Marine Sniper (11 page)

Hathcock and Burke watched as the dike faded from view.

"There's something moving," Hathcock whispered as he shifted his rifle scope's reticle onto a dark lump that appeared to the right of the wall. He had already called the artillery battery to request flares.

Burke put his binoculars to his eyes and saw the motion.

"It's too dark to be sure of my shot," Hathcock said, "I can barely pick up my cross hairs. Where's those illumes?"

High overhead, three muffled pops echoed through the valley, and three bright spots appeared in the clouds.

"They're running," Burke cautioned, and just as he spoke, Hathcock's Winchester broke the silence with a shot that sent the cluster of dark shadows rushing across the open terrain.

"Shoot, Burke, shoot! They're getting away!" Hathcock said as he rapidly drew his rifle's bolt back, ejecting a smoking brass casing. As he shoved the bolt forward, chambering a second round. Burke's M-14 began to pop and flash in the darkness.

"I can barely see 'em, Sergeant Hathcock, we need more light."

"Just shoot into the crowd. Those illumes will brighten up pretty quick once they drift to the bottom of these clouds."

Three muffled pops ignited more illumination rounds. As the glowing flares, swinging beneath small parachutes, flooded light across Elephant Valley, the soldiers who remained behind the mud wall sprayed a broadside hail of bullets at the tree line, hoping to suppress the snipers' fire and allow their comrades to reach the huts. Once there, they would set up a second base of suppression fire, allowing the men behind the dike to follow them.

Beneath the forest's umbrella, and behind the thick knot of brush and fallen timber that had filled with silt and dirt, Hathcock and Burke continued their assault on the fleeing platoon. They had already shot the first few leaders of the escaping band, and now, midway between the mud dike and the huts, the remaining troops fell into prone positions in the dried out rice paddies and began shooting back.

"Damn," Hathcock said.

"Those guys gonna lay there?" Burke asked. Both snipers dropped their heads behind the upper edge of the log that they had used as a bench-rest for their rifles. Above them hundreds of bullets sang and popped as they struck the broad leaves and branches along the tree line.

"1 reckon," Hathcock answered. "I suppose we're gonna have to pick at 'em down there until they decide to go back to the dike."

"Reckon we ought to radio operations and tell them what's happening?" Burke asked.

"Let's give the gooners a chance to regroup behind the dike. I'd a whole lot rather wait until daylight before we drop our people in on them. We would stand a better chance of sweeping them out with fewer casualties."

Placing his rifle on the log, Hathcock put his eye to the scope and fired another carefully placed round. Then he said to Burke, "If you think that the calvary can ride to the rescue for us if we start losing ground down here, you better think again. I ain't about to wait around if things start to fold up too fast. That happens, I plan for us to be up on the ridge, looking down and moving out.

"If the sweep team catches the bastards after that, then good for them. I'm not about to let anybody come in here and die trying to save you and me. Besides, those hamburgers ain't worth a thing, except maybe to those shaved-headed bozos at ITT* (Interrogator Translator Team).

Burke laughed.

"What's so damn funny?"

"I'll bet that ugly gunny at ITT would love to hear you call him a shaved-headed bozo. As big and mean looking as he is-what with his head shaved slicker than a peeled onion and that long black handlebar mustache curling out past his jaws -he'd probably melt you into the ground with just a look."

"Burke... shoot."

"And you better not say anything to him either, or Til tell him what you said about his face and you shaving your dog's butt."

Above the firelight, more flares burned their way through the clouds. Hathcock and Burke continued picking at the platoon of soldiers who hugged the earth. The Marines were connecting with one shot in four, and now once again the North Vietnamese rushed back to cover.

Huddled behind the dike, a second platoon of young Communist soldiers crouched ready to run. They counted on their comrades to provide a more effective suppression fire this time,

At exactly 8:20 P.M., just as more illumination rounds exploded in the clouds, the NVA opened a hail of fire that struck much lower in the trees and sent din flying from the dead-wood behind which Hathcock and Burke lay hidden.

"We're gonna move out of here and take up positions higher up the hillside and on down toward those huts so that we got those hot dogs running right down our barrels," Hathcock told Burke. "Let's turn them back behind that wall and then scoot."

Both Marines began firing at the east end of the dike, daring anyone to venture past its corner.

The hail of fire began to concentrate into the downed dead tree and tangle of brush, yet the two Marines continued to pop the end of the dike with single shots that kept the waiting platoon sitting in place.

"Let's go, Burke," Hathcock said, and began to low-crawl from behind the log barrier and through the vines and thickets that lined the hillside.

Burke continued shooting until Hathcock reached a sheltered point, where he opened fire and allowed his partner to move away from the cover that now attracted the majority of enemy bullets.

As the two Marines leapfrogged their way to a small ridge that jutted out ahead of the group of mud-and-straw huts, the desperate platoon emerged from behind the dike and began running toward them.

Hathcock sat cross-legged behind a tree fifty feet away from Burke and opened fire. Burke hurried past him and crawled into a sinkhole surrounded by roots and brush that were piled with dirt and covered with vines. He laid his rifle across the mound and fired.

