Marine Sniper (26 page)

During the night a black-clad Viet Cong scout had slipped into the temple, where he planned to spend the day observing the Marines on the adjacent hilltop. While he waited, the guerrilla relaxed on the floor and fell asleep.

The click of the rifle's barrel against the wall had alerted him to the company outside. He was silently creeping up a narrow set of stone steps that led to the upper portion of the shrine when the door suddenly banged open and the green-faced Marine stepped in, waving a pistol.

Land saw the soldier leaping up the steps with his AK carbine in hand, and for a second his mind went blank. Then he scrambled out the open doorway, and, as he did so, he blindly fired three shots in rapid succession through the temple's doorway.

Wide-eyed and visibly shaken, the captain cautiously peeked back inside and found the Viet Cong soldier sprawled on the floor, shot twice. Land stood and turned toward Master Sergeant Reinke.

"Sir," the top said, with his eyes twinkling and a grin on his lips, "you sure came out of there a whole lot faster than you went in."

"Reinke... just don't say another word," the captain grumbled.

Hathcock raised his head when he heard the three muffled pops faintly echo across the valley. He immediately turned his twenty-power spotting scope, which he had mounted on a small tripod that he had set on the end of the sandbag, toward the shrine. Turning the rear eyepiece with his fingers, he brought into focus Land and Reinke, who, having realized that the gunshots had alerted the VC and removed any possibility of their staying at the temple, were just disappearing into the dense jungle.

He scanned the treetops, looking for a gap through which he might catch a second glimpse of the two snipers as they moved away from the shrine. But, after several minutes of searching and seeing nothing but jungle, he turned the scope back toward the hut that stood more than three-quarters of a mile away.

Now the sun bathed the pointed, thatched roof and the hard-packed dirt that surrounded the small house. In the yellow morning light, Hathcock watched as the woman, who appeared to live alone, placed a wooden stool outside the doorway and set a small table near it. A young girl dressed in a white blouse and black pants, who had come to the woman's hut while Hathcock had his attention trained on the shrine, sat on the stool and removed the straw hat that she wore.

The middle-aged woman studied the girl's face, lifting her chin and tilting her face to the right and left with her right hand. She turned from the girl and took a waxed string from a box that sat on the small table and looped her right thumb and forefinger in one end and her left thumb and forefinger in the other.

Pulling the string tightly between her hands, she began to roll it up and down the girl's cheeks, under her chin, and over her forehead, catching fine facial hairs on the spinning string and plucking them out as they tangled around it.

From the distance that Hathcock watched, he could only tell that the woman was rubbing something across the girl's face. And even from the distance of more than twelve hundred yards, it was obvious that this woman provided certain beauty services for her neighbors.

When the woman finished, she patted the young girl on her head and walked back into the hut. The girl put her straw hat back on and walked down a trail that led along a rice paddy dike to where other huts and sheds stood.

Hours of boredom carried the morning to the early afternoon and Hathcock continued watching the hut and hills below his outpost. He saw several brightly colored chickens with long green tails and ruffles of orange feathers around their necks strutting and scratching in the dirt near the tall haystack. The chickens fascinated Hathcock and held his attention as they pecked and pawed at the debris that littered this farmyard.

"Bingo!" Hathcock said to himself suddenly and picked up his rifle, which he had rested to the right of the spotting scope. While watching the chickens claw through the dirt, searching for tiny bits of food, he saw two men slip from behind the tall trees that grew to the left of the hut and trot quickly inside its doorway. Both were dressed in dark green uniforms and carried long rifles.

When they emerged again, both men had removed their shirts and had set their rifles out of sight inside the hut. One man patted the woman on her shoulder and sat on the stool, while the other man squatted nearby. As he squatted there in

the dirt, he waved his hands and shook his head in active conversation with the others.

The men were stocky and muscular, and Hathcock recognized them clearly as NVA. Probably they were snipers, he judged, because of the long rifles that they carried. Possibly they were the very snipers that had killed the gunnery sergeant.

Looking through his rifle scope, Hathcock judged the distance and moved the elevation knob to raise the strike of his bullet. He could see the mirage boiling up from the rice field and leaned to his left to peek through the spotting scope and get a better look at the heat waves.

Giving the rear eyepiece a quarter-turn to the left, Hathcock brought the mirage into full focus and could see it angling first to the right, and then boiling straight up, and then angling to the left. "Little bit of a fishtail," he told himself. At more than twelve hundred yards, the shifting wind, even though a very light breeze, made this one of the most difficult shots a marksman could attempt.

Waiting until the mirage leaned well to the left, Hathcock set his rifle scope's reticle on the chest of the man who sat on the stool having his hair trimmed by the woman. He took a breath, exhaled, and squeezed the Winchester's trigger.

The rifle's crack sent a flock of dark brown and black birds flying skyward from the thick brush that grew on the hillside below the hide where Hathcock lay. He drew back his bolt and chambered a second round, watching the first strike the thick, straw roof of the hut and skip skyward.

The woman and two men heard the shot strike the hut's roof and immediately leaped for cover behind the tall pile of straw and grass. They knew that the haystack would block them from the view of the rifleman atop the hill and hoped that it would stop his bullets, too.

Before Hathcock could settle his aim on any of the three, they had vanished from sight. "Damn it," he said under his breath, turning the knob on the right-hand side of his scope four clicks, moving this next shot down two minutes of angle, slightly more than twenty-four inches from where he had zeroed the last one.

