Several days later, Carlos poured over notes and reports of the various incidents. The documents provided him with the information that the Viet Cong no longer presented the primary threat—but that the 2nd NVA division, reinforced with the 90th, 141st, 1st, 3rd, 36th, and 31st NVA regiments and two artillery battalions who were now poised for attack from strongholds located all along the 7th Marines’ western flank, were trouble. He talked aloud to himself, turning the heads of two snipers who sat on boxes, cleaning their weapons.
“Gonna get a lot hotter this summer,” he said. “They’re stocking up for the monsoons. Gonna get all the rice this year. That many troops—gonna be a big harvest of not enough to go around.”
It did not take a tactical scholar to conclude that with less rice available for more people, the food-gathering program initiated by the enemy would be vigorous, to say the least Carlos had watched rice drops to hungry villagers, and based his assumption on that.
He laughed at the story a friend told him of a hundred people intermingled with hungry pigs and other farm animals, all waiting in a large circle where an orange T lay spread on the ground. They stood, staring at the sky, listening for the sound of airplane engines belonging to a C-117 that would drop sacks of rice into the large circle of people. Then, all of a sudden, the roar of the engines and propellers cut through the air just above the broken and mangled treetops. The pigs, too, turned their snouts skyward—their ears perked—and watched for the rice.
It was as though someone fired the starter’s pistol when the bags fell to earth, several sacks bursting open. The people and the pigs ran for the rice—hungry and fighting for every grain, because the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese had taken their harvest from the season before and these regular airdrop deliveries, which occurred on a daily basis throughout the country, provided their principal means of survival now. No longer did rice come from the field, but from the sky, and the Marines who watched the event laughed.
Today, however, that memory haunted Carlos as he pondered the prospects of the enemy’s rice-harvesting plan this year. That preposterous spectacle, which repeated itself throughout the country again and again, lost its humor and took on a menacing prospect.
“Gonna be a hot, hot summer.” He sighed.
AS HE SCRATCHED out more notes with his black ballpoint pen on a yellow legal-sized tablet, sweat ran down his shirtless back and soaked into the top of his trousers.
The door suddenly burst open and two loud feet stomped across the sniper hooch’s plywood floor. Carlos raised his head as he heard the thud of a hundred pounds of personal gear, bound inside a long green sea bag, hit the floor behind him. Before he could turn his head, a familiar voice boomed, “The name’s McAbee—Staff Sergeant McAbee. Just call me Mack!”
Staff Sergeant Ronald H. McAbee was one of Carlos’s best friends in the Marine Corps.
McAbee first met Carlos at Camp Lejeune at the end of the Marine Corps’ rifle and pistol matches in the spring of 1967. McAbee had just finished shooting his .45-caliber “hard ball” pistol in the final day of individual competition when he met Carlos in the redbrick barracks at the rifle range near coastal North Carolina’s Sneed’s Ferry and Topsail Island. That night they crossed the tall bridge that led to the beach community and drank Jim Beam at a tavern there. McAbee was allergic to beer.
A month later, they were neighbors in the Chamberlain Village family housing area of the Marine Base at Quantico. Only a matter of days after the Hathcock family cleared their quarters, so did Staff Sergeant R. H. McAbee and kin.
McAbee knew that Carlos was in 1 Corps, but he did not know where. He guessed his friend would probably be at the 1st Marine Division’s Scout/Sniper Instructor School, now at Da Nang. He had no idea that Carlos led the sniper platoon on Hill 55.
After the exclamations, hugs, slaps, and cheers, Carlos got down to business with his friend, one of the best armorers in the Marine Corps.
“The first project on the agenda is to overhaul all these old sticks we’ve been shootin’,” Carlos said. “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,” McAbee said.
“Soon as you get settled,” Hathcock added, “you’re gonna get a truck from 11th Motor T and head down to 1st FSR2 at Da Nang and use their shop. I’ll get the sergeant major to grease the skids.
