“Sergeant major would have your butt. You know how he gets when you jump off without telling him, and he’d take it especially hard with you having the duty,” Mack said, honing a rifle part that he had clamped in a vise. Carlos moaned and continued stuffing folders and stacking gear.
Hathcock checked his watch and looked at McAbee. “Lunchtime. Gotta go to the mess tent and check the chow. Duty calls.”
McAbee nodded and kept filing on the steel piece.
For Carlos, the afternoon of August 13 was one of the most boring days he would ever recall of his war experience. But as he finished checking posts at five P.M., the day suddenly filled with excitement.
“Turn that off!” Carlos shouted as he stepped into the sniper hooch.
The strained Cajun voice singing the song called “Joli Blond” sent chills through Carlos. “Every time I hear that song, I have bad luck. Something bad always happens!”
“You’re serious,” McAbee said, walking to the transistor radio that sat on the other end of his workbench. He turned the tiny black wheel on the top of the small plastic radio until it clicked off.
“Sorry,” he said and went back to work on the rifle that he had nearly finished rebuilding.
“I just got One-Seven’s situation reports from yesterday’s operations,” Carlos said. “They’re taking some heavy losses, but kicking hell out of the NVA. Listen.”
McAbee sat on the cot near his workbench and listened as Carlos read the brief reports.
“At 6:50 yesterday morning Delta Company got sucked into an ambush. Two hamburgers drew them into where twenty of their buddies waited. Ended up killing one Marine and wounding three. They didn’t get any of them.
“At 8:50, Alpha Company lost a Marine when he set off a booby trap—a 105-millimeter artillery round with a pressure fuse. Apparently one of the platoons saw six of the hamburgers who set the thing; they killed one and wounded the other. Everybody they engage so far is NVA. One of the men they killed had a Chinese pistol.”
“An officer,” Mack said, resting his chin on the heels of his hands.
“Most likely.”
Carlos thumbed through the printed pages and said, “Here. Here’s where things start happening.
“At 11:45 in the morning, Echo Company took incoming into their position and had six Marines wounded. They swept their forward area and killed one NVA hamburger on his getaway.
“Then all hell broke loose when they began their battalion sweep. The NVA hit Bravo and Delta companies. They had units out on the sweeps, and when they started taking fire back in their camps, they hotfooted it home. They got back just in time to catch the full attack. Bravo and Delta, and Charlie Company, too, started taking RPGs and 82-millimeter mortar hits, and all kinds of small-arms fire.
“This lasted all night. NVA killed eight Marines and wounded thirty-three. At first light, they went out and picked up fifty-eight dead NVA and two wounded ones. They also picked up 100 AK-47s, three light machine guns, three RPG launchers, fifty-two Chicom rifles, and a world of ammo.
“While all that went on, the NVA was hitting One-Seven’s command post, and elements from Charlie Company along with Alpha Company went into where the NVA had dug in along the tree line. When the dust settled, they lost five Marines, had twenty-two wounded, but killed eighty-two NVA.
“This morning, they went out from the battalion command post and picked up four wounded hamburgers and 147 dead ones. Also, the battalion got all kinds of 82-millimeter mortar tubes, some 120-millimeter mortars, and a world of small arms and ammo.
“I guess Colonel Dowd is finally getting at that raft of gooners that have dogged him for the past two months.”
McAbee took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes.
“I’ll bet our little rice denial program has gotten the NVA and Charlie in a pinch trying to get stocked up for the monsoons,” Mack said. “Sounds to me like we’ve got their backs to the wall and they’re trying to make a stand.”
Carlos stood and looked outside. He could see the distant smoke of a battle.
“They’re still at it,” he said. “There must be thousands of those Communists going at our folks.”
A worried expression spread over Carlos’s face.
THAT AFTERNOON, IN those same hills where the smoke of battle rose, heavy artillery shells and air-delivered bombs and napalm pounded and burned the 90th NVA Regiment, and what was left of its supporting units. Now they fought for their very existence against the battalion commanded by Lieutenant Colonel John A. Dowd.
