platoon that 7th Marines can brag about.”
Puckett was a man who had always done what he thought was best for his soldiers, and now, in spite of himself, he had to be impressed. “I’ll do what I can for you, if you’re serious,” he said sternly. “Don’t you embarrass me.”
Hathcock reached inside the large cargo pocket on the leg of his camouflage trousers and pulled out a list that he had typed early that morning in the dim light uf a small tamp. “Here’s a copy of my shopping list. I sure appreciate the help.” He walked back to the jeep where David Sommers waited and left with him.
All the way down the hill, the two men laughed. “Hell, Hathcock, he’ll probably deliver the stuff himself. You sure stuck your chin out, inviting him to become a sniper. The sergeant major’s just gunji enough to do that.”
“Good! If he’s one of us, then he can’t be against us.”
“Yeah. But he’ll still be a pain in the ass. You know, he’s got to take care of everybody else too.”
“I hope he does,” Hathcock said, jumping out of the jeep.
That evening, when Hathcock walked into the sniper hooch, he found the old platoon sergeant reclining on the duty rack, wearing his dirty jungle boots and reading a paperback western.
“Sergeant Major send you back here?”
“Yeah,” the sergeant said without taking his eyes from the book.
“You think you can generate enough energy to answer this phone, if it rings?”
“Yeah, no problem.”
“For the next two weeks, you’re phone watch.”
The sergeant glanced at Hathcock and then turned his eyes back to the book.
Hathcock slammed the door as he left and grumbled all the way to the staff hooch where he found Sommers sitting outside, drinking a Coca-Cola.
“Two weeks with that bum! I don’t know how I’ll do it. I can’t stand two minutes with him!”
“Cool off, Hathcock. Look at it this way. The sergeant major will have someone to talk to when he calls. Who knows, maybe he’ll get tired of seeing him lie back there and put him to work.”
“Burning shitters? No sergeant’s gonna burn shifters. Not even him. But now that I think about it, he may give me the space I need to get these snipers trained and put to work.”
Sommers smiled and raised his soda can in a toasting salute. “See, even that dark cloud has its silver lining.”
Mid-June heat cooked brown what little green color existed in the elephant grass in the valley below Hill 55. The summer sun sent the mirage boiling in heavy waves above the many empty rice fields that had flourished with tall stands of grain only a year before. Beyond the fields, near the broken trunks of hundreds of denuded trees that prickled the hillside with their shattered, gray skeletons, Carlos Hathcock and three of his snipers trudged in the shimmering heat, carefully following a plan set out by the patrol leader—a corporal who Hathcock was evaluating.
“You seem pretty familiar with this plan,” Hathcock said in a low voice to the corporal as they stopped to rest in the cover of several of the downed logs. “You walk this ground very often?”
“Yes. I’ve done it about three times this week, in fact.”
“You took this route three times this week?”
“Sure. I’ve gotten kills every time too. I thought that today, with four of us, we would hit the jack-pot.”
“Or Charlie will hit the jack-pot. You underestimate your opponent, Corporal. That’s deadly. Do you think they’re going to let you walk out here three times a week and not leave you a little present?”
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 Hathcock’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