“Let’s go see Gunny Sommers and get you settled in our hooch.”
IT TOOK THREE trips to Da Nang before McAbee completed the major work on the rifles. From then on, he passed time fine-tuning each weapon at a bench he built in the sniper hooch. It was a job with 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 a level that rivaled battalions.
July ended with the 7th Marines sniper platoon confirming seventy-two kills. Carlos felt certain it was a record.
For Carlos and his snipers, McAbee’s arrival had sweetened their lives. His fine gun-smithing coupled with the keen training and leadership that Carlos 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.
The accomplishments of the 7th Marines snipers, however, did not win the hearts of all who broke bread with them at the mess hall on Hill 55. There were those who admired and respected the snipers, and those who detested them.
Carlos often wondered in which camp the sergeant major really stood—sometimes it seemed as though the leathery Marine counted the days when the trio of McAbee, Hathcock, and Sommers would be gone, and other times they were certain the man was their friend. But there was never a doubt about the master sergeant who headed the Interrogator Translator Team. He hated them.
That hate grew the first week that McAbee arrived. He and Carlos had enjoyed a bottle of Jim Beam much of the afternoon and felt the euphoria that the 86-proof bourbon packed.
As the two Marines relaxed on the staff NCO hooch’s small plywood porch, Carlos noticed a group of peasants walking through the checkpoint where the highway crossed the top of Hill 55. Several men and women, yoked with large buckets hung on the ends of long poles balanced across their shoulders, hurried through the gate, followed by several empty-handed children, all unchecked by the sentries who stood guard there.
Carlos jumped to his feet.
“They just let those hamburgers through the wire without so much as a how-do-you-do!” Hathcock snapped. “Mack, come on. Let’s see what that bunch is carrying in those buckets.”
Both Marines slung their rifles across their shoulders and headed off the band of peasants.
“Hold on there!” Carlos shouted to the woman who led the group. “What you got in the buckets?”
The woman smiled, showing a mouth filled with black teeth. “Got fish. Go sell fish.”
“Everybody got fish?” Carlos asked.
The woman smiled again and bobbed her head up and down quickly, stooping her shoulders up and down with her hearty nod.
All the buckets brimmed with large fish. Many fish. Too many fish.
“You catch them down in the river?” Carlos asked, pointing his finger at the silver ribbon of water that flowed to the sea in the distance.
The woman smiled and bobbed her exaggerated nod again.
“You have the best luck I’ve ever seen anybody have out of that river,” Carlos said. He looked toward McAbee and grinned. “I smell a fish!”
Both Marines chuckled at the irony of the comment. And as Carlos reached for a fish, the woman suddenly tensed.
“That’s about the hardest fish I ever felt,”
Hathcock said. “Feel that, Mack. That old sucker must have arthritis! What’s that, a rock fish?”
McAbee grinned. “Wonder if it might be something he ate?”
Both men laughed again, and Carlos pushed his middle finger down the fish’s throat.
“Mack, you’re right. This old sucker swallowed something.” And as he withdrew the contents of the contraband hidden inside the fish, Carlos said, smiling at the woman, “He swallowed himself a bunch of bottles of penicillin. I’ll bet that just surprises the hell out of you.”
Carlos frowned and lowered his rifle at the group. McAbee followed the lead, tilting his weapon down at the men and women and several children that followed along. “I’ve got guard of the rear. Carlos, you lead on.”
Dutifully, the two snipers marched the group of peasants to the camp stockade, and there turned them over to the commander of the guard. The Interrogator Translation Team chief spent much of the evening listening to the interrogations. And once word of the mass capture reached the colonel’s ears, the angry commanding officer responded with a policy that each group of peasants wishing to pass through the gate must first pass a careful examination by one of the ITT Marines.