"Well," he told himself, "it's a stab in the dark, but what can I lose?" Steadily, he positioned the center of the scope's cross hairs on the middle of the haystack, and after one last check to see that the mirage leaned well to the left, he sent a second round cracking down from the hill, across the rice fields, and through the haystack.

Like frightened animals, the two men scurried from behind the haystack, bolted across the wide yard, and disappeared into the stand of tall trees, leaving their rifles and shirts inside the woman's hut. Hathcock chambered a round and drew his scope to the rear for a third shot, but nothing else moved.

"I must have nailed her," he said to himself, taking a closer look at the scene through the twenty-power spotting scope. He continued watching, waiting for the two men to return for their rifles and shirts. But that hope quickly turned sour when he looked to the right of the hut and saw a Marine patrol hurrying toward the haystack.

They had been on the other side of the community of huts where the young girl had gone earlier, and had heard shots. They saw the unarmed woman lying in the dirt behind the haystack and hurried to give her assistance. They thought that the woman had been hit by a stray round.

When Hathcock saw the Marines rushing down the dike, one by one, thirty yards apart, he knew that he had struck the woman with his shot. "I better get up the hill to counterintelligence and ITT," he told himself. "If that woman is alive, that big, ugly gunny will want to talk to her."

He screwed the lens cap on his spotting scope and slid it back into his pack. Scooting out of his hide, he slung his rifle over his right shoulder, grabbed his pack by the straps, and hurried up the trail from the lower edge of finger four. He walked to a hard-back tent near the center of the compound, where he found the gunnery sergeant whose job it was to interrogate prisoners of war and enemy suspects brought to Hill 55.

Many of the Marines assigned duty with the counterintelligence and interrogator/translator teams had shaved their heads and had grown long handlebar mustaches. The gunnery sergeant was much taller than Hathcock and was very broad across the shoulders. Hathcock felt intimidated by his menacing appearance and thought that if this Marine and his kind caused that much uneasiness with him, they surely must devastate the Vietnamese suspects whom they interrogated.

"Gunny," Hathcock said, heaving and panting after running up die hill from his hide. "I need to talk to you about something that just happened down off finger four."

The fearsome Marine wore a flack jacket and no shirt beneath it. He carried a helmet in his right hand and dipped his head as he walked outside to meet Hathcock, who ran the final few steps up the dirt pathway to the gunnery sergeant's hooch. "What did you see, Sergeant?"

"It ain't exactly what I saw as much as it is what happened," Hathcock said huffing. "I watched this woman cuttin' what looked like two NVA snipers' hair, and I took a shot at 'em. I shot a little high, so the three of them ran to this haystack to hide. I put my second round into the haystack, and I believe I hit the woman. Meantime, the two NVA hot dogs got away in the tree line."

"What makes you believe they were NVA?" the Marine asked, leaning slightly down to make eye contact with Hathcock.

"They wore dark green uniforms and carried long rifles- looked like Mosin-Nagants. Those two hamburgers left them in her hooch with their shirts when they flew the coop."

"Hmm," the gunny said thoughtfully. "What else?"

"A patrol walked into the scene and picked up this woman. I need to know where they're taking her, because I don't think that they realize what she is. Those Marines never checked out her hooch or anything around it. They just snatched her up and hauled her off and never saw the uniforms or the rifles."

Palming the helmet in one hand, the interrogator shoved the camouflage-covered, steel pot on his head and began walking briskly toward the operations center. "Come on, Sergeant. We better get a lead on these guys."

In less than five minutes the two Marines had a report from the patrol who had found the woman. They sent a fire team back to the thatched hut to search for the weapons.

Thirty minutes later, word came on the radio that the fire team had found nothing. They claimed that this probably was someone else and that she had been hit in the neck by a stray round. She was just too far away for it to come from Hill 55.

"Gunny, I shot her," Hathcock said, narrowing his eyes. "She is a collaborator. Those two hamburgers doubled back and grabbed their rifles and shirts. There is one sure way to prove she is the woman who was cutting those ol' boys' hair."

The gunny looked at Hathcock and started to walk back to his tent. "Okay, Sergeant. How's that?"

"When they take her to the aid station, have one of your own men standing by while the doctor pulls that slug out of her neck. If it's my woman, the bullet that they pull out will be a 173-grain boat-tail Sierra."

Hathcock lay on his cot, leaning his head and shoulders against his pack as he read a letter from Jo and listened to Glen Campbell singing "Gentle on My Mind." The screen door slamming shut, followed by heavy footsteps, distracted his attention from the home thoughts and music.

It was the mountain-sized gunnery sergeant. He stood twirling his long handlebar mustache with his right hand as the low-angled sunlight shone off his head. "She's yours, Sergeant Hathcock. The doc pulled a boat-tailed bullet out of her neck. I'll talk to her tomorrow. I just came by to let you know, and to say thanks. She may know quite a bit. If these gooks talk to their barbers like we do, we might get real lucky."

Hathcock smiled, "Hope so, Gunny. If you think of it when you interrogate her, you might ask her about a platoon of NVA snipers. Captain Land thinks they're operating a full platoon down here now. If she knows something, give me a holler. I'd surely appreciate knowing anything about that."