aye, sir,” Carlos said, almost chuckling, and walked to his hooch, where Burke had just finished cleaning the sergeant’s rifle and now had the M-14 dismantled.

  THAT SAME NIGHT, Colonel Ba knelt with his head down, listening to the report from his men. At least one-third of the fifty-man unit had fallen from the American patrol’s direct fire, and from the bombs and napalm that followed. When they saw three helicopters land at the bend of the long meadow, the Communist soldiers retreated with their wounded.

  Certainly, Brigadier Le would gloat. Ba dreaded seeing him in just over a week.

  IN THE FOLLOWING days, Hathcock packed most of his personal belongings and only used what he absolutely needed during his last few days in Vietnam. He thought of home, Jo, and his baby boy. Some men talked about extending in-country, and continuing their dance with the devil. Not Carlos Hathcock.

  He had promised Jo he would not reenlist.

  SWEAT BEADED ON Hathcock’s brow, and then he felt something cool and wet cover his forehead. He opened his eyes and saw the dim light and a person reaching across his head. He could hardly breathe now. His lungs rattled and hurt with each shallow breath he drew.

  He remembered the snake once again. Its green, cold head raising in front of his eyes. Its black and red forked tongue flicking, tasting the air, looking for food or danger. Even when he and Burke hid in the tree roots, even when they had spent three days in Elephant Valley pinning down an entire North Vietnamese Army company—even those times he had not felt the panic, the fright surge through his bloodstream that he had felt when he faced that snake. When he crawled for three days across open ground, with enemy patrols walking within feet of him.

  That ordeal had frightened him most.

  ONLY DAYS BEFORE leaving Vietnam, at the end of his first tour, an enormous captain, a man who seemed to stand as tall as one of the blackjack pines behind his grandmother’s house, and broad as a barn, came to him and had asked him to volunteer to kill one more man. An enemy commander. An enemy commander at his own headquarters. At his own headquarters that lay in the middle of a wide flatland with nothing but grass growing around it for more than 2,500 yards in any direction.

  He had to take the mission. Even though they called it volunteering, Carlos knew he had no choice. Who else would they send? Burke? More than likely, since next to Hathcock, he was the best.

  But Carlos knew he could not live with himself if he turned down the job and Burke went, and died. No, he had no choice but to go. And he knew full well his chances of getting out alive were beyond any odds-maker’s estimation. Less than nothing. Shooting the man presented less of a problem in Hathcock’s mind. Escape posed the challenge.

  Yet he did pull out the miracle. He covered himself with dense camouflage, native grass from the flatland that he gathered in the evening and fastened onto his uniform through small slits he cut with a knife. Then he crawled at the speed a minute hand moves on a clock. Crawled for three days, more than 1,500 yards to his firing point.

  He lay there until the enemy commander walked from his headquarters with his aide, both men in full uniform. As this high ranking enemy officer walked away from the large house surrounded by hooches and huts and sandbagged gun emplacements, manned by more soldiers than Carlos could count, he sent a single, deadly shot into the general’s chest.

  Hathcock had found a low and very shallow draw that led to the tree line. He could hardly discern it, yet he knew that his chances were best if he could quickly crawl on his belly along that low, grass-covered wash to the tree line.

  The single shot had left the Communist force tasked with defending this headquarters completely confused. All that they heard was the pop of Hathcock’s bullet as it struck their senior field commander. None of them had any idea from which direction the shot had come.

  Dozens of uniformed and nonuniformed soldiers swept around the compound several hundred yards. However, they failed to go far enough and this Marine who traditionally wore the white feather, except on this mission, slipped away.

  Carlos left Vietnam a few days later.

  AS HE LAY in the bed, sick with pneumonia, near death, he tried to smile. He thought of how good it had felt to go home.

  11

  Home and Back

  IT SEEMED LIKE just yesterday, yet a lifetime ago, when Carlos Hathcock first set foot on the ground at Chu Lai, Republic of Vietnam. And now the feelings he encountered, as he returned to the place where he began this war, whirled beyond description. The details of stepping on the tarmac at the Chu Lai airfield remained as vivid as though he had done it yesterday, yet so much had happened in this past year. He experienced a lifetime’s worth of living and dying compressed into twelve months, and now he felt like an old veteran recalling his past for his grandchildren.