India Company, 3rd Battalion, 7th Marines, joined Colonel Dowd’s force when the fighting began to get heavy.
At five P.M. on August 13, 1969, John Dowd commenced a battalion sweep across a wide valley near the place they called Dodge City in the Arizona badlands. They were advancing on the enemy, who had dug in again along a tree line, determined to hold their ground.
Dowd stood in the midst of that front established by India Company, and led the advance on the tree line. The enemy had committed everything to this battle, and now waited, watching as the Marines came closer.
It felt like the quiet one encounters as a huge storm cloud rolls across the hills, just before the first gust of wind sends torrents of rain and hail, lightning and thunder.
Lieutenant Colonel John Aloysious Dowd, a Marine loved by his men, deeply respected by his peers, and one of the greatest warriors that Carlos Hathcock had ever had the pleasure and extreme honor of serving and calling friend, never heard that thunder.
In the time that an eye can blink, or bare skin can feel the prickle of the afternoon sun, the time that it takes to call out to warn a friend when a sudden rifle crack shatters the quietness of a warm summer afternoon while jungle birds sing in the trees, a man can die.
In the instant that a volley of rifle and machine-gun fire burst forth from the line of trees that edged the valley where John Dowd led his men, his life ended.
At just past five P.M. the commanding officer of 1st Battalion, 7th Marines, along with four of his men, died.
At just past five P.M., the smoke of battle that Carlos watched from his hilltop command post marked the spot where those five souls departed, and thirty-two other Marines lay bleeding from wounds while Spooky1 flew overhead, churning and chopping and riddling the tree line to shredded and burned rubble.
“Hey! Staff Sergeant Hathcock!” Corporal Perry shouted as he ran toward the sniper command post. “They’re calling for volunteers to fly out to help One-Seven! They’re taking hell!”
As Carlos watched that faraway smoke, the 90th NVA Regiment, reinforced by elements of the 2nd NVA Division and the 577th NVA Artillery, made their last stand against a reinforced battalion of Marines who fought with great vengeance for their many fallen brothers who now lay zipped in black bags at the rear area. Now, those avenging Marines fought against a superior-sized enemy force who was attempting to overrun them.
“Mack! Take my duty!” Hathcock shouted as he sprinted from the hooch, slinging his rifle and looping the straps of his pack over his shoulders while he ran. Carlos felt compelled to help. Compelled by that part of him that would never stand and watch while others needed aid.
“What about the sergeant major?” Mack yelled to his friend.
“He’ll understand,” Carlos called back, feeling that no Marine could resist the sounding of the alarm—his call to duty.
Hathcock ran up the rear ramp of a CH-46 Sea Knight helicopter that squatted with its twin rotor blades turning, waiting as forty Marines bounded aboard, filling its long and narrow belly.
The crew chief wore a heavy white aviator’s helmet, decorated with zigzagging green and orange tape, and had its dark-tinted visor dropped down, hiding his eyes and much of his nose. He stood facing out at the foot of the ramp, pointing to his left, and yelled above the roar of the turning blades, “Bravo Company!”
He shouted again, “Charlie Company,” and pointed to his right.
Carlos thought of Captain Hof
fman and ran to the left where other volunteers, heading to help Bravo Company, sat, buckling themselves to the long, grease-stained, red nylon fabric seat fastened to a tubular-aluminum frame that stretched the entire length of each side of the aircraft’s cargo bay.
These Marines who sat, apprehensive of what they may encounter—scared that they might die—were mostly Marines who spent much of their time cooking in field kitchens, typing in command tents, driving trucks, or a dozen other jobs that do not normally involve direct combat.
Carlos admired them for their bravery. To him they were heros.
Shuddering under the strain of its heavy cargo of men and arms, the helicopter rose from the landing zone, following three other similarly loaded aircraft, and disappeared in the blackness of the night sky.
