Silent Warrior Page 4

  “Rather than burn up the engine by driving back here on time, we stopped at every exit and refilled the radiator. Now Dave and I are late back to base because of your car. I’m sorry, but your car didn’t make it all the way back. It’s parked just off the expressway. The engine was smoking. I’m real sorry.”

  “You’re sorry?” the man asked. “I’m sorry! I thought we had tied that battery down. You boys being late back from liberty, I know what that means. I was a sergeant major, you know, and I remember what I had to do with my Marines who showed up late.

  “Don’t you worry about the car. I’ll send the truck up to get it. But first, I gotta call your first sergeant and square all this for you.

  “I’ll have one of my boys take you back to base.”

  As soon as Carlos and David arrived back at their Camp Pendleton barracks, they immediately changed into freshly starched and ironed utilities and spit-shined boots. At two o’clock they marched into their first sergeant’s office.

  At rigid attention, holding their starched and ironed utility hats in their right hands, Privates Hathcock and Holden stepped to the front and center of the first sergeant’s desk.

  “Sir, Private Holden reporting as ordered, sir,” David said first. Carlos immediately followed suit.

  “Okay, you two,” the first sergeant said, “stand at ease and let’s hear it.”

  “First Sergeant, sir, we sure are sorry we are late getting back,” Carlos pled. “But we did have car trouble, and the man did call.”

  “Right,” the first sergeant said. “You two are still late. The way I see it, car trouble or anything else is no excuse. Late is late. U-A is U-A. Your cock-and-bull story may have worked on that old man in Oceanside but you don’t fool me any. Just take a look in the mirror. Those pretty red eyes and baggy faces say one thing. You two liberty hounds decided that these California split-tails and the good times are more important than your duty, otherwise you would have made it, car trouble or not.

  “Hathcock, you and Holden will remember to plan a little bit better from here on out. I will see to that.

  “To make it sink in, I have a small chore for you men over in the headquarters building.”

  The three Marines walked to the staging battalion headquarters where the first sergeant issued them a bucket of soap and water, and two stiff brushes.

  From 2:30 P.M. until nine o’clock that night Carlos and David scrubbed boot marks from the stairs in the building. Both men smiling—recounting the weekend—the entire time.

  THREE DAYS LATER, Carlos and David left Camp Pendleton for Treasure Island, where they caught a troop ship from the San Francisco Bay to Hawaii. There they joined the same squad as machine gunners in the weapons platoon of Company E, 2nd Battalion, 4th Marines.

  And like the battalion’s nickname—“The Magnificent Bastards”—the two did their best to maintain that image throughout their tour in Hawaii.

  TO YOUNG MARINES in Hawaii, First Lieutenant Jim Land looked hard. Intimidating. He had a crew cut and a square jaw. He rigorously kept his body lean and muscular. A platoon commander in the 4th Marine Regiment his first year in Hawaii, Land then became the officer in charge of the Hawaii Marines shooting team because of his experience as a competitive marksman.

  Together with Marine Gunner Arthur Terry, a mentor of competitive shooters, he devised a way not only to justify competitive marksmanship there, but also to increase the Brigade infantry units’ effectiveness by training selected Marines to be scouts and snipers. In 1960, Land and Terry commenced their first two-week scout/sniper course.

  That same year, Carlos Hathcock won the intramural individual shooting championship. Besides engraving his name on the big trophy, 1st Brigade sent him as one of their representatives on the Hawaii Marine Shooting Team.

  “Sir, Private Carlos Hathcock reporting for duty, sir,” Carlos barked as he stood at attention six inches in front of Lieutenant Jim Land’s desk, his eyes fixed straight ahead.

  “At ease, Private,” Land said in a friendly voice.

  Carlos snapped his feet apart and clasped his hands behind his back, but remained rigid, his eyes still fixed on the wall behind Land’s head.

  “Would you please relax,” Land said. “I want to talk to you, not inspect you.”

  Carlos let his eyes drop to Land’s face, and breathed a little easier, yet he still maintained a certain amount of rigidity out of respect for the Marine Corps officer’s rank.

  “When I saw you win the intramural title, weren’t you a private first class?” Land asked.