  Jo and Sonny had kissed him good-bye a year ago when he boarded a plane at New Bern, North Carolina, and now, in less than a week, he would step off the same cramped, twin-engine Piedmont Airliner, at that same rural coastal Carolina airport and kiss his wife and son again. A lifetime lived between yesterday and today. He felt uneasy about it.

  Now the year had come full circle as the sun disappeared behind the hills west of Chu Lai, and Carlos sat on a bamboo chair, looking out across the runways and taxiways.

  In the distance, two F-4 Phantoms turned up their engines to a deafening roar, filling the air with black smoke as their pilots proceeded through their pre-flight checks. The roar of the planes dropped to a dull rumble and Carlos turned his head toward them to watch their takeoff roll.

  Slow to start, the two planes gained speed and Carlos strained his neck to see the thirty-foot long blue and orange flames that shot from beneath the aircraft tails like four gigantic Bunsen burners. As the pair of 40,000-pound jet fighters turned high and right, departing the air traffic pattern, he could see inside their engines and the fiery hell that churned within them was like thunderous blast furnaces streaking through the late evening sky. The awesomeness of their great power made him feel insignificant.

  As he watched the orange lights disappear in the gray darkness, he thought of the men who rode atop the twin kerosene-burning turbines and how fragile they were compared to the engines that rocketed them skyward with 44,000 pounds of thrust. They truly were brave men to harness their souls to such fiery chariots.

  Carlos listened as the roar of their engines faded in the distance and fell subordinate to the whistling whine of two A-4 Skyhawk attack jets that settled on the runway, their long landing gear outstretched like the talons of their namesakes as they came home to roost. They had flown close air-support missions this evening, dropping napalm on jungle-covered ridges, burning Charlie as he hid there. Carlos had seen the napalm attacks before, and recalled the foul stench of the flaming jelled gasoline and burning humanity.

  Feeling to his side, Carlos grasped the neck of a quart bottle and raised it in a toast to the two Marine Aircraft Group-12 planes as they taxied off the active runway, hurrying toward their aviary of high-stacked oil drums on the edge of the tarmac where Marine mechanics waited ready to service the war birds and prepare them for their next sorties. He turned the two-thirds-full bottle of Jim Beam bourbon straight up and dumped a healthy slug into his mouth. As he gulped the warm, brown spirits down his throat, his eyes filled with tears from the fire that gushed its way to his stomach.

  “Oooooh weeee! Mighty fine, yes, sir. Mighty fine,” Carlos said to a Marine who sat in a bamboo chair of similar design and who gulped whiskey, too.

  The Marine who sat next to Carlos also waited for the eight A.M. “Freedom Bird” to Okinawa. There they would connect with their overseas flight that would return them to Camp Pendleton, California, and release them from active duty.

  “Less than twelve hours we ain’t gonna be short no more. We gonna be gone!” the Marine said in a whooping laugh. “Just think! We are so short, that in the morning, when we get up, we’re gonna have to use a stepladder to climb outa bed.”

  Half-
drunk already, Carlos chuckled. “Yup. I’m so short that I could walk under a snake’s belly while wearin’ a top hat and standing on stilts.”

  “Hell, Carlos. We ain’t short. We’re next!”

  Both Marines lifted their bottles in a toast and gulped down another slug of whiskey. “Ohhhhweeee, that cat’s got a barbwire tail,” Carlos said, blowing hard.

  “In three days we’ll be at Pendleton, a couple of days after that, I’ll be home. I figure this time next week I’ll be a PFC in the 1st Civ Div.”

  “What? PFC?” Carlos asked.

  “Yup. Proud Fuckin’ Civilian!”

  Carlos laughed loudly.

  “Hell, Carlos. I was thinking about it today and feeling real bad because I have a whole week more to wait before I’m out. But after this year here, I don’t think they could do anything to me that would get me down, except cancel my ticket out of here tomorrow.