THE FINAL WEDGE, however, came only a few days later, when Carlos and McAbee returned from a hunt with a prisoner. They met the master sergeant from ITT at a checkpoint, and there he very promptly began to question the soldier dressed in a white shirt and black shorts.
Each time the top asked a question, the man responded and the Marine said, “What?” and looked at Carlos and McAbee who simply smiled and shrugged.
Finally the frustrated master sergeant looked at them and said, “This man is Laotian. I need to send for a Lao language interrogator from Da Nang. You’ll have to watch him for a while longer.”
Carlos and McAbee sat quietly with their prisoner for several hours, waiting for the interrogator to arrive from Da Nang. Finally, after the ITT chief went through the trouble of dispatching a jeep and driver to Da Nang to bring the interrogator back to the checkpoint, the Marine arrived, and met the same confusion that had confronted the master sergeant.
“I can’t understand him,” the ITT chief said. “It’s a dialect that I’ve never heard.”
Carlos stood and looked at the master sergeant. “Reckon one of these hotdogs out here might understand him? At least they might be able to tell you which flavor of translator to get next trip.”
The top looked coldly at Carlos, put his hands on his hips, and yelled to a farmer squatting near a hut no more than fifty yards away, who had watched the entire episode with great interest. The old man walked as quickly as his ancient, stiff legs could carry him. He bowed his head and removed the straw hat from his head before speaking to the Marine.
After a brief exchange in Vietnamese, the old man looked at the prisoner and spoke. The prisoner responded in a pleading tone. The old man laughed, looked at the master sergeant, spoke several words, and pointed to the prisoner, who in response opened his mouth and pointed to his tongue.
The interpreter from Da Nang smiled and looked at Carlos and McAbee, who grinned, too, anticipating a humorous explanation.
“The man’s tongue-tied,” the Marine said, laughing. “He was talking Vietnamese all along. He just has a speech impediment.”
Carlos and McAbee howled and guffawed. The humiliated master sergeant remained silent. He took the prisoner, set him in the back of the jeep between the Marine from Da Nang and a guard, jumped in the front seat, and told his driver, “Home!”
The two snipers continued to laugh as the jeep spun its tires on the rutted roadway and left them standing in a cloud of dust.
CARLOS AND HIS snipers avoided any unnecessary contact with the ITT Marines, and others who shared their opinion of snipers. As Carlos saw it, a sniper’s place was in the bush, not drinking coffee in somebody’s hooch. Out of sight, out of mind proved to be an effective philosophy for the snipers to adopt when dealing with the support troops on the Hill. But Sergeant Major Puckett was another story.
Hathcock’s and McAbee’s disappearing acts had become a constant irritation to him. Every time he asked for one of the two Marines, both were out patrolling somewhere. Meanwhile, he could only speak to the lance corporal or private who answered the telephone, only able to say, “I’ll give him the message, Sergeant Major.”
Puckett gave up on the radios when he realized the men generally hunted well out of direct range. As weeks disappeared, so did Hathcock and McAbee with more and more frequency.
Whenever Carlos and his men finally returned to their headquarters, Sergeant Major Puckett roared at them. Carlos and McAbee remained close for several days. After things cooled a bit, they would take off on another adventure. Puckett would storm, they would batten down their hatches, and repeat the drill.
When Captain Rick Hoffman called for Hathcock and Company to go on a “Rice Denial” patrol with his 1st Battalion, 7th Marines company, Carlos and McAbee disappeared again.
“HOW’S YOUR BACK?” Captain Hoffman asked as the two snipers stepped inside Bravo Company’s command tent. “You got some room to carry explosives?”
“Sure. How much?” Carlos said.
“Forty pounds each,” Hoffman said. “We have satchels filled with C-4, and each man will carry one on this patrol. Go on out to that six-by and the gunny will get yours and Mack’s.
“How you feelin’, Mack?”
“Fine, sir,” McAbee said.
“You’re a whole lot slimmer now than when you got here. You been eatin’ okay?” Hoffman asked.
