Hathcock said nothing. He knew that sniping was highly cost-effective in terms of materials and lives. He also knew its impact on the enemy. Snipers denied the enemy leadership and access to communications and heavy weapons. But mostly, snipers demoralized the enemy. Made them quit. Made them hide and not want to fight.
“Sir, I can’t imagine anybody not wanting to make snipers a regular part of the battalion. Just think if every company had a platoon of snipers who doubled as scouts. How could anyone not want that?” Hathcock asked Land.
“They don’t want to consider that you, in a single month, killed more than thirty enemy soldiers, confirmed. Forget probable kills. Compare your success—one man—against an entire battalion’s during the same period.
“Operation Macon started back on the fourth of July down near An Hoa. That’s real hot Indian country. Third Battalion, 9th Marines worked extra hard clearing the area around the industrial complex. They lost twenty-four Marines from the time they started until the end of October, when they wrapped it up. In the four months that Macon lasted, they confirmed 445 enemy dead. That is a little more than 110 per month. It’s a damn good result for a battalion. They’re proud of it, too.
“From mid-October to mid-November you confirmed thirty kills, nearly a third of what an entire battalion accomplished patrolling day and night.
“Look at October alone. Operation Kern netted seventy-five VC kills and cost eight Marine KIAs. Operation Teton nailed thirty-seven VC and two Marine KIAs. And Operation Madison blew hell out of Cam Ne hamlet—looking for a VC battalion—and got nothing, not even a sack of rice.
“In the first month we’ve been in business we have more than sixty kills. That’s between seventeen people, and most of them students. “What if those battalions had snipers working ahead of their operations, or keeping security around their camps. I think the results would have been much more impressive and would have had longer lasting effects against the enemy. Lord only knows how long Charlie keeps on ducking and dodging after we’ve worked an area.
“If we sell the sniper system, battalion and company commanders won’t want to go to war without a sniper platoon to keep the boogeyman out of the bushes.”
Hathcock looked Land in the eye and smiled. They both knew that if the Marine Corps could be convinced of the value of sniping, they were the ones to do it. Just then, rifle fire began to crack.
The bullets struck the rocks well below where Hathcock sat, but the surprise sent him diving headlong into the din. He heard shot after shot splattering against the rocks.
The old man who lay at the edge of the cane field fired his twentieth round and gathered the empty brass.
Land glanced at Hathcock in the gray light that now filled the hillside as November 21 dawned. “I know one place to start hunting tomorrow.”
Wilson and Burke returned from their day’s stalk with little more than a few blisters. They had not had a good hunt. They had seen Charlie, but by the time they got authorization to shoot into that sector, he had strolled right on by.
Land looked disgusted, “I swear these rules of engagement get my goat. One place there’s a free fire zone. Shoot anything that moves. Next place you can’t shoot at all unless you get permission.”
Resting his head on his pack, Hathcock sprawled out to sleep on the bunker’s dirt floor. He thought of how he preferred to work away from the crowd, shooting into free fire zones—places he called Indian country. He felt as though he had just dozed off when Land’s strong hand firmly gripped his arm.
“Carlos. Time to get up.”
Carlos jerked at his captain’s touch. He had slept with a coiled spring’s tension, leaving him stiff and sore. Stretching felt good.
Nighttime left a dampness on everything, including the aching snipers who crawled down Hill 263 into the area that the captain had cleared with operations. The zone included a large cane field that waved in the predawn breezes.
The gray morning felt chilly as the two snipers built a dummy position a hundred yards to the right of their hide. They counted on it drawing any fire, should Charlie have friends. Land calculated that when they fired, the bullets passing the elbow that jutted out from the hill, just above the dummy position, would cause a crack from the bullet’s supersonic wake. Charlie would look to where he heard the loud pop of the speeding projectile as it passed the dummy position, rather than the more distant and less dissemble .30-06 muzzle blast from the heavy semi varminter barrel.
The old man awoke late this morning. He, too, had slept poorly. He had seen strange-looking soldiers that his neighbor told him were Korean. His neighbor told him to be careful, these Koreans were not like the Americans—they killed with unquenchable thirst.
The fanner looked across the dark hut at the sleeping children and at the rapidly brightening sky that shone through the window above where they lay. It reminded him that he must hurry.
He crept to where the straw mats covered the rifle, and, with shaking hands, he rolled them back and took the weapon from its hiding place. In the shed where he stored his plow and hand tools, he lifted the lid off a pot and removed a fresh box of shells, left during the night by the phantom guerrilla who prowled through the village while all others slept. He never saw who left the shells, but they were always there each morning, and the spent rounds were always gone at night.
Because the early morning light now exposed him, the old farmer chose a hidden route through the tall, green stalks of cane. He slowly crawled to the earthen barrier that held back the rice paddy’s water.
Hathcock took the first watch behind the rifle. He scanned along the dike, searching for a target. As he panned the edge of the cane field, he noticed a dark figure crouched low.
“We got company,” he whispered to his captain. “He just hunkered down behind that dike next to the cane field. It sure wasn’t a farmer. I saw a rifle.”
“When he raises his head to shoot,” the captain answered, “drop him.”
The world seemed extraordinarily quiet to the old man, who nervously shoved the muzzle of the badly worn Chinese rifle over the top of the dike. He pulled the rifle’s butt into his shoulder and fixed his eyes to the hilltop where he saw dark figures silhouetted against the gray morning sky. His hands trembled as he gripped the stock and rolled his finger around the rusty trigger.
“Get the task finished,” he thought to himself as he jerked the trigger.
The sudden explosion from the rusty barrel sent an echo across the valley to where the two snipers lay beneath their camouflage.
“Can you see him?” Land asked Hathcock, who now squirmed behind the long scope atop his Winchester.
Carlos said nothing. He saw the top of the old man’s gray head, his temples, his ears, and his one open eye behind the sights of the rifle. The target that the old man presented at five hundred yards lay hidden behind die reticle as Carlos concentrated on the cross hairs’ intersection.
Slowly, he increased pressure on the trigger so as not to disturb the sight’s alignment on the old man’s temple. He watched through the scope and saw the gray puffs of smoke clouding above the old man’s rifle.
Above where the fanner and the snipers lay, Marines jumped behind sandbags, swearing at this constant aggravation. Before the operation, the firing had bothered no one, since the Marines who normally camped on the hilltop rarely ventured to the side where they had heard shots each morning since the summer.
A fourth and fifth shot belched from the rusty rifle, yet Hathcock did not rush his. He waited for the pressure to overpower the resistance of the trigger’s spring.