  “Yes, sir,” Carlos answered, offering nothing more.

  “Do I have to pry it out of you, or will you just tell me what happened,” Land said while thumbing through Carlos’s Service Record Book to find its “Page 12,” where an administrative clerk would have recorded the young Marine’s violations and punishments.

  “Says here your company commander found you guilty of Article 134, conduct unbecoming a Marine,” Land said. “That’s the catchall. So what kind of conduct are we looking at?”

  “I hit a lieutenant,” Carlos said.

  A MONTH EARLIER, Carlos had celebrated his twenty-first birthday, and typical of many Marines who crossed the threshold that allowed him to legally walk into any bar, he and several of his Echo Company buddies went out to Hotel Street in Honolulu to celebrate. Famous for its prostitutes and steamy nightclubs, Hotel Street is that lighted strip of establishments focused on cleaning out military paychecks from their recipients twice monthly. Nearly every city that hosts a military base, also hosts its version of Hotel Street.

  Since Carlos would have nothing to do with the women of easy virtue who trolled the nightclubs, at midnight he found himself alone, sitting at a bar beneath a thatched awning, sipping Jim Beam whiskey, waiting for his buddies to return so that they could go back to the base.

  Carlos straddled a bar stool wearing a sharply creased, tan tropical wool uniform with a long-sleeved shirt, matching tie, and one stripe on his sleeve. His expert shooting badge with a third-award bar added to it dangled from his shirt. Although drunk, he had kept his collar buttoned and tie snugged up. He had tucked his garrison cap neatly under his belt when he had sat down next to a young man with short-cropped hair, wearing a blue and red flower-covered Hawaiian print shirt, khaki Bermuda shorts, and shin-high white socks with sandals.

  Filled with whiskey-born bravado, Carlos chuckled to himself as he noticed the man’s white socks and sandals. He would never be caught dead looking like that, he had thought to himself.

  The man took immediate offense at the look Carlos had given him and the chuckle that followed. He had drank well beyond a reasonable quota of beer, and like Carlos sat in a booze-tilted haze. He glanced at Carlos’s shooting badge and said, “You really earn that third award, Private? Or did you just buy that at the PX and decide to wear that instead of a toilet seat?”

  “What did you say?” Carlos responded, and felt his stomach tighten as his face filled with blood. “These crossed rifles was awarded to me in bootcamp when I was series high shooter. It’s pure silver. I just got through winning the intramural championship for the second year in a row, my third expert award. Next month, I am reporting TAD to the Hawaii Marine Rifle Team.”

  Carlos’s breath had shortened and his hand trembled as he picked up his glass and brought it to his lips.

  “Another shooter,” the man said scowling at Carlos. “You have any idea what a waste of space you guys are?”

  Carlos did not want to acknowledge the comment. He kept his line of sight fixed on the several rows of bottles at the back of the bar, and out of the corner of his eye he glanced at the mirror to see what this drunk would do next.

  “I’m talking to you, Private,” the man said, taking Carlos by the shoulder and turning him. “You better look at me when I say something.”

  With the help of Jim Beam, Carlos unloaded. He slid off the bar stool, and in the same move swung a roundhouse right fist into the man’s
nose and cheek.

  “That is PFC, you asshole,” Carlos said as the man fell off his bar stool and cupped his hands over his now bleeding nose.

  “It’s lieutenant to you, Private,” the man told Carlos as he looked up through tear-filled eyes.

  CARLOS LOOKED AT Jim Land after describing the incident. Then he quickly snapped his gaze back to the wall.

  “That lieutenant wanted to run me up and disk me at battalion office hours,” Carlos explained, “but I was lucky. My captain at Echo Company found out from witnesses there that the lieutenant was drunk. He convinced the colonel to keep it at company. So I lost a stripe and a month’s pay.”

  “You’re damned lucky you’re not doing a year in the brig,” Land said. “They could have given you a special court-martial, and booted you out with a dishonorable discharge.”

  CARLOS BEGAN HIS stint on the Hawaii Marine Rifle Team by graduating Land’s sniper school and then winning the Marine Corps’ Pacific Division Rifle Championship. A few months later, in the fall of 1961, he received orders to report to the commanding general, 2nd Marine Aircraft Wing, Cherry Point, North Carolina.