Hathcock swiftly crawled to a small rise and lay behind it, resting his rifle across its top and aiming at the soldiers who now ran through his field of fire at a forty-five-degree angle toward him.

His first shot sent the lead soldier tumbling head over heels. It reminded Hathcock of when he shot jackrabbits on the run in Arkansas-how they seemed to roll like a ball when his .22-caliber, hollow-point bullets struck them. This time it was a teenage boy who lay kicking and screaming as he died from a bullet that had ripped through his middle, disemboweling him.

A second soldier fell to his knees at the screaming youth's side and Hathcock sent a round straight through the young man's chest, reeling him backward with his knees folded beneath him.

Realizing that they now ran directly into a new field of fire, the remaining NVA soldiers turned and retreated to the dike.

"Burke," Hathcock whispered into the darkness.

"Yo," Burke responded.

"You OK?"

"Yeah."

"Let's move on over to that ridge."

Quietly the two snipers crept through the jungle to a hump on the ridge and settled behind it. They looked at the dike surrounded by open terrain and at the small mud-and-grass huts at their right.

"Let me see your map," Hathcock told Burke, who lay five feet away, at his right. "If I'm not mistaken, these are the same huts that we have marked as on-call targets for the artillery battery."

"You're right, Sergeant Hathcock. We gave them these huts here and the set of huts around the bend to the west as primary targets. They should have these spots bore-sighted."

"If what I have in mind works, we'll send most of the rest of these not dogs back to Hanoi in pieces. We're gonna let them eventually reach these huts... just about daylight.

"We'll defend these huts for now. Later on, we'll move up this ridge and go back over to where we first caught these hamburgers on the march, but just a little higher up the slope. We'll start hammerin' on 'em and let them see that we moved to the opposite end from the huts. Once they start out, we'll have the arty hit our on-call targets, while we do a Hank Snow and go a movin' on, over the hill."

"What about the sweep team?" Burke asked.

"We have to call operations and ask them to move up their timetable a couple of hours. We'll leave the sweep team a real easy operation, once we're done."

By midnight, the NVA had made a fourth push toward the group of huts and each time lost men. Each time they turned back, the two Marines ceased fire-encouraging the retreat.

For three hours after midnight, neither side fired a shot. And, for three hours after midnight, a drizzle soaked Elephant Valley and the men who lay imprisoned behind the mud wall, as well as their captors. Other than the drip and patter of the light rain, only the sound of the Ca De Song's rushing water and the intermittent popping of the illumination rounds overhead broke Elephant Valley's silence.

Both snipers lay quiet, their rifles trained at the end of the dike now nearest to them. Nothing but stillness met their eyes as they monotonously watched the low mud wall through the night. "Burke," Hathcock whispered.

"Yeah," came his quiet reply.

"Let's get ready for the big adios. It's just past four o'clock and I'll bet those shovel heads are sleeping. When we get to the other end, we'll wake 'em up."

Slowly and silently, the two Marines crept up the ridge and edged across the lower face of Dong Den.

Two hours later, they reached the ridge that overlooked the western end of the paddy dike. Hathcock slipped through the thick vines and brush like a snake, hardly making a sound as he pushed himself up to a place where the ground leveled off. Carefully he pulled a thick branch from one side and bench-rested his rifle across it, focusing his scope on the west end of the mud wall.

Above and to the right of Hathcock, Burke bellied himself behind a fallen tree where he sat cross-legged with his body following the contour formed by upward-turning roots mat jutted at a right angle from the fallen trunk. He took out his binoculars and began searching for movement along the low dike below him.

Hathcock looked at his watch and offered a thumbs-up sign to Burke. Burke smiled back, and taking the handset, he called the artillery battery, warning them to ready their guns for the fire mission.

Hathcock looked at the thick black clouds that hid the sunrise and allowed only dim gray light to usher a new day into Elephant Valley. He hoped that the clouds were high enough to allow helicopters to land the sweep team into the eastern end of the valley, near the tree line.

He pointed at the sky and shrugged at Burke.

Burke took the signal and radioed the sweep team, which now sat mustered in the landing zone south of Dong Den with their three CH-46 Sea Knight helicopters prepared for takeoff. He glanced back at Hathcock and put his thumb straight up.

Hathcock sighted down his scope, picking the corner of the west end of the low dike, and sent a round whining toward the river after it ricocheted at a right angle off the wall. Moving his scope along the dike, he found a tuft of black protruding from behind. One of the soldiers attempted to peek over the top and locate the snipers' position. Hathcock took a short breath and held it, bringing his scope's reticle on the black tuft. Slowly he tightened his grip around the small of the rifle stock and began squeezing the trigger.

Burke winced as Hathcock's bullet struck the soldier's skull, showering the young NVA troops who huddled beside him with blood, bone, and brains. The sudden bloody shower sent a dozen soldiers scurrying down the wall toward the east-em end, and Burke followed them with three shots from his M-14.

Hathcock shot once more and sent two soldiers dashing from the dike's east end toward the distant huts. Both snipers concentrated their fire toward the middle section of the wall as more of the soldiers saw the escape unfolding and followed their brothers' lead.