In August of 1966, Maj. Gen. Herman Nickerson was on his way to Chu Lai, Vietnam, to assume command of the 1st Marine Division, and he stopped for staging at Camp Butler, Okinawa, where Land commanded the ordnance company.
It was a twist of fate that brought Capt. Jim Land and General Nickerson together, and it was that chance meeting that caused a major turn in the life and future of Carlos Hathcock.
Nickerson encountered Land by coincidence at a command briefing. “Captain!” the general said, “What are you doing here?’
“I’m Ordnance Company’s commander.”
“Ordnance! You’re no ordnance officer—you’re a shooter. You did all that work selling and developing the sniper program. Why aren’t you over in Vietnam, killing the Viet CongT’
“Sir, I’m afraid I don’t have an answer for you,” Land said bravely.
“I have a proposal for you, Captain Land. You get your gear together and report to me in Chu Lai. You have thirty days to be effecting sniper casualties on the enemy in Vietnam.”
Now Land was here in Vietnam, standing in the bright sunlight of Da Nang. The stocky Marine captain with the shortcut hair and the bulldog expression pulled a list of names from his pocket and began reading through them. He recognized many teammates from the Marine Corps Rifle and Pistol Team. He searched the unit designations for Marines who belonged to 1st Marine Division, since they would be easiest to have placed under his command.
Many of the Marines belonged to 3rd Marine Division, which had a sniper program started some months earlier. Major Robert A. Russell headed the snipers there and already employed several of the men whose names appeared on Land’s list.
Land took a pen from his pocket and circled several names, one of which was Sgt. Carlos Halhcock, who had been serving as a military policeman at Chu Lai since April.
By October 3, Hathcock had joined Land at the 1st Marine Division headquarters in Chu Lai. There they, together with M. Sgt. Donald L. Reinke, Gunnery Sergeant Wilson, and Staff Sgt. Charles A. Roberts made preparations to move north into the Da Nang Tactical Area of Responsibility, where 1st Marine Division would relieve 3rd Marine Division.
The move was well timed as far as the new sniper school staff was concerned. The small nucleus of snipers had spent every waking hour searching for rifles and scopes with which they could begin their own training operations. After Land obtained rifles, he had them all rebuilt and put into match condition by former shooting team armorers. By the time the sniper school staff had fully equipped themselves, the move north was ready to begin. They could start shooting the enemy as soon as they reached Hill 55, their base of operations, thirty miles southwest of Da Nang.
When the school formed at Hill 55, Captain Land managed to interview several other prospective sniper instructors, among them Lance Corporal Burke.
Careful searching had produced the sort of men he was after: good marksmen, but, above all, men who had both good outdoor skills and strong mental and moral stability. He needed no hotshots; Land knew that type well, and he had seen that the loudmouths and braggarts tended to fold when the going got really tough, and their precious lives were on the line.
Land outfitted each team of two men with an M-14 for the spotter and one of the odd bolt-action rifles for the sniper. They ranged from Remingtons to Winchesters to M-1D (Korean War vintage) sniper rifles. He married the M-84 scope to the M-1 rifles and used a variety of eight—and ten-power scopes, developed by a World War I German sniper named John Unertl, which he mounted on the Remingtons and Winchesters.
Land managed to add to his men’s confidence and chances for success by obtaining a large lot of match ammunition, direct from the Lake City Arsenal—the same ammo used in national and international shooting competition. It had 173-grain, boat-tailed bullets that traveled at 2,550 feet per second and would strike the target at the same spot with every shot. A dozen strong, the classes began.
When word spread of the sniper school’s creation, reactions ranged from the snide to the complimentary. But one request came through very clearly to the entire sniper school staff—get the Viet Cong woman who led a guerrilla platoon that terrorized the Marines at Hill 55.
7. The Apache
THE STEAMINESS OF the hot October morning left a foggy pall across Hill 55 as Marine helicopters approached from the south. The rippling, thumping sound of their rotor blades beating the heavy air echoed across the rice paddies beneath die dusty hill, and a dirty-faced young woman turned and searched the hazy southern skies.
She was attractive, about thirty years old, and stood just five feet tall. She wore her shiny black hair pulled into a tight bun on the back of her head. Her nose was small and pointed, and her eyes were wide and light brown, hinting at a partially French ancestry.
In her left hand she held a three-inch by five-inch notebook whose narrow-lined pages were bound together with paper tape that she had carefully removed from the cardboard containers in which the Americans’ artillery shells had been wrapped for shipment to Vietnam. She had bought the small notebook in Hanoi, nearly a year ago, while she was training to become a sniper platoon commander and intelligence expert. The notebook was mildewed now, and its water-stained pages were filled with the records of her numerous encounters with the enemy.
She looked at the large face of the man’s wristwatch that she wore on her left arm, opened the book to a clean page, and began writing of the activity that she observed.
Squatting in the tall, saw-blade elephant grass, she swore in Vietnamese and spit out the betel nut she had been chewing. She realized that the Marines she had tormented so successfully were leaving, and an entirely new unit was replacing them. The progress she had made with the old residents of Hill 55 was nullified. She would have to begin anew.
She crawled through the thick grass to the edge of a rice field where other women, dressed as she was—in black silk blouses and pants and wearing broad-brimmed, rice-straw hats-worked. The women knew better than to take any notice of her. When a few of them walked back toward the village, she followed behind them. Once they reached the cluster of huts, she made her way to a hut at the far side of the village, next to the edge of the jungle and, reaching in its doorway, took hold of a canvas rucksack and her most prized possession, a Russian M1891/30 Mosin-Nagant 7.62 × 54mm sniper rifle with a 3.5-power PU scope mounted atop its receiver.
Glancing over her shoulder at the women huddled at the other end of the village, their eyes turned away, she stepped quickly behind the hut and disappeared into the jungle.
On Hill 55, four Marines who had gotten off one of the helicopters that had flown them there from Chu Lai, walked to an empty, hard-backed tent on the edge of the compound and laid down their packs. A lieutenant from the intelligence section met them outside the dark green canvas-covered, plywood-and-pine-board structure, with its large, screen-covered windows and doors, and introduced himself to Captain Land.
“What’s the good word, Lieutenant?” Land asked cheerfully, as he pulled a handkerchief from his hip pocket and wiped the sweat from his face.
“How soon are you and your men going to be in operation?”
“Give us a little time to get our racks made and office in order, and I’ll tell you.”
“Come see me when you’re ready to go after Charlie,” the lieutenant said casually. “I can put you onto some leads, and I can certainly use the input from your sightings.”
“I plan to do that. What can you tell me about this place?”
“It’s one of the most active areas in the country,” the young officer said. He unfolded a plastic-covered map that he carried in the cargo pocket on the leg of his trousers. “Our west are Charlie Ridge and Happy Valley. Just south is An Hoa, and right there is Dodge City. Up north we have Elephant Valley, and over here, across this river, is Oklahoma Territory—all Indian country, just crawling with gooks.