  With a newly sewn PFC stripe on his arm, Carlos wondered what rationale had possessed the person who decided to send him, a machine gunner and rifleman, to an air station.

  “What are they gonna do, strap me on a wing with a machine gun?” Carlos said to himself as he stepped briskly down the sidewalk in front of the 2nd Marine Aircraft Wing, Headquarters Squadron administrative offices. He wore custom-tailored khaki trousers and a starched crisp shirt. His spit-shined low-quarter shoes clicked noticeably from the horseshoe cleats nailed to the heels. This was a standard look for Brigade Marines who often spent many months at sea visiting exotic ports and wanted to look sharp.

  Carlos believed in always being sharp—squared away, he called it. But as he made his way to the first stop of his check-in route he felt let down. As though someone had tossed him off a pedestal and into a scrap heap. These Marines wore their hair long. For Carlos, long was seeing any length of hair above one’s ears and below one’s cover. High and tight was Carlos Hathcock’s standard.

  Worse yet, these air wing Marines looked disheveled instead of squared away. Their uniforms fit loosely. Instead of starched utilities and khakis, they were fluff-dried and wrinkled. Their boots were dull and scuffed, and many sported rolls of fat above their belts.

  Back at Brigade in Hawaii, the company gunny had told him as he checked out that he wouldn’t like it at the wing. “The officers are not Marines,” he had said, “they are naval aviators. They have no idea what it is to hump, or be a grunt.”

  Recalling what the gunny had said, Carlos concluded he had been correct. These air wing fellows at one time knew how to look and act like Marines, but without the same brand of disciplined leadership they experienced in basic and infantry training, they fell slack. They ate too much fat, did not exercise, and lost pride in their appearance.

  When Carlos checked in at Headquarters Squadron, the personnel chief, a round-bellied gunnery sergeant with a ruddy face, suggested that they could put him to use at the gymnasium with special services. But after a brief conversation about Hathcock’s marksmanship skills, Carlos found himself seated on a bus, bound for the rifle range.

  After Jim Land had learned of Hathcock’s orders, he gave Gunnery Sergeant Paul Yeager a heads-up telephone call. He told the Cherry Point shooting team captain that the Pacific Division rifle champion was on his way. So by the time Carlos knocked on the duty hut door and reported to Yeager, the gunny was expecting him.

  IN THE NEXT three years everything about Carlos’s life changed. On November 10, 1962, he got married. He lost his PFC stripe for a second time, too. He had been hospitalized and failed to properly check back into the squadron, so he was listed as an unauthorized absence. Even though he was at work, where he belonged, the squadron commander still took his stripe.

  A year later, 1963, he won so many titles that the Marine Corps invited him to Quantico to join the “Big Team.” Feeling it was just too quick a move up, Carlos declined the offer. In 1964 he was glad that he had. He had a tough time that year, and did not finish in the medals. However, because of his standing at Cherry Point, Carlos was able to compete in the National Championship at Camp Perry, Ohio, where he won a silver medal.

  The points that medal carried put him so close to the top that in his first competition in 1965 he achieved every competitive marksman’s goal. He became Distinguished, and received the gold Distinguished Marksman shooting badge.

  During 1965, his team regularly beat the Marine Corps team. Cherry Point had the Marine Corps’ best shooters, and Carlos was among the best of those men.

  His greatest prize, however, came at Camp Perry, Ohio, concluding that year’s shooting season in the National Championship matches. There, Carlos won the Wimbledon Cup. With that achievement, the shooting world hailed him as America’s best shot at 1000 yards. It was his best year at Cherry Point, and concluded his competition there. His next team, as Carlos liked to put it, was “in that big shooting match across the pond.”

  SWEAT STUNG CARLOS’S eyes, but he could not move. He dared not breathe. Frozen in place, all he could do was look into the ruby eyes of a deadly bamboo viper that lay coiled in front of him. The bright green serpent waited, poised with its head raised. It flicked its black tongue from its yellow-rimmed mouth, only inches from the Marine sniper’s face.

