Silent Warrior
Page 31
A squad of Marines fired their rifles in the air, and Marine Corps musicians sounded taps. Lieutenant General Pace saluted as Carlos’s pallbearers lifted the flag from his casket, folded it, and presented the banner to Jo and Gunnery Sergeant Carlos Hathcock III.
Someone once said, “When you are born, you come into the world crying, while those surrounding you smile. Live your life so that when they lay you to rest, you will be smiling as all those around you cry.”
More than 1,200 streams of tears flowed that Friday in the mid-Atlantic coastal community cemetery. One can be sure that Carlos Hathcock was smiling.
1Marine Corps Marksmanship Training Manual Testing and Scoring Information: In 1959 the Marine Corps used the A-Course of fire at rifle ranges to teach and test marksmanship skills. It is very similar to the Known Distance Course, used today, but employed a different set of target faces at some of the firing lines. Today, 200- and-300-yard rapid-fire uses “Dog” targets, which are head-and-shoulders silhouettes, rather than the “Able” and “Baker” targets, containing round bull’s-eyes, which were used on the A-Course. Scoring awards five points for any shot that breaks the paper in the black bull’s-eye. The next ring outside the bull’s-eye awards four points, and progress farther out to a three-point ring. Shots outside the rings but on paper net a two-point score. A miss nets nothing. Firing is from 200, 300, and 500 yards. With a total of 250 points possible. The V-ring is at the center of the bull’s eye, but does not provide additional points in Marine Corps rifle qualification tests. The V-ring is used in marksmanship competition as a tiebreaker. In today’s marksmanship competition, the center of the bull’s-eye contains an X-ring rather than a V. Scoring is from a ten-point center and progresses outward with one less point per ring. Firing is from 200, 300, and 600 yards, and all targets use round bull’s-eyes. In all marksmanship, the target is divided into areas corresponding to a clock face. Marines are generally taught to hold their front sight blade at the six o’clock or bottom center position of the bull’s-eye. However, many competitive marksmen, such as Gunnery Sergeant Carlos Hathcock, hold “point of aim, point of impact,” meaning that they hold the front sight blade at the point on the target that they expect their bullet to strike. Thus, Hathcock would hold his sight at the center of the bull’s-eye.
1 Known among Marines as TBS and located in the western training area of the Marine base at Quantico, Virginia, The Basic School provides newly commissioned Marine Corps officers and warrant officers with basic combat, leadership, and administrative skills. Today, whether aviation or ground, all Marine officers are required to successfully complete TBS. During the Vietnam War, Marine Corps Naval Aviators were not required to attend TBS. During the late 1970s and early 1980s the Marine Corps rescinded this exemption for aviators, citing the Corps’ requirement that all Marine officers, regardless of primary specialty, be qualified to lead an infantry platoon in combat.
1 South Vietnam.
2 The League for the Independence of Vietnam, the chief political military organization that battled the French for independence between 1946 and 1954.
3 Montagnards are native inhabitants primarily of the southwestern mountainous region of Vietnam near the Cambodian border. These aboriginal people live communally in longhouses set on stilts, and today work chiefly as woodcutters.
4 Collective controls the angle of attack of the main rotor blades. The control is a bar extending up at an angle from the floor of the helicopter at the left side of the pilot’s seat. A pilot operates it in coordination with the cyclic and the floor peddles to control the aircraft.
5 Cyclic controls the altitude of a helicopter, used for turning and tilting. It is a stick that comes straight up from the floor between the pilot’s legs. It is fitted with a pistol grip at the top, which also contains a trigger, a toggle, and buttons that control such things as radio microphone switch, weapons firing, sling-load release, and trim control.
6 Reconnaissance by fire is a term describing the act of shooting heavy fire in all directions and into all possible hiding places around a suspected enemy site. “Hosing down the area” was a term Marines often used to describe the same action.
