The weekend with his friends had planted a seed of doubt in his mind. For eight years he had put down roots in the Marine Corps and now, as he bounced his giggling son up and down, his thoughts drifted away to the firing ranges, to the comradeship between friends, and to the competition and the possible chance of winning another national championship.
The night that he got home from Camp Lejeune’s Stone Bay ranges, Hathcock told Jo that he missed the Marine Corps already. And from the tone of his voice, she knew that the odds of him remaining a civilian and staying out of the war had grown slim. She was well aware that Carlos did not like being an electrician, it had become obvious that going to work each day was an increasing drudgery for him.
“I was safer in Vietnam,” Hathcock said sharply, after telling Jo how a screwdriver, hurled by an electrocuted co-worker, narrowly missed his head. “I don’t like that job.”
“What does that mean?” Jo responded. “You want to go back into the Marine Corps?”
He sat silent for a moment, looking at his son bounce. He felt a tightness in his stomach wrench into a hard knot with her response. “Would that be so bad?” he asked. “I’m a competitive marksman and marksmanship instructor. I’m sure not volunteering to go back to Vietnam.”
“Carlos, I knew what you were when I married you. I’ve never liked the Marine Corps, but I accepted it. Don’t feel like you’re doing me and Sonny a favor by staying out and being miserable. I want you to be happy. That’s what makes me happy.”
BY SUMMER HE AND HIS FAMILY HAD MOVED FROM NEW BERN TO Quantico, where he was assigned to the Marksmanship Training Unit and the Marine Corps’ national champion rifle team.
Hathcock continued shooting the three hundred Winchester magnum rifle at a thousand yards as well as the M-14 on the National Match Course,* but he also began pursuing the international small-bore (.22 caliber) competition as well, hoping for a chance at the 1968 Olympics.
One day in July, 1967, Hathcock came home from Quantico’s Calvin A. Lloyd Rifle Rangers and saw Jo waiting at the door, holding a letter with a Massachusetts postmark.
“Honey, you got a letter from Captain Land,” she called.
He trotted across the lawn to the door, smiling. He had not heard from his friend since he left Vietnam. He tore the envelope open as he walked in the door, stopping for a moment to pick up his son and give him a bear hug.
As he settled into an easy chair, the 6:00 P.M. television news came on, and he put down the letter. A reporter spoke from atop a hotel in Saigon. He watched intently, hoping to hear of the 1st Marine Division and the war in I Corps.
During the commercial, Carlos looked at the letter that he had pressed flat on his lap.
Dear Carlos,
I’m glad to see that you made it out alive. At first I heard that you got out of the Marine Corps, but now I see that you have made it to the Big Team. You deserve it, my friend. You earned it.
I can understand you getting out for a while, you were pretty well burned out. I’m sure. I’m glad that you got back on your feet and reenlisted. The Marine Corps needs you.
I wish this letter could be all good, but I’m afraid that I have some bad news. I got a letter from Major Wight the other day. He said that the sniper program is really working well. Burke got promoted to corporal and went to 1st Battalion, 26th Marines, and took charge of a squad. He was really proud.
Burke and his men got assigned security duty up at Khe Sanh and ran into trouble. Carlos, Burke got killed.
I don’t know any more about it, but I feel sure that he died with valor and not from some dumb mistake. After all, you taught him well.
I know that you thought the world of him. I did too. Next to you, he was one of the best Marines I ever had. I feel a great deal of grief for him now, and I can imagine the sadness you must feel too. He was a good, good Marine. We will all miss him.
Carlos looked up, and his eyes flooded with tears. He stepped into his backyard, looked at the setting sun glimmering through the tall oak and maple trees and thought of his friend. The best partner he ever had. And as he stood looking toward heaven, tears streamed down his cheeks. “What happened, Burke? What happened?”
KHE SANH WAS A SERIES OF HILLS LOCATED IN THE NORTHWESTERN corner of I Corps along the Laotian border. Hundreds of paths and tunnels branched from the Ho Chi Minh Trail and wound past Hill 881 and Long Vei and through the steep mountains of the Khe Sanh area. One lone mountain among that cluster of peaks was Hill 950. There a small encampment of Marines defended a combat outpost—one of the toughest corners of the Khe Sanh neighborhood. It was the new home of Corporal John Burke and his snipers.
Sleep came hard on Hill 950. There were no comforts of home. If a Marine was lucky, his “rubber bitch” did not leak and he could spend a quiet night in relative comfort. But the nature of life in combat does not afford rubber air mattresses staving off punctures, and thus Burke’s leaked.
As he prepared for sleep, he blew it as full as it would hold and placed a fresh Band-Aid taken from his first-aid kit over the pencil-