Things that caused a missed prearranged rendezvous were weather and enemy activity in the area. So far, the weather was clear, and we hadn’t seen or heard the enemy. But he was there. We saw fresh ruts and footprints in the network of trails, and we came upon recently abandoned camps, and we smelled cooking fires at night. He was all around us, but he was invisible, and so, too, I hoped, were we.
That all changed on Day Ten.
We were patrolling an area that gave me some concern; it was a place that had once been lush woodland, but was now an expanse of napalm-charred tree trunks, compliments of the U.S. Air Force. Our job here was to report on the effects of the recent air strike, and I was trying to comprehend and evaluate what I was seeing: black ash, charred trucks, and dozens of grotesquely contorted and incinerated bodies, white teeth protruding from charcoal faces. We needed to do a vehicle and body count.
The problem with this place, other than the obvious, was that it offered little or no cover and concealment to me and my men.
I spoke in a whisper to my radio operator behind me, a guy named Alf Muller. “Radio.” I put my hand out behind me to take the radiophone, but it wasn’t slapped into my hand as it should have been.
I turned to see Alf lying facedown in the black ash, his radio strapped to his back and his arms thrown out from his sides, one hand holding the phone at the end of the wire.
It took me half a second to realize he’d been hit.
I yelled “Sniper!” and dove to the ground and did a roll in the ash with everyone else. We lay there, hoping to look like something inanimate among the blackened debris of the blasted earth.
Sniper. The scariest thing on the battlefield, where scary things abound. I hadn’t heard the shot, and I wouldn’t hear the next one either. Nor would I see the sniper even if I was still alive after the next shot. The sniper operates from a long distance-about a hundred or two hundred meters-and he has a very good rifle, equipped with a telescopic sight, a silencer, and a flash suppressor. He wears camouflage clothing and his face is blackened like the ash I was lying in. He is the Grim Reaper who harvests the living.
No one moved, because movement meant death.
There was no way to tell where the shot had come from, so we couldn’t get behind something because we could actually be putting ourselves in the direct line of fire. We couldn’t run because we could be running right toward the sniper.
I turned my head slowly toward Alf. His face lay in the ash, and there was no sign of breathing.
To the extent that I had any thoughts at all except terror, I wondered why the sniper had taken Alf, the radio man, rather than me; the guy next to the radio man is the officer or the sergeant, who is the prime target in combat, like taking out the quarterback. Strange. But I wasn’t complaining.
There is no best thing to do in this situation, but the second best thing to do is nothing. My guys were trained, and they knew to keep their nerve and stay motionless. If the sniper fired again, and someone got hit-assuming we knew someone was hit-then we’d have no choice but to scatter and take a chance that the sniper could only hit so many moving targets before some of us were out of range.
I get paid to make decisions, so I decided that the sniper was too far off to hear us. I needed a head count, and I called out, “ Dawson. Report.”
My patrol sergeant, Phil Dawson, called back, “Landon is hit. He was moving, but I think he’s dead.”
The patrol medic, Peter Garcia, called out, “I’ll try to get to him.”
“No!” I shouted. “Stay put. Everyone report.”
The men reported in order of their assigned patrol numbers. “Smitty here,” then “Andolotti here,” followed by “Johnson here,” then after a few long seconds, Markowitz and Beatty reported.
Sergeant Dawson, whose job it is to count heads, reported to me, “Nine accounted for, Lieutenant. You got Muller with you?”
I called back, “Muller is dead.”
“Shit,” said Dawson.
So we had the two radio operators dead, which was not a coincidence. But it was puzzling.
I needed to get on the radio and ask for observation helicopters and gunships to form a ring of fire around us and maybe flush out the son of a bitch. I glanced toward Muller, who was about five feet from me. He had the radiophone in his right hand, which was farthest away from me.
Well, I thought, we could stay here and get picked off one by one, we could wait until sundown and hope the sniper didn’t have a nightscope, or I could earn some of that extra combat pay. I had a thought, based on a year of this kind of crap, that the sniper was gone. I thought this because all this possum playing didn’t amount to much, considering how exposed we were in this burned-out terrain. So, if the sniper was still there, he’d have taken a few more shots by now. I called out, “Report.”
Everyone who was alive a few minutes ago was still alive.
I took a deep breath and rolled twice, then a third time over Alf’s body and came to a motionless stop on top of his outstretched arm. I snatched the radiophone out of his stiffening fingers and put it to my ear, waiting for the shot that would blow my brains out. I squeezed the send button and said in the mouthpiece, “Royal Duck Six, this is Black Weasel.” I released the send button, and I pressed the earpiece hard against my ear, but there was dead silence. I tried again, but there wasn’t even a radio hum or the sound of breaking squelch coming through the earpiece. The radio was as dead as Alf Muller.
I waited for the impact of a bullet somewhere in my body. I could almost feel the hot steel tearing into me.
I waited. I got pissed off. I stood and called out to my patrol, “If I go down, you scatter!”
I stood there and nothing happened.
I ordered again, “Report.”
The seven other survivors reported again.
I looked down at Alf Muller and saw now the bullet hole in his radio. I walked along the line of the patrol and saw my men lying in the black ash, their heads turning toward me, and some of them saying, “Get down, Lieutenant! You crazy?”
You get this sixth sense that it’s not your turn that day, that you’re okay now, that fate has spared you for something worse later.
I found Landon facedown like Muller, and like Muller there was a single hole in the top of his radio. The battery is in the bottom; the guts are in the top. The sniper knew that and was able to put a single round through the electronics and into the spine of both radio operators.
What I didn’t understand was why the sniper didn’t take out at least a few other guys. He certainly had the time, had the range, had a clear field of fire, and obviously was a good shot.
Actually, I knew the answer. This guy was playing with us. There was no other reason for his actions. A little psychological warfare, played with a deadly rifle instead of propaganda leaflets or Radio Hanoi broadcasts. A message to the Americans. And the game wasn’t over.
Snipers think and act differently from normal people, and our own snipers, some of whom I’d met, liked to play games, too. It gets boring waiting for hours or days or weeks for a target. The sniper’s mind does weird things during the long, lonely waits, so when a target finally shows up in the telescopic lens, the sniper becomes a comedian and does funny things. Funny to them, not to the targets. An American sniper once told me he’d shot the hashish pipe out of an enemy soldier’s mouth.
I thought about sharing these thoughts with my men, but if they hadn’t figured it out already, then they didn’t need to know, or they’d know soon enough.
Decision time. I said, “Okay, we’ve got to leave these guys for a body recovery detail. Strip the bodies, and let’s get moving.”