Carlos edged his way to the front, near the window where another Marine wearing a white, tape-decorated aviator’s helmet stood behind a .50-caliber machine gun. Hathcock stood near the Marine, and watched the black hills and jungle and hidden rubble of war pass just below the belly of this green giant filled with Marines.
Below, in the blackness of the jungle, he saw red streaks of fire reaching toward him, passing below and above the helicopter as it pressed onward toward the hills of Arizona Territory.
A ridge line rose from the blackness of the ground and touched the gray sky with its jagged edge. Down the side of this ridge, thousands of red streaks streamed into each other. The nighttime exchange of gunfire, accented by tracers, reminded him of one night in bootcamp when he joined in and first saw the Final Protective Fire that Marines termed “The Mad Moment.”
A sudden tug on his pack startled Carlos. He was tense and frightened, too, by what he saw.
“Charlie Company!” a Marine with the face of a child yelled at him. “Which side is going to Charlie Company?”
“This side is Bravo Company. Charlie Company is over there!” Carlos yelled to this young man, still in his teens, whose face offered little wear for a razor, and whose mother probably worried for him each day.
The Marine turned to cross the helicopter, and before he could step, that mad moment below them turned skyward and filled the inside of the lumbering green giant with hundreds of red glowing bullets. Seven Marines, including this young man who wanted to help Charlie Company—who wanted to save the lives of his brother Marines pinned on the hillside below—fell dead.
Carlos had taken a step toward the Marine who fired the machine gun out the helicopter’s window. As smoke and red glowing bullets and spraying hot hydraulic fluid filled the helicopter, Carlos fell to the floor with a sudden burning pain in his right upper thigh.
He scrambled back to his feet and saw the floor, covered with wounded and dead Marines. He looked between the two pilots’ seats and saw a firework- and tracer-filled sky through the bullet-riddled windscreen. He imagined headlines that he feared Jo would read: “More than 40 Marines Die As Helicopter Is Shot Down.”
He closed his eyes for a moment and waited.
Then the helicopter banked sharply left and Hathcock opened his eyes. Again, he looked out the front window and this time he saw blackness and stars. Smoke still fumed and oil still sprayed, but the bullets had stopped. Carlos knew that the attempt to get this helicopter down and reinforce the Marines on the ground had failed. They were going home.
When the leaking, limping aircraft touched down, the pilot did not make a textbook landing. The wheels hit the ground hard, jolting every Marine aboard. But Carlos knew that the pilots did not care about the smoothness of their landing this night. They were just glad to be alive.
“What happened?” Mack said as Carlos limped inside the command hooch.
“We took too much fire to get in there.”
Mack looked sadly at Carlos. “Colonel Dowd got killed when that ruckus began this afternoon.”
Carlos said nothing at first. He thought of the other good Marines he had known and lost.
“Good man. Outstanding Marine.”
A hot lump tightened in his throat, choking him, and he turned his face toward the screen so that his friend would not see the sudden well of tears that he fought hard to conceal.
“I’m suuuure gonna miss him,” Carlos said with the audible gurgle that often accompanies fought-back sorrow—the sound of one’s soul fighting to find its voice and cry out.
After a moment, Carlos breathed heavily and pulled his emotions together. The sight of seven Marines dying at his feet and the news of the colonel’s death had left him drained. He stared out at the darkness that engulfed the world where the distant flashes of the battle that he had departed continued to glow, yet he saw nothing but the faces of those men in his mind’s eye.
“What’s that on your leg?” Mack asked, seeing the blood that turned Carlos’s trousers dark.
“Aww, that’s nothing,” Carlos said, taking a deep breath of the stale and steamy night. “A little scratch. I’ll put something on it later.”
He walked out of the hooch without looking back at his best friend, who felt the grief, too, and who worried as well about this man he considered his brother.
The rounds from checkpoint to checkpoint seemed much more distant to Carlos as he limped with a bullet lodged in his thigh. He thought of Sergeant Major Puckett and what he would say if he got wind of his volunteer effort.
