Marine Sniper (37 page)

The corporal was silent.

"Where were we headed next?"

"Down this slope and through that cane."

"That the same route you took the last time you crossed here?"

"Yes. It's a long way from where we're going to set up. It's the quickest way through here."

"You think we ought to go through there?"

"No," the corporal said, "We'll have to go around and follow the contour of the hill, instead. It'll take about forty-five minutes longer."

"Right," Hathcock said. "Now let's walk down to that cane and see what that trail has to offer."

Cautiously, the four Marines crawled over a high, dirt dike below which a tall stand of cane grew green and straw brown. Sitting on his heels Hathcock searched for trip wires. A tense smile spread across his face.

"You see it?" he asked.

"No. Where?" the corporal asked.

"About knee high, all along the edge of the cane. See it?"

The corporal looked closely, and as the breeze rustled the cane back and forth, his eye caught in a flash of sunlight, the fine, black wire stretched across a twenty-five-foot expanse of cane.

Hathcock was watching his expression closely. "All right, good," he said. "Now look on the backsides of these thick stalks. See 'em?"

The corporal eyed each tall shaft of cane from its roots to its leafy, thin top. Suddenly he snapped his head toward Hathcock, his eyes open wide. "Yes!"

Hathcock said in a low voice, "I see at least four grenades tied in right here. That daisy chain stretches across the entire front of this field. Anybody walking through would be blown to pieces against this dike. I wouldn't no more go through there now than I would tap-dance in a mine field."

Unhooking a hand grenade from his belt, Hathcock looked at his men and said, "You men get on up over that dike. I'm gonna roll this down in the field and see if I can't set off Charlie's trap."

The three Marines scrambled up the bank and over the top as Hathcock worked loose the pin with his left hand. He crawled halfway up the embankment and then tossed down the small bomb filled with heavy explosive.

Suddenly, a portion of ground gave way beneath Hath-cock's boots. His feet slipped as he scrambled at the top of the high bank, and, as he slid, he yelled. His Marines responded with six hands that grabbed hold of his shirt and pack and jerked him so forcefully that in a second he was airborne. His hundred fifty-pound body flew over the top just as the cane field exploded, sending thousands of deadly steel shards into the dirt bank where he had struggled. The four Marines were showered with leaves and dirt and fragments of cane stalk.

Pale as oatmeal, Carlos looked at the three wide-eyed Marines beside him. "That wasn't too smart either. Thanks."

He looked down at his hands shaking from the adrenaline his body had poured out. "The next time you do something like that get behind cover before you throw the grenade."

The corporal looked at Hathcock and said, "1 started to say something, but I thought that was the way you did things. A little more gutsy than the rest of us."

"A little more stupid," Hathcock said with a laugh. He was glad to be alive. He stood, dusted off his trousers and took his three snipers on to the point. They killed three Viet Cong that day.

June was a busy month for Hathcock; he sent three sniper teams to work with 1st Battalion, 7th Marines, commanded by Lt. Col. John Aloysius Dowd, who welcomed the opportunity to employ this added dimension of firepower. Hathcock felt honored because Dowd's battalion saw the most action and led the regiment in enemy killed.

During April his battalion killed one hundred sixty North Vietnamese Army troops, fifty-one Viet Cong, and took one prisoner. The second and third battalions killed fifty-eight and eighty-five of the enemy respectively in the same period. In May, Dowd's Marines tallied forty-four NVA killed in action, forty-one Viet Cong, and took two prisoners, while the second battalion killed none and the third killed thirty NVA.

The first battalion seemed to be where the action always occurred, and Hathcock, who had a high opinion of Dowd, was delighted.

While the six snipers operated with the first battalion, Hathcock sent eight others to the division's sniper school at Da Nang. Next month he planned to send four more, and two others after that. By mid-August, he calculated, his platoon would be 99 percent operational.

He faced another problem, however, that would not be so easily solved-rifles. When he reported to Vietnam, he anticipated seeing nothing but the M-40 rifle in use. He saw the first arrivals of the new sniper weapon in January 1967, therefore, it was not unreasonable to expect this weapon-a Model 700 Remington 7.62mm rifle with a 10-power light-gathering, range-finding scope-to be the common denominator among snipers. But what he found when he arrived left him bitterly disappointed. There were vintage World War n era Model 70 Winchesters and M-1D sniper rifles, as well as a couple of M-40X rifles-the test model of the M-40.

The sniper arsenal offered him nothing more up-to-date than the weapons he had left behind in 1967, and in fact, he believed he was handling some of the same rifles he'd fired then. Only now they were a little worse for wear.

"Be nice to have an armorer assigned to the platoon," Hathcock told David Sommers one hot June evening as the two Marines sat on the front porch in bamboo-bottomed chairs.

"You talk to the sergeant major about it?"