1 High-Velocity Explosive rounds.
2 Operations section.
3 Republic of Korea.
1 Tactical Area Of Responsibility.
2 A mangolike fruit that resembles the apples from the prickly pear cactus, but is much larger and has no needles. It is typically six inches in length and three inches in diameter with a red leathery skin on which triangular, leaflike appendages grow, similar to the tips of leaves surrounding the artichoke. The fruit’s interior is white with tiny black seeds throughout the meat, which is very juicy and delicately sweet.
3 Several years after the end of the Vietnam war, dragon fruit reappeared in the countryside south and west of Pleiku. Today it grows in that region in abundance.
4 A very attractive clothing ensemble worn typically by young women and girls in Vietnam, commonly students. Usually made of fine silk in white or light pastel colors, the outfit includes flowing pants worn under a top that features a long panel that hangs to knee length in front and in back, and is open at the sides to the waistline.
5 Dang Quang Phung remained a Communist spy at his Tan Son Nhut post throughout the war. In a 1994 interview, Dang claimed that during the 1975 collapse of South Vietnam, his detailed knowledge and expertise as a South Vietnamese government architect enabled Viet Cong and North Vietnamese forces to lay in artillery, mortars, and aerial bombs with great accuracy at Tan Son Nhut Airbase, the nearby Defense Attaché’s Office Compound, and other key facilities in Saigon. After the war’s end, Dang received a pension from the new government, and moved to the countryside northwest of Saigon, near Cu Chi, where he resides today.
1 A water trailer, also sometimes called a water buffalo.
2 An acronym formed from Marine Logistics, used to describe daily re-supply/administrative support flights.
1 National Match Course consists of firing twenty rounds standing slow-fire from the 200 yard line at an “A” target with a twelve-inch bull’s-eye and six-inch V-ring; ten rounds standing to sitting rapid-fire from the 200 yard line at an “A” target with a twelve-inch bull’s-eye and six-inch V-ring; ten rounds standing to prone rapid-fire from the 300 yard line at an “A” target with a twelve-inch bull’s-eye and six-inch V-ring; and twenty rounds prone slow-fire from the 600 yard line at a “B” target with a twenty-inch bull’s-eye and ten-inch V-ring. Total possible score on this course is 300 points with sixty Vs.
1 A Department of Defense program initiated by Secretary Robert S. McNamara in the later 1960s in which enlistment requirements, especially individual intelligence and arrest/conviction standards, were significantly lowered to accommodate the increased manpower needs of the armed forces to fulfill its primary national defense missions as well as supporting forces engaged in the Vietnam War.
2 Force Service Regiment.
1 A twin-engine, fixed-wing aircraft, typically a C-117 (formerly a C-47, like the civilian Douglas DC-3), commonly used for cargo and troop transport, but in this case heavily loaded with 20-millimeter chain guns, rockets, and other significant firepower.
2 White phosphorus artillery rounds.
When the explosive detonated under the amtrac, the blast ruptured the vehicle’s fuel tanks, immediately engulfing the amphibious personnel carrier in flames. Carlos Hathcock was the only Marine riding on top that remained conscious after the explosion. Rather than leaping to safety, Hathcock stood in the fire and rescued the seven other Marines riding on top with him. They included Privates First Class Roberto Barrera, Lawrence Head, Keith Spencer, Thurman Trussell, Lance Corporal Earl Thibodeaux, Corporal Perry, and 1st Lieutenant Edward Hyland. Hathcock suffered third-degree burns over forty-three percent of his body.
4 A miniature shooting range 1,000 inches in length using small targets to simulate long distances, enabling marksmen to work on rifle operation, holds, and techn
iques with minimal influence from elements such as wind.
2 High velocity explosives packed in a nonferrous container, such as a large wooden box or clay jar, that does not produce an electromagnetic signature on typical mine detection equipment. Viet Cong would commonly bury the container in a roadway or trail and fill it with explosives. When a target entered its kill radius, guerrillas watching from a hidden vantage point would detonate the device.
3 U.S. Navy hospital ship, USS Repose.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s Imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
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