Marine Sniper (40 page)

"What's that?" Hyland asked.

"Long Tra'ng and then something after that, but mainly Long Tra'ng."

"White Feather," the officer said, translating the Vietnamese language.

"You speak Vietnamese?"

"I understand some of it. I guess they'd call you Long Tra'ng du K'ich."

"That's it."

"White Feather Sniper," the officer said with a smile.

The amtrac lurched forward and began rumbling down the roadway. Hathcock looked back through the dusty air toward LZ Baldy and thought of his friend. It would be all right. Mack would understand. But he still felt a pinch of guilt as he turned his eyes toward the fields and trees and huts and all the other places where Charlie might be hiding.

The noise of the convoy was so loud that further attempts at conversation ceased. The Marines sat on top of the vehicles, rifles poised, magazines inserted, looking out with caution at a seemingly tranquil world.

Ahead of the column, a mine sweep team carefully cleared the way, giving Hathcock a sense of security. Not perfect security, however. He only felt that when he was on his feet, in his element, stalking the enemy. In the bush he made his own luck. Here, his luck rested squarely in the hands of fate and the amtrac driver.

The amtrac came to a jolting halt, bouncing low on its tanklike treads, causing its three antennae to whip and snap through the air. Hathcock looked back at Corporal Perry and at Lieutenant Hyland who sat next to him.

"I think we're going to follow that trail off to the left," the officer shouted, pointing at some tracks left days earlier by a similar patrol.

Carlos didn't like it. He thought of the hand grenades tied in a daisy chain along the cane field.

One after another, the heavy, armored transports crept off the highway, and as the number three amtrac creeped along the gravel shoulder, starting its turn, Hathcock's entire world disappeared in a booming, ringing, earth-shattering explosion.

Fifty startled Marines scrambled for cover as gunfire erupted from the nearby trees. They saw a forty-foot high column of fire rise from the amtrac on which Hathcock and the seven other Marines had ridden. It filled the air with an acrid pall of billowy, black smoke.

Beneath that smoke, between the flames, Hathcock opened his eyes and saw nothing but blackness and fire. Something heavy pinned his legs. He felt the hair on his neck, his eyebrows, and the top of his head singe and curl. Panic suddenly flashed through his mind and sent his heart pounding-"I'm gonna die!" He had to run. He had to get away.

Hathcock reached for the dead weight that pinned his legs and saw that it was the body of the lieutenant who had spoken to him only seconds earlier. He was already on fire.

"Save him! Got to save him!" Hathcock suddenly thought. And without thinking of his own life, he took the young officer by his flaming clothes and hurled him off the side of the burning vehicle. As he looked at the tangled bodies of the other Marines, who had been whole and well only a second ago, he saw their slow, groggy motion among the flames and instinctively began hurling them off too.

He didn't notice when he threw Corporal Perry clear of the inferno. All the Marines were equally important to him- brother Marines who would otherwise die. He grabbed them randomly and tossed. Privates First Class Roberto Barrera, Lawrence Head, Keith Spencer, and Thurman Trussell, and Lance Corporal Earl Thibodeaux.

He himself was on fire. His trousers were burning, his chest and arms and neck were burning. And as another explosion rumbled beneath his feet and fire belched skyward through the torn and bent hulk that seconds ago was an amtrac, Hathcock blindly jumped through the wall of flames. He had no idea what awaited him on the other side of that fiery curtain.

Hathcock struggled to his feet from the gravel where he fell. He did not hear the clatter of machine-gun fire or the explosions of grenades. He saw the fire towering over him and could only hope to get away from that burning trap before it killed him.

Inside his head he kept asking himself, "Why do I feel wet. I'm weighted down like I'm soaked. Why?"

Hathcock staggered away from the blazing amtrac, holding his arms straight out from his sides. He knew he was hurt, but it was when he looked down at his arms that he realized his injury was beyond anything he had imagined.

Skin hung down from his arms like bat wings, ragged and black, as though draped with moss six to eight inches in length. His heart sank as he stopped and sat on the side of the road. "Will I live?" he asked himself.

"Roll him!" two frantic voices cried. "Quick! Roll him into the water!" Hathcock didn't know that his clothes still burned, and the bandoleer of ammo draped over his shoulder and the six hand grenades that still hung on his cartridge belt were quite forgotten by him.

Suddenly some Marines doused him in the muddy water next to the road. A few seconds later he was sitting in the dirt with his head bobbing and his lashless eyelids blinking over his sore eyes.

A corpsman ran to Hathcock's side and placed a canteen next to his lips. "Drink all this," he ordered, and Hathcock drank. When the bottle was empty, the corpsman pressed another to his lips. "Drink all this too." And he drank. He had finished three canteens of water when a tall black shadow stood over him.

"Can you stand?" Hathcock heard Staff Sergeant Boone ask.

"We try," he answered, blindly struggling to his feet.

Then another voice that belonged to a Marine captain said, "No. Call the chopper down here."

A CH-46 sat on the roadway, beyond where the devastated amtrac burned, and there crewmen, corpsmen, and Marines helped carry the other seriously burned Marines inside it.

"Sir," Boone said, "the chopper pilot says he can't get in down here. We have to carry Hathcock over there."

"Can you walk?" the captain asked.

'Try," Hathcock said.
 
"You're gonna be okay, Carlos," Boone sad. He stood on Hathcock's left, and the captain stood on his right. They put their hands on Hithcock's hips, where his cartridge belt had protected his skin, and held him upright as he struggled each step toward the waiting helicopter.

