walked out the door,
“Just be sure you get your food and rest.”
The following morning, while the sun stilt lay hidden beyond the foggy horizon, Carlos Hathcock silently crawled behind a blind of bushes and grass on the far end of finger four. Months before, he had constructed the hide by digging a small hole in which he could lie and bench his rifle over two sandbags. From it he could watch the rice fields below and the hills that flanked them.
More than twelve hundred yards directly ahead of him, a small thatched hut sat near a stand of tall trees. Near the hut a high stack of straw and grass stood with its top covered by a large canvas tarpaulin. Through his scope, Hathcock could see the dark doorway and a woman walking outside, carrying a large jug.
A thousand yards to his left, a less-prominent hill rose from the forest, and on its peak, overlooking the countryside, stood a small, one-room temple, crowned with a bell-shaped top, that had large, oblong windows. The entire shrine was made of stone tinted green and black with moss and mold.
Across the fields and hedgerows to his right, several small hills rippled up from the flatness of the surrounding farmland. It was from there that this sniper who killed the gunnery sergeant had fired the fatal bullet. Every time he shot from that cluster of knolls, the Marines on watch responded with concentrated machine-gun and mortar fire, yet he survived each attack. The dead space between the series of hills gave him several sheltered channels through which to escape and allowed him many avenues in which to maneuver to a variety of exits.
As Hathcock scanned the wide panorama of low hills and rice paddies, Captain Land and Master Sergeant Reinke, green greasepaint on their faces, climbed toward the small stone temple atop the peak at Hathcock’s left. They hoped that the shrine’s different sighting angle would expose the enemy sniper while he climbed to his hilltop hide.
A misty fog lay like a humid blanket over the deep green jungle that covered the hillside through which the captain and the master sergeant struggled. Tangled humps of slick, moss-covered roots covered the ground. They grasped low branches and saplings and pulled their way up the hill hand over hand, while their feet slipped and slid beneath them.
Long beams of light shone down between gaps in the forest’s canopy revealing the humid air in smoky swirls of mist and fog. Ahead in a clearing, lit by the orange light that shone at an angle through the trees, stood the small stone temple, bathed in glimmering moisture from the dank air that hung over the hill.
Land turned and motioned for Reinke to come close. “I’ll check the inside,” the captain whispered into his assistant’s ear. “You stand out here and be ready in case somebody jumps out. It’s too close in there for the rifle, so I’m going in with my .45. You just be ready.”
Reinke nodded and crept to the side of the building, where he crouched on one knee and held his M-14 ready to snap into his shoulder and fire.
Land crawled next to the shrine and leaned his rifle against the wall, inadvertently causing an audible click as the barrel struck the stone. He drew out his pistol, which he carried in a holster that he wore at an angle on the back of his belt, and prepared to make his entrance.
The captain felt confident with the pistol. As well as being a Distinguished Marksman, he was a Distinguished Pistol Shot, winning many interservice and National Rifle Association championships. More than that, Land had excelled in snap-and-shoot combat pistol competition. Clearing one small room ought to be no challenge for his expertise.
With his pistol raised, a vision of John Wayne entered the captain’s mind as he lifted his leg high and slammed his foot against the temple’s thick wooden door. The heavy door swung open, and he stepped inside with a turn, pistol first.
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.
