outdoors, a sense of belonging to the wilds, extensive field-craft skills, and, most important, strong mental stability and extreme patience. So far Land’s judgment had paid off.
The patrol walked for two hours through the bush, and engaged in one fire fight that could have been costly but wasn’t because they had approached an area that seemed ideal for a Viet Cong ambush with caution. The ambush had come, but the Marines hadn’t been where the enemy expected them to be. Result: six dead Viet Cong and a massive string of mines the Cong had laid along a trail set off by one of their own men.
The Marines departed from the scene of the action and moved through more acres of hills and thorns and tall grass. The sun baked the ground dry from the morning rain. The weeds crunched under their steps as the patrol approached a stream mat led northwest, toward Elephant Valley.
“Sergeant Hathcock, I guess this is it for now,” the black corporal said to the snipers. “I hope I see you again. You two Marines take care of yourselves.”
Hathcock and Burke dropped away as the patrol moved westward. This was the start point from which the sniper team moved into Elephant Valley for the week.
They had a long trek ahead that would be at a much slower pace. Beneath the thick undergrowth they went forward cautiously, on constant alert for the slightest hint of Charlie’s presence. Hathcock faced the inner struggle of speed versus stealth. He wanted to be hidden by nightfall—in position and ready to start hunting Charlie at first tight. But he was going to see to it that even their presence in this area would be unknown to the enemy.
3. Elephant Valley
BATE DE TOURANE, as the French called it, serves as the city of Tourane’s gateway to the South China Sea. When the French left Tourane, the Vietnamese, and later the Americans, called the city Da Nang. The muddy water of the Ca De Song—known to U.S. Marines as the Cade River—finds its end at this city, emptying into the bay that is guarded by a prominent peak the Americans named Monkey Mountain.
Ca De Song flows wide from the west’s high mountains, into the thousands of rice fields that border the northern edge of Da Nang. During this region’s monsoon season—November through February—more than one hundred inches of rain swells the river, flooding the rice fields along its banks. Those farmlands, vulnerable to the river’s monsoon ravages, stretch from Da Nang’s northern limits to where the river’s valley begins gashing between the Annamite Cordillera’s eight thousand-feet-high peaks.
Along the southern bank of the river, a dirt road winds just above die highest points that the monsoon floodwaters reach. This road serves the farmers, who grow rice along this river, as a pathway to Da Nang’s market. During the monsoon floods, it also serves as their escape route from the deep, rushing water as it courses eastward between densely forested granite mountains. No one knows who first built the road. For the Vietnamese farmers, it has always been there—the only trafficable route out of this mountainous jungle. Because it is the only road, the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese Army depended on it for supplies and reinforcements from Laos.
More than twenty kilometers northwest of Da Nang, heading up river to where the Ca De Song bends north and then west again, rises a velvety green mountain, thirty-three hundred feet high, called Dong Den. Below Dong Den stretches the narrow, elbow-shaped run that infantrymen from the 3rd Marine Regiment named Elephant Valley.
It got its name one June night in 1965 when the Marines atop Dong Den’s jungle-covered ridges heard the trumpeting of elephants. An illumination round was fired to light the valley, and it revealed a train of eight elephants, loaded with heavy cannons. The Marines called for naval gunfire, and after two spotter rounds, the eastern horizon came ablaze with the flash of the ship’s broadside fire. In the valley, the barrage struck, obliterating the Viet Cong and their elephants.
The elephants died near the hamlet of Nam Yen, the heart of Elephant Valley. There the river runs eastward. Two kilometers downriver, where the elbow crooks southward, is the hamlet of Pho Nan Thuong Ha. And two kilometers below this crook, the river again bends eastward at a hamlet called Truong Dinh—the end of Elephant Valley.
It is here at Elephant Valley’s eastern limit that the mountains become hills and the river spreads flat across the rice land, scattering sandbars between its wide channels and dumping silt into Bale de Tourane.