  “As long as we get back to the World, I don’t care how many days we stay at Camp Pendleton. At this point I figure I could stand on my head and stack BBs.”

  Carlos took another slug of whiskey and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “Tonight, I’m on a search for oblivion. And I think I’m getting close.”

  He leaned back in the chair and stared up at the clear night sky scattered with stars that disappeared into the South China Sea.

  Both Marines staggered on the flight the following morning—drunk and still happily in oblivion. They felt lucky to be on the plane and alive.

  Neither Marine had slept the night before—they drank instead, celebrating their departure from Vietnam. Aboard the plane, they continued laughing and joking, still feeling the effects of the bottle of Jim Beam bourbon and the bottle of Johnny Walker scotch.

  Carlos and the Marine sat across the aisle from a major who kept looking at them as though he knew them but could not place their faces. Hathcock noticed the officer watching them and gouged his elbow into his partner’s ribs, alerting him to tone down his revelry.

  “Major, do we know each other, sir?” Carlos asked.

  “I’m not sure, but you look awfully familiar. I’m just trying to place your face,” the major said.

  “Sergeant Carlos N. Hathcock II at your service, sir. 1st Marine Division Scout/Snipers.”

  “That’s it!” the major said. “Hill 55. You worked there with Captain Jim Land.”

  “Yes, sir,” Carlos said, extending his hand to the officer who shook it, smiling.

  “I’ve heard a lot about you snipers. I don’t know how much is true, but I’ve heard a lot of good sea stories.”

  The major paused and squinted his eyes. “So you’re Hathcock. I’ve heard about you. Got a lot of kills—most of anyone in-country, from what they say.”

  “I suppose,” Carlos said, feeling uneasy with the direction the conversation had taken. “I really don’t put much stock in body count. Confirmed kills, probable kills. I never went after numbers. I just did my job.”

  “Me, too,” the major said as the plane shuddered under the strain of its engines as it began its takeoff roll. “I had a battery of one-five-fives up in your area. I got promoted and they sent me down here. I worked at the Task Force X-Ray command center for the rest of my tour.

  “I don’t mean it as an insult or anything, but I don’t see how you snipers rate so much hype. It’s like you’re the deadliest thing since the Cobra, to hear the troops talk. So what’s the big deal? You guys do a good job of providing security and I guess a special hit now and then. But for real killing power, you have to agree, a 155-millimeter Howitzer does the best. You want to talk about blowing away VC, I know for a fact that I have killed more men in one day than you have killed on your entire tour in Vietnam.”

  “Sir, that may be true. And I mean no disrespect,” Carlos said, pausing for a moment and looking sternly at the major, “but when you killed all those men, did you look ’em in the eye when you did it?”

  The major turned away and said nothing more. It was true that his kills were always distant and done with a great deal of anonymity. He never saw the individual faces of the people his guns destroyed—it was always a grid coordinate, a faraway speck. The idea of watching a man, looking at his face—his eyes—seeing into his soul as the bullet struck him dead had never seemed an issue until the sniper asked him that question. A question that he could only answer, no.

  Carlos sat back in the seat, closed his eyes, and slowly drifted into a deep sleep.

  He awoke with a jolt as the plane’s wheels touched the runway at Kadena Air Base, Okinawa.

  His head throbbed with the 86-proof hangover that his all-night celebration had bought. The scorching heat and humidity sent his stomach turning as he stepped down the metal stairs and walked across the concrete tarmac to where the enlisted Marines lined up, four deep, in a formation.

  It felt strange to walk across an open area, as though he stepped outdoors naked and no one cared. There were no sandbags in the windows of the formed concrete buildings. There were no weapons. The walls and buildings had no pockmarks from ten thousand bullets fired by a hidden enemy. There was no rubble of war. It was peaceful. And that made him feel uneasy.

  Carlos stood in the formation of Marines and waited for a staff sergeant to call his name. He was glad that his last name started with H rather than W since the humidity and scorching midday heat that reflected up from the concrete made his hangover nearly unmanageable.