McAbee laughed. “I’ve lost a good twenty pounds, maybe more.”
“Dieting?”
“No, sir. Hathcocking,” McAbee said with a grin. “First words that Carlos says to me is, ‘Mack, you sure put it on around your middle. Come on and we’ll go walk some of that stuff off of you.’
“Sir. That’s when you and I first met. Remember?”
“Sure do,” the captain said, leaning back against his footlocker. “That’s when I noticed you were a regular butterball. And that’s one of the few times I’ve seen Carlos wear a helmet and flak jacket.”
“Yes, sir, I think he did that on purpose, too,” Mack continued. “He made me wear my Army hat and all that other garbage to conform to regulations—he said.”
The captain laughed.
“He wanted to wear me out!” Mack said, laughing, too.
“I had four canteens of water and when we got to the place where he and I dropped off from your company, I had run completely out.”
“It was hot that day, too,” the captain said.
“Carlos only carried two canteens and both his were still nearly full,” Mack continued. “I think he’s half-camel, on top of everything else.
“But, we sat there and I finally asked him for a drink because I was sick from the heat.”
Carlos looked at the two Marines and said, laughing, “You were just about the same color as the skipper’s writing paper there. I crushed up a couple of salt tablets in my canteen cup, and after you drank that you were all right. Right?”
“I don’t think we ever walked that much since then!” McAbee said. “We covered a good twenty miles that day—all at a dead run.”
“Well, Mack,” Carlos said, “I told you that I was going to walk that fat off of you.”
“Yeah, Carlos, you sure did,” McAbee said, shaking his head and chuckling. “But you didn’t have to do it all in one day!”
“You look real good, Mack,” the captain said. “You up to another heavy hike like that one?”
“Sir, it can’t be worse than that one,” McAbee said. “I don’t have all that spare weight and I ain’t loaded down with that Army hat and flak jacket. Forty pounds of C-4 won’t mean a thing.”
Carlos looked at his friend and said, “I want to hear that again, about this time tomorrow.”
The captain smiled. “Let’s get going. You get your satchels and I’ll meet you outside.”
; A group of lieutenants and staff sergeants, notebooks in hand, huddled around the captain to hear the operations order. The mission was to search for caches of rice or other stored food in the Arizona Territory and destroy it all with the explosives that each man carried.
After a round of questions, the lieutenants and many of the staff sergeants hustled away to formulate their operation orders, issue them to their respective squad leaders, and assign them the detailed tasks of the overall mission.
As the captain folded his map, he looked at Carlos. “I saw a curious sight the other day. Something that really got my attention.”
Carlos arched his eyebrows with anticipation. “What was that, sir?”
“I had to rub my eyes. I couldn’t believe it. Now, am I crazy, or is Gunny Sommers’s career planner hooch really bright red and yellow?”
Carlos fell back on his heels laughing. “Last time the sergeant major grounded me and Mack, we had to have something to do. We figured that Gunny Sommers would get a lot of business if folks knew where to find his hooch. We got a couple of gallons of red and yellow paint and made his hooch visible.”
“Real visible!” the captain chuckled. “Charlie shoot at it?”
“No!” Carlos said. “Not at all. You know how it sits right between the Operations hooch and the mess tent? The mess tent still gets the rear end blown out of it every day, and Operations still gets thunder shot out of it, too, but they haven’t so much as sent even one small-arms round through ole Gunny Dave’s hooch. That’s the safest place on Hill 55.”
“How does Gunny Sommers like it?” Hoffman asked.
“He thinks it’s great,” Carlos answered. “He even helped paint, once he saw Mack and me out there working.”
“How about Sergeant Major Puckett?” the captain said smiling.
“He hit a grand slam!” Carlos said with a twinkle in his eyes. “I have never seen the sergeant major blow more fuses at once. His neck bulged and all his veins poked out on his face. He turned red as that hooch.
Silent Warrior Page 23