Darkness had swallowed this country as Carlos Hathcock and Johnny Burke slowly made their way over the hills east of Dong Den and descended into Elephant Valley where the Ca De Song bends from its southward to its eastward flow at Truong Dinh. Hathcock planned to move into the big elbow’s crook at Pho Nan Thuong Ha where the valley broadened between the dense mountain jungles.
“We have two, maybe three kilometers left before we’re at the big bend,” Hathcock whispered to Burke as they paused to examine their map and survey this end of the long and crooked valley. “I think we’d be too close for comfort here. Only six hundred meters to work in. Up at the big bend where the valley widens we’ll have a thousand to shoot across, and, by moving into a couple of different positions, we have open fields of fire that extend two or three thousand meters up or down the valley.” The slim Marine stood up and said to Burke with a smile, “It’ll be goooood huntin’.”
These were the first words they had spoken since they separated from Corporal Perry’s patrol. On the move, they communicated with hand signs and facial expressions.
While Hathcock and Burke slipped along the valley’s edge at Truong Dinh, heading toward the big bend, as many as one hundred fifty newly trained North Vietnamese soldiers and their leaders tramped into the western reaches of the valley that follows the Ca De Song.
The NVA company consisted mostly of sixteen—and seventeen-year-old boys. They were the children of the new society of Uncle Ho—its first generation. They began school under the Communist state, established in 1954, and passed from childhood into adolescence following the valiant struggle of the Viet Minh rebels against Ngo Dinh Diem. Diem was overthrown on November 1, 1963, by Gen. Duong Van Minh, and unrest lasted through 1964. It seemed as if the National Liberation Front and its National Liberation Army, the Viet Cong, would finally claim victory and bring about the unification of Vietnam. But the United States stepped in following the ouster of Minh, propping up the south’s new chief of state, Gen. Nguyen Van Thieu, and premier Gen. Nguyen Cao Ky, and flooding South Vietnam with American forces.
Now the young Communist soldiers realized that the war might rage for years. They were valiant enough, these young men, but they were new to combat. Their uniforms looked fresh, their turtle-shell-shaped helmets showed no dents or scars, and each man’s Kalashnikov rifle looked as if it had just been unpacked.
They were a far cry from the typical National Liberation Army soldiers who had no uniforms other than khaki shirts and shorts, or black pajamas, and whose rifles were old and well worn. Men like these had often been in the jungle for years, and they waged war with whatever they could steal or capture, and with what little they could carry over the mountains from Laos.
These youngsters followed an officer who had only a little more experience than they did and who was assisted by a few subordinate officers and NCOs, who had seen some combat. Each officer and NCO carried a pistol—a symbol of authority—on his hip.
As the company route-stepped along the rice fields, the commander kept his position at the lead. Behind him his senior NCO followed closely. The young officer who led the company planned to join his battalion in the jungles on the northern side of Elephant Valley, and rather than climb through the rough mountains at a crawl, he marched his men through the flat valleys at a rapid pace. This cut days off his trek, getting badly needed soldiers to his commander, whose battalion’s numbers had been cut drastically by the search-and-destroy attacks that the growing American forces had launched against them.
Concealed in the thick jungle growth at the valley’s edge, the two Marine snipers peered from behind a tree fall covered with broad-leafed vines, scanning the open fields through which the Ca De Song snaked. They rubbed light and dark green greasepaint on their faces, necks, ears, and hands. The whiteness of their eyes contrasted sharply with the mixture of green hues that surrounded them, like pearls laid in a mossy pool.
The white feather festooning the senior sniper’s bush hat lay motionless in the still morning air. Soon dawn’s first gray light began to reveal more and more of the wide and flat river valley to Carlos Hathcock’s and John Brake’s shifting and searching eyes. Both snipers felt knots tighten in the pit of their stomachs. As the early morning brightened, they could hear the muffled sounds of men on the march.