  “What’s going on?” Carlos asked in his mind. He could not recognize this person, or another who now walked at the foot of his bed. Blurs in a white light.

  He shut his eyes.

  Carlos thought about the snake. The thought of it still frightened him. He hated snakes, and especially that one. A two-stepper, he called it. It bites a person and all he gets is two steps. Yet Carlos had to lie there and allow this deadly viper to taste the air next to his face, and satisfy himself that this thing in his way presented no threat. In a matter of seconds, the creature whisked silently away, disappearing in the grass.

  The snake represented one of the exclamation marks that punctuated this most demanding and dangerous mission. Carlos had oozed four days and three nights across more than 1,500 yards of open ground, covered only by grass, to take out an enemy commander. A general at his own headquarters, far away from any of Carlos Hathcock’s friendly forces.

  Pure suicide. He took the assignment, voluntarily, because he knew he was the best available. He had the best chance, if there was any chance at all. Carlos certainly did not want to die. Yet, he could not accept a less skilled sniper dying in his place.

  That was in the spring of 1967. His last mission of that first tour.

  Vietnam.

  There were good memories. Memories of men that he considered brothers. Men like Corporal Burke, Captain Land, Gunny Wilson, and Top Reinke. Buddies like David Sommers and Ron McAbee.

  But with them came the other memories. The unforgettable. Impressions burned so deeply in his mind that even the details of that deadly green snake he had watched for less than a minute remained vivid after more than thirty-two years.

  2

  Newbee in Chu Lai

  IT HAD BEEN a year since his promotion to corporal, and Carlos Hathcock sat in front of a television, touching up his metal utility uniform chevrons with EmNew. He dabbed the black paint with the tiny brush inside the bottle cap, covering spots where the brass shone through the original paint. On the TV’s black-and-white screen, a Navy journalist read the latest news from the Far East Network, transmitted from Kadena Air Base, Okinawa.

  There only one day and Carlos had written two letters home already. While other Marines in transit to Vietnam took advantage of liberty opportunities in Kin Village, just outside the gates at Camp Hansen, Carlos remained close to the barracks. He saw a movie at the base theater and bought a box of stationery at the PX. He had dumped a dollar’s worth of quarters into a slot machine at the NCO club, but became bored with that and returned to the
barracks.

  Since he would never think of being unfaithful to his wife, he saw no use in going into the “ville,” paying higher prices for watered-down whiskey, and wasting money on Okinawan naisans who would probably give a guy the clap anyway.

  Carlos laughed at his buddies mimicking the girls they had entertained. “I love you, GI, no bullshit. You take me Stateside? You buy me Honda? You take me big PX?” they would say.

  Ironically, many of these same Marines who spouted such sarcasm about the bar girls’ intentions, were completely broke when the plane lifted off from Kadena, bound for Chu Lai.

  On the plane, one Marine commented, “So I pulled out my wallet and told the girl, ‘Here take all my money. Let’s just get this over with fast, so I can go back to the barracks.’ ”

  The Marines knew the absurdity of spending their money on these cold-hearted girls, who the very next night would be with another Vietnam-bound GI, taking all his money, too. But, what the hell. Their prospects for the future did not appear all that bright. Death loomed for any number of the men, just outside the gates at Chu Lai.

  THE PLANE TAXIED past row after row of stalls constructed of sand-filled, fifty-five gallon barrels, stacked six and seven high. These provided cover for the fighter and attack planes quartered there. Suddenly Carlos’s gaze was caught by the red archway sign at the tarmac’s edge that displayed WELCOME TO CHU LAI, 1ST MARINE DIVISION HEADQUARTERS, painted in yellow block letters.

  Carlos followed the line of Marines, seabags on their shoulders, as they walked across the hot concrete apron and fell into formation. Humidity and temperature hovered at about the same number—100—beneath the broiling April afternoon sun. Carlos felt his sweat soak through his green utility uniform, leaving the starch feeling sticky against his skin.

  “First I was a machine gunner,” Carlos mumbled to himself as he laid his seabag next to his right foot. “Then they send me to an air wing. I wonder what they have in store now?”