The afternoon passed into the evening. Under a clear sky, the moon shone brightly on the river and its marshy banks. Anyone who moved along that route could not pass without his seeing him.
With it too dark to take aim and shoot, he spent the night observing through his twenty-power (M-49) spotting scope several long boats filled with soldiers, sliding silently past him. “Coming back by the boatload. Lots of gear, too. Bet
They’re headed to those tunnels below the hill.” When dawn broke, he watched the last boat slipping downstream in trace of the all-night procession. It was a much smaller craft, built like a dugout canoe. It appeared as a black dot, but as it drew nearer, he could distinguish three seated figures. The man at the bow and the man at the stern each paddled, while the man in the center simply sat with his arms folded and his head turning casually, watching the quiet banks as he drifted past them.
As the boat neared, Hathcock put his rifle’s scope first on the man paddling at the bow—a Viet Cong soldier wearing a black shirt and black shorts. He had a carbine across his back. But it was the man in the center—the man who did nothing but ride—who interested Hathcock.
Holding steady on the slow-moving boat, the sun’s orange light exposed the red collar tabs on the gray uniform that the man wore. As he came nearer, Hathcock recognized the large red star above the bill of the man’s cap. “Chinese. I’ll be damned.”
Hathcock had no idea what rank the man held, so he watched through his scope and held his fire until he could clearly see the gold star and clusters of braid on the large, red, collar tabs. “I’ll make a note of that. Maybe CIT can tell me what this guy is.”
He watched as the boat came abeam him, and as the small craft passed, Carlos tightened his grip around the Winchester’s stock and squeezed the trigger, sending a shot ripping into the back of the Chinese soldier’s neck, knocking him out of the boat.
The two Viet Cong who gulled the small boat down the river bent low in the craft and paddled as hard as they could toward the far bank. The two men powered the boat over the reeds and salt grass that grew in the shallows along the river’s edge. The soldier who crouched in the rear rose up. Just as he jumped into the water and the boat struck shore, Hathcock sent a shot across the river that shattered the man’s spine and sprayed his terrified comrade with blood. That soldier leaped from the boat into the reeds. Hathcock cycled the rifle’s bolt and pulled his scope back through its mounts. But as he sighted through the scope, he saw only a flicker of the third man as he disappeared into the thick brush that lined the river.
In the Song Tro Khuc’s main channel, where the current pulled strongest, Hathcock could see the Chinese soldier’s back and shoulders above the water. Taking careful aim, he sent a bullet into the man’s back, making certain that this advisor’s last testament to the Viet Cong would be a warning to beware of the whispering death.
Hathcock silently slipped from the hide and crept through the jungle toward a mark on his map where he knew friendly forces now waited.
“Happy New Year,” Hathcock called out, startling a daydreaming Marine who was manning a forward outpost.
“What the fu--! Where in the hell you come from, man?” the Marine called back.
“That’s, where in the hell you come from… Sergeant!” Hathcock said with a broad smile, showing a line of white teeth contrasting against the camouflage paint that covered his face. “You got a radio?”
“Sure. You a sniper?”
“Yep. I spent the night observing Charlie moving a lot of men and equipment downstream. And I killed what looked to be a Chinese officer.”
“Chinese? Shit!”
“What net you on?”
“7th Marines. Just talk and the regimental CP will answer.”
While Hathcock spoke with an operations officer at the regimental command post, Captain Land talked with the 1st Marine Division’s operations officer, Col. Herman Poggemeyer, Jr.his boss. Land was getting short. His orders home had arrived.
“Captain,” the colonel said, “you’ve done an impressive job with the snipers. General Nickerson is extremely happy with the program and sad to see you go. But you need to go home. I want you to stop in and see the G-2. He’ll show you one good reason why you should not consider extending in-country.” What the intelligence officer showed Land shocked him a little and concerned him a lot. “God damn it, Hathcock!” he roared.
A newspaper story that had appeared in the Sea Tiger* extolling the greatness of “Hathcock and company” had fed the enemy vital information about the 1st Marine Division’s sniper school, its officer in charge, and the sniper with the most scalps—the one who wore the white feather—Sergeant Carlos Hathcock. The Viet Cong had issued a leaflet based on the story.
Land stared at the black-and-white leaflet, written in the Vietnamese language, to which the intelligence officer had attached a translation. A pen-and-ink sketch on the left half of the front page depicted a perfect likeness of Hathcock, complete with bush hat and white feather, and on the right, a perfect likeness of himself, square- jawed and steely eyed.
The translation stated that the two Americans were wanted by the People of Vietnam for the murder of hundreds of innocent women and children. They offered the pay that a middle-class city worker would make in a period of three years as a reward for either man—dead or alive.
Captain Land handed the leaflet back to the captain who had custody of it.
“You know, Charlie has a standing reward of eight dollars a head on any sniper. What you’re looking at is several thousand bucks for each of you two. If I were you—and I thank God I’m not—I would get in the bunker in the center of the compound and not come out until the Freedom Bird took me back to the world.”
Land smiled. “I’ve got work to do, Captain. Good day.”
Seeing the leaflet made Land feel naked. He wondered who might be watching even now and walked near cover, consciously avoiding the open.
Hathcock must be warned. He had no way of knowing that Charlie wanted him bad enough to pay literally a king’s ransom for his head.
“God damn that Hathcock!” the captain swore. He walked to a pickup point, where he could catch a truck from Hill 327 back to Hill 55.
A helicopter rushed Hathcock to a debriefing at the 7th Marines command post, while Captain Land bounced and jarred in the back of a “six-by” truck headed south. Several officers crowded around as the sniper read from the notes that he had jotted in his log book during the night.
“Are you certain he was Chinese?” a lieutenant asked. “Could he have been North Vietnamese or Laotian?”
“Could have been any kind of Oriental Communist, Sir,” Hathcock said. “But he looked to me like he was wearing a Chinese uniform. It was gray, or light brown—I couldn’t be certain because of the color of the early morning light. However, he had that big red star on his hat and those big red and gold tabs on his collar. I have no doubts about that.”
A husky gunnery sergeant, with a bulldog wearing a Marine campaign cover tattooed on his forearm, said, “Sir, what the sergeant described is a Chinese officer. Probably about like our field grade—perhaps a colonel. From an intelligence standpoint, I’d like to examine that body and what he had in his pockets.”
“I want that body,” a major said, taking a pipe from his mouth and blowing a cloud of cherry-scented smoke through die command post tent, where they grouped around Hathcock. “Call for some helicopters to sweep the river. Put out a reward to anyone who can lead us to where that body may be snagged up.”
“Odds are the VC already got him,” another major said. “We can offer twenty thousand piasters. Those gooners will turn in their mothers for that. But I wouldn’t hold my breath.”
“Sergeant, good job. We’ll write this up as two probable kills and send your report to division with trie sitrep.”
The Marines walked outside. Hathcock was already planning another mission.
Late that afternoon, Captain Land climbed down from the bed of the dirty truck in which he had ridden to Hill 55. His body ached and his head throbbed from the long, rough ride, but throughout the whole trip back he had thought only of
what to do about his sniper who had spent the past month walking patrol after patrol, working himself to