"I mentioned it, but he told me that he would be glad to ask for one if I knew where one could be found. I'm out of answers. He did tell me that an assistant platoon sergeant will be coming from division soon."

"That's good news."

"Good or bad. You never know. Kind of like a blind date -you expect the worst and hope for the best. My luck, it'll be an ugly, old, toothless, fat girl."

A week later Hathcock was scratching out notes with his black ballpoint pen on a yellow, legal-size pad. The sweat ran down his shiftless back and soaked into his trousers.

Suddenly the door burst open and two loud feet stomped across the sniper hooch's plywood floor. Hathcock raised his head as he heard the thud of a hundred pounds of personal gear, bound inside a long, green seabag, hit the floor behind him. A familiar voice boomed, "The name's McAbee-Staff Sergeant McAbee. Just call me Mack!"

"Mack!" Hathcock said, twisting around on his stool. "You old horse thief. What in the world are you doing here?"

"Carlos! You the platoon sergeant?"

"Yeah!"

"Hell! I'm your platoon armorer."

To have as his assistant a man who was not only his best friend, but one of the very best high-power rifle armorers in the Marine Corps was a good deal beyond his wildest dreams.

"Look out Charlie!" Hathcock said, laughing and embracing his friend.

"The first project on the agenda is to overhaul all these old sticks we've been shootin' with. 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-fined 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."

"Soon as you get settled, you're gonna get a truck from 11th Motor T and head down to 1st Force Service Regiment at Da Nang and use their shop. I'll get the sergeant major to grease the skids."

It took three trips to Da Nang before McAbee completed the major work on the rifles. From then on, he passed time at a bench he built in the sniper hooch, fine-tuning each weapon. It was a job that had 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 the level mat rivaled battalions.

July ended with the 7th Marines sniper platoon confirming seventy-two kills. Hathcock felt certain it was a record.

For Hathcock and his snipers, McAbee's arrival had turned their lives sweet. His fine gunsmithing coupled with the keen training and leadership that Hathcock 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.

Sergeant Major Puckett had a different view of things. Out of sight meant trouble to him. He felt that Hathcock or his second in command, McAbee, should be available-and accountable-at any given moment. It was a sound command-and-control philosophy shared by most Marines, and Puckett was undoubtedly right in feeling that the sniper sergeant had to take the responsibility of command as seriously as he took the business of getting out in the field and zapping "Charlie."

Hathcock had a hard time sitting in his hooch and pushing papers, remaining by his radio and being always available for the sergeant major's beck and call. Once Hathcock delegated assignments, he and McAbee grabbed their gear and went to the field too. As Hathcock saw it, the sergeant major could always reach him by radio. Most often he would be with Bravo Company, 1st Battalion, 7th Marines.

He had built a bond with that company and its commander, a captain named Hoffman who had reached the enlisted rank of gunnery sergeant and received a battlefield commission. After the war the Marine Corps withdrew his temporary commission and made him a gunny once again. But because this captain "spoke the enlisted man's language," and was a "straight arrow," Hathcock trusted him completely.

While Sergeant Major Puckett fumed because he could not reach anyone at the sniper hooch, Hathcock and several of his snipers spent the first ten days of July working the bush along Western Route 4, between the hamlets of Hoi An and Thuong Due, supporting Lieutenant Colonel Dowd and his 1st Battalion Marines.

During that brief period, they cleared the area of all enemy positions, and on July 10 escorted the first convoy to successfully pass along this route in more than four years.

July 10 found Hathcock and McAbee peering from behind tall shafts of dry elephant grass, searching a broad clearing. They had moved away from Route 4, looking for signs of enemy movement. McAbee carried the radio and held the handset next to his ear as Hathcock scoured the landscape with his twenty-power M-49 spotting scope.

"Mack, I don't see a thing moving out there. But there is

this tittle hump six hundred yards out there that I want to stay and watch just a bit. It strikes me a little curious-somehow it just don't fit."

The grassy hump rose from the ground fifty yards from a cluster of trees and much taller grass. Hathcock thought it a likely spot for an enemy patrol to break out. It was the most narrow point in the clearing and seemed to be the most likely place for anyone to cross.

"Perry got a kill," McAbee whispered to Hathcock as the two men lay cooking in the afternoon sun. Hathcock glanced at his watch and noted the time-3:30 P.M.

"How long ago?"

"About fifteen minutes."

"I never heard a thing."

"Yeah, he stayed with Charlie Company when they moved on down by that river. He set up mere on a bluff, overlooking that big bend in the river. Perry said he no more than settled in and this Viet Cong laid down his rifle, shucked off his clothes, and started taking a bath right there. One shot put an end to his bath."

"Where's Perry now?"

"He had just moved out when he came up on the net. He's got a patrol covering him, so he's moving out in the direction that the VC he killed came from."

"Look!" Hathcock whispered urgently.

McAbee put his eye to the spotting scope and saw a head rising out of the hump.