It was certain that the sergeant major would find out from any doctors who attended Carlos’s wound. He also knew that the sergeant major might never know if he let his leg heal without going to sick bay. But by first light, the pain signaled that he could not just let it mend on its own.
After passing the watch duty to his relief the following morning, Carlos went to the regimental aid station.
When the corpsman said, “You just got a Purple Heart,” Carlos swore at him.
“Don’t you write that down! Put it down as a cut or something. I don’t want no Purple Heart,” Hathcock said.
The corpsman laughed. “Don’t be so humble. We give out a hundred a day around here.”
“I get a Purple Heart,” Carlos argued, “and the sergeant major will have my butt. That’s why I don’t want it. I don’t need him mad at me!”
Three days later, Carlos stood before Sergeant Major Clinton Puckett and received his Purple Heart, as well as a sound lecture on what it meant to be Commander of the Guard. But because of Hathcock’s noble purpose, the sergeant major did not place him on report for reassigning his duty without permission.
AT THE END of the three-day sweep in Arizona Territory, near the valley they called Dodge City, the 1st Battalion left those badlands with the 90th NVA Regiment virtually destroyed and 226 of the enemy killed.
Two days after that, the regimental headquarters, along with 3rd Battalion and the sniper platoon, moved to Landing Zone Baldy, a hilltop twenty-three miles south of Da Nang, while 2nd Battalion moved to Fire Support Base Ross, a hill seven miles southwest of Baldy.
During the move, Carlos, McAbee, and a driver assigned to them from 11th Motor Transport Battalion drove a six-by truck with a high canvas cover over its cargo bed to Da Nang. They had completed their portion of the move and now headed to I Corps’ main supply point where they were to pick up thirty-five R-and-R kits—small green and yellow plastic “ditty” bags with shaving gear, prophylactics, and toiletries inside. It was a good excuse to take a vacation to the city and eat a sit-down lunch in the modern dining hall there.
All of June and July, and thus far in August, many items were in short supply on Hill 55. Utility uniforms and boots loomed at the top of that list. All three Marines who sat in the cab of that truck had holes worn in the knees and seats of their uniforms. When they walked up to the large dining hall, a Marine dressed in white and wearing gunnery sergeant stripes sent them away.
“You boys go change into decent uniforms and take a shower,” he told them.
All the Marines that Carlos saw there in that rear area wore fairly new utilities, and it increased his humiliation and anger.
/> “Let’s go on to the warehouse and get those kits. To hell with eating there, you don’t have to dress up to eat C rations,” Hathcock growled.
When the truck stopped in front of the Quonset hut that sat at the head of several long warehouses, a very young, frightened-looking private stepped through the doorway.
“Your boss around?” Carlos asked, jumping from the cab.
“No, sir,” the private responded. “They’re all gone to chow.”
Carlos looked at his watch; it was 11:25 in the morning, and he knew that despite the fact that a person could get fed at the dining hall as early as 10:30 A.M., normal chow time did not start until 11:30.
“You boys stay pretty busy here, don’t you?” Hathcock said with the sound of innocence in his voice.
“No, sir,” the private said. “We’ll move pallets and load orders during the day, but we don’t push it too hard around here.”
Carlos thought about the men back at the fire bases and outposts squatting in the dirt with no supplies. The treatment at the dining hall and now the revelation that the people at the supply point were in no special hurry to get the much-needed supplies out to the line companies made him boil.
“You boys get plenty of utilities?” the staff sergeant asked.
“Sure. Many as we need,” the private said proudly. “That’s the advantage of working here.”
“We come to pick up thirty-five R-and-R kits. I got the paperwork right here,” Carlos said.
“You all go on down and get them. They’re in that first warehouse,” the private said. He walked inside the hut, took out a set of keys hung on a large brass clip, and tossed them across the counter to McAbee, who followed him inside.
“We just go out and get them ourselves?” McAbee asked.
“Sure,” the private answered. “Just drop off the keys when you’re done. I gotta stay here. I’m just the phone watch.
“You can drop the paperwork off when the gunny gets back.”
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