Hathcock was burned to some degree over nearly every inch of his body. His brick-red face was sore and swelling. His chest and arms and hands and back were opened, crackled, and bloody, and caked black. His legs fared little better, blisters rising on the skin beneath the tattered rags that once were trousers.

As the helicopter lifted away from the land and the war of bullets and bombs, it carried Carios Hathcock to another war: a war fought with needles and scalpels and chemicals and drugs. A war in which pain was the terrifying constant, the companion of every waking moment-and the enemy.

"I'm still on fire!" Hathcock thought. Every place where anything touched him now felt as though it was covered with white-hot steel. He stood and refused to sit.

"Got to get these clothes off," he thought. "That will help." And he looked at a corpsman who stood in front of him, writing on a tablet. Scissors hung from his pocket, and Carlos pointed a black and bloody bent finger at them, and then at the burned rags that were his trousers. The corpsman went to work.

When the helicopter landed, Hathcock stood completely naked and hesitated to move. He had to find Perry. He had searched during the entire trip and had not seen his partner. "He can't be dead!" Hathcock thought.

As a hoard of doctors, nurses, corpsmen, and Marines filled the helicopter and began taking the injured men away, Hathcock finally saw Perry. He looked well and smiled and waved.

"Sit down, Marine" a voice told him.

Hathcock sat.

"Lay back and we'll go for a ride."

Hathcock looked at the rear ramp of the helicopter where a pile of burned rags that were his clothes slid down to the deck of the hospital ship, USS Repose. In die midst of the rags, Carios saw his cigarette lighter. "That's mine!" he said pointing at the silver-colored Zippo, A nurse picked it up, and Carlos managed a smile for her with his swollen lips.

"Get word to Master Sergeant Moose Gunderson over at 1st Division G-3. Tell him I've been hurt, but I'm okay!" Hathcock said to the nurse. She nodded and he smiled again.

A hand pushed him gently back on the gumey, but when his bloody and cracked back touched the sheet, he popped back up. A hand would push his forehead back and he popped back again, and again and again, all the way to the emergency room where a doctor, masked and dressed in surgical garb, waited.

"How you feel, Marine?"

"I'll be okay, Sir. Got a little hot," Hathcock said, trying to sound as though he was in complete control of his life.

"What do you do?" the doctor asked as he inserted the needle on an IV tube into Hathcock.

Fighting back the urge to shout, Carlos panted, "Scout/ Sniper, Sir. I lead a platoon."

"I think you may be out of action for a couple of days, Marine."

Hathcock felt something happening to his back and arms. He did not look. He did not want to see those parts of him that he would never have again disappear.

"What's going on back there," Hathcock asked.

"Cleaning out a truck-load of gravel," a voice answered from behind him.

"What do you think about giving every corpsman a jeep, Mariner'

Hathcock thought a moment and said, 'That would be a terrible idea. I mean it would be outstanding for the corpsmen and those people who needed help. But the logistics of something like that would be terrible. I don't see how..."

When Ron McAbee's driver pulled the jeep to a stop in front of the operations tent on LZ Baldy, a Marine shouted to him, "They finally got Staff Sergeant Hathcock! I think he's dead!" Mack raced inside the operations tent where the gunnery sergeant, who sat scrawling notes, said, "Hathcock and Perry were on an amtrac that got ambushed. The VC set off a five hundred-pound box mine under it. Blew that sucker sky high.

All the Marines were burned bad-real bad. I don't know whether he is dead or alive. He looked bad when they put him on the medevac chopper and sent him out to the Repose. I didn't get any word on Perry, but he's on the Repose, too."

"I'm headed out to the ship to see Hathcock," McAbee told the gunnery sergeant, and in two giant steps, the tall Marine jumped in the jeep and roared away, slinging gravel and dirt. Ron McAbee spent the remainder of the day trying to hitch a ride out to the ship. He never succeeded.

A day later, Mack got word from Moose Gunderson that Hathcock was badly burned but alive, and he wrote him a letter.

On the day that Ron McAbee wrote Hathcock, Maj, Gen. Ormond R. Simpson, 1st Marine Division's commanding general, pinned a Purple Heart medal on Hathcock's pillow. The general's aide took a Polaroid photograph of the event.

When the general departed, a nurse took the photo and the medal, and said, "I'll put these in your ditty bag so that you can find them when you wake up." A person dressed in white inserted a needle in Carlos Hathcock's pain-ridden body, and in a moment he was asleep.

He never knew when they loaded him on another helicopter and lifted him to the Da Nang air base, where air force medics put him and the seven other burned Marines on a jet bound for Tokyo. Hathcock never knew that he also spent several days in the hospital at Yakota Air Force Base while the world-famous bum center at Brooke Army Hospital in San Antonio, Texas, awaited his and the seven other Marines' arrival.

And even when he awoke on September 24, more than a week after the terrible fire that would change his life forever, Hathcock did not realize that he was away from Vietnam.

On the afternoon of September 16, (Stateside time) a message arrived at the Navy Annex of the Pentagon, located up the hill, next to the national cemetery, on Columbia Pike in Arlington, Virginia-a complex of buildings where Gen. Leonard F. Chapman commanded the Marine Corps. This message went to the casualty branch of the Marine Corps' manpower division, bearing the names of eight Marines, their next of kin and home addresses: eight Marines burned on an amtrac a day ago, half a world away. And at the top of the list appeared the name Staff Sergeant Carlos N. Hathcock II.