Outside Hathcock’s hooch, Lance Corporal Burke sat quietly whittling on a stick. Hathcock saw the back of Burke’s bush hat resting against the wire screen and called out drowsily, “You been there long?”
“No, not really. Figured you weren’t in any special hurry since we’re going for the week. Thought I’d let you sleep some.”
“Let me grab my pack and rifle, and I’ll be with you. What’s the time?”
“Almost six thirty.”
Hathcock and Burke walked to the Combat Operations Center, where radios crackled around the clock and a tired-eyed gunnery sergeant sat at a field desk jotting notes on a yellow pad, assembling bits and pieces of an intelligence report from messages scrawled in pencil on flimsy, yellow slips of paper.
“Morning, Gunny,” Hathcock said in a low voice to the intelligence chief.
“Hi there, Sergeant Hathcock. Want some coffee? That jog’s fresh.”
Each man poured himself a cup and then Hathcock looked over at the sergeant. “Anything going on north-up around Elephant Valley?”
“Happenings everywhere, Sergeant Hathcock. Take your pick. Ream’s sighted lots of movement. Already had reports of contact this morning from two patrols—one up toward Elephant Valley. You planning to work up there?”
“Had that in mind, unless someone has something else to flffer. Lance Corporal Burke and I coordinated a long-range nassion up that direction.”
“Good. I could use some intel-reps from up there. Let me know your call sign when you check out with operations. And be careful—Charlie’s up to something.”
Hathcock finished checking out in the operations center and joined Burke outside in the drizzle.
“What’s the plan on getting up there?” Burke asked.
We chop north to a fire base where we join a patrol. They’ll take us to a good drop-off point. After that, we’ll be by our lonesome. A long-range patrol will pick us up on its way in Sunday, at the edge of Elephant Valley. That’s six days alone with no rear guard.
“We’re Bravo-Hotel on the radio net. We will only make contact on the move or when departing our position.”
“Or in case shit hits the fan?” Burke added with a sarcastic smile.
Hathcock unfolded a map that he had made waterproof with a clear-plastic laminating film. “We’ve got a battery of 105s here,” he told Burke, pointing to a hill located southeast of Elephant Valley. “They’ll fire on our call, if we need help. If we need air or some other kind of help, we call the S-3.”
“Sounds good, Sergeant.” The rain was ending, and Burke looked up at the brightening sky. “Weatherman says possible light showers off and on in the evening, and sunny days.”
“Good. We ought to be able to move pretty fast. Shouldn’t make any noise with the world soft and soggy.”
In less than an hour, the two snipers were climbing out of a helicopter at the fire base* where a rifle squad stood in a U-shaped formation. A tall, black corporal moved from man to man, checking each rifle and inspecting each Marine. Two Marine sentries sat behind sandbags, near a gap in the barbed wire that encircled the compound. The corporal turned toward the approaching snipers. A Marine standing in the squad crowed, “Looky here. It’s Murder Incorporated!”
“Shut the fuck up, asshole,” the black corporal snapped. “You the snipers we’re taking up toward Dong Den and Nam Yen?”
“I’m Corporal Perry.”
The men shook hands, and, in less than ten minutes, the patrol set out, moving quickly through the wire, one man at a time. Once they reached the far side of the tangled maze of barbed wire surrounding the fire base, stretched in crisscrossing patterns, each Marine took a covered position, widely spaced and on line along a hedgerow near a well-traveled road.
Perry took a quick head count and motioned to the point man to move out. One at a time, each Marine stood and followed the lead, the men taking positions staggered from right to left and spaced thirty feet apart. They maintained mis discipline of wide dispersion to lessen the effects of ambush or booby traps.
Hathcock and Burke joined the column near the patrol’s rear guard—a heavyset and already sweating Marine whose boots had worn nearly white from lack of polish. Hathcock had seen many Marines like this one—Marines who neared the end of their tours, their domes showing the wear of a year at war. He could see beginnings of the telltale one thousand-yard stare, the stoic expression on a face that had seen its fill of combat.
Hathcock looked at his own faded uniform—Marines called it “salt.” That lance corporal walking rear guard looked salty, but, except for his boots, no more salty man he or Burke did. The snipers used plenty of Mack paste wax on their boots, but they left it unbuffed so as not to reflect sunlight and draw fire.
Hathcock thought about the wisecrack the Marine had made when he and Burke turned up. It was the sort of thing he had had to get used to. He remembered Capt. Jim Land, the man largely responsible for selling the sniper program to the Marines, saying, “When you react to their brand of bullshit, you just buy more. Keep this in mind, they don’t understand snipers because snipers are new. They may be a little scared of you, too. Show them you’re a pro by not letting their crap get in your way.”
It was Land who had recruited Hathcock and Burke and fifteen other men as snipers, and be had known perfectly well what he was doing. Land looked for a special breed of Marine to join his unit—the 1st Marine Division’s Scout/Sniper Instructors. Good marksmanship was important, but that was a skill one could acquire. He picked men like Hathcock because they possessed the more important skills—great knowledge of nature and the 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.