  By the time the troop transport trucks reached Camp Hansen, many of the Marines who surrounded Carlos had formed their plans for liberty that night in Kin Village, a bar district just outside the camp gates. There were prostitutes, floor shows, and cheap beer in bars that remained open until dawn. Carlos listened and could only think of lying in the barracks and getting well. He felt awful now.

  Flights left Okinawa each Wednesday and Friday morning at eight o’clock. “Freedom Birds” seemed to depart always at eight o’clock in the morning. The twenty-three-hour flight to Norton Air Force Base, California, and then the two-hour bus ride to Camp Pendleton ended well into the night. The out-processing there continued another two days and finally, on a Saturday afternoon in April of 1967, Carlos walked aboard a Boeing 727 bound for Washington, D.C.

  He barely made connections at National Airport and caught the last Piedmont Airlines plane headed south that night.

  The propeller-driven Convair aircraft taxied to a halt in New Bern at a few minutes past midnight. He sat alone in the back of the plane and looked out the Plexiglas-covered window, trying to see if Jo and Sonny were there to meet him. Floodlights shone from the eaves of the terminal and made it difficult to tell who was who.

  No one on the plane had spoken to him; they recognized that he was a serviceman and left him alone. He waited until the pushing mass of passengers had almost all made their way through the doorway on the side of the airplane and then reached under his seat and dragged out his green vinyl satchel with yellow handles and USMC written on the side, and walked out of the plane.

  No one greeted him. No one asked him of the battles he had fought. No one cared that he was a veteran returning home from war. He was just another traveler coming home to New Bern that night.

  As he walked through the gate, he saw Jo standing there, holding their son and smiling, thankful that her husband had survived and had come home so that they could build a new life. Carlos took his son in his arms and kissed his wife.

  The greeting lasted a moment and no one else took notice of him.

  He took a sea bag and a vinyl suitcase from the baggage claim and left the airport, bound for his little house on Bray Avenue, a brand-new job with an electrical contractor, and a new life as a civilian.

  “CARLOS! YOU BETTER hurry, honey. They’ll be by to pick you up before you know it,” Jo called as Carlos finished dressing.

  The smell of bacon, eggs, and fresh coffee filled the small house on Bray Avenue. For Carlos, it was the morning that he had dreamed about while lying in the rain and m
ud of Vietnam. A reason to come home.

  Yet as Carlos pulled the laces tightly around the hooks on the upper portion of his old combat boots, he felt out of place. This was something new. He was starting fresh, just as he had done eight years ago when he left Arkansas for the Marine Corps. Eight years gone in the Corps and nothing to show but a few wrinkles around his eyes.

  His new boss hired veterans. He believed in giving them a preference, but Carlos knew that in order to stay on, he had to learn the business of electricity. And the idea of electricity didn’t mix well with him.

  Carlos dreaded being shocked, and he knew that for electrical workers it came with the turf—electricians get shocked regularly. Thus, each morning, he left for work with uneasiness lurking in the shadows of his mind.

  “Your lunch is on the counter,” Jo told Carlos as he sipped the last of his coffee and left the breakfast table to meet his ride this Monday morning, his second week of civilian work.

  “Bye-bye, honey. I love you,” Carlos told Jo as he left the kitchen.

  His toddling boy stood at his side, and Carlos rubbed his little blond head. He looked down at the child who clung to his khaki trousers, and marvelled at how much the boy resembled his mother.

  “Lucky boy. Looks just like you,” Carlos said with a smile. And then joked, “He could have looked like me.”

  “He’s got your temperament,” Jo said as a horn blasted in the street. “I’ll see you this evening.”

  As Carlos settled inside the cab of the pickup truck, he thought of the past long weekend. He had taken Thursday and Friday off and had driven to nearby Camp Lejeune where he had watched the Marine Corps’ Eastern Division Rifle and Pistol matches. There he met many of his old shooting partners from the Marine Corps team. He again saw that side of the Marine Corps that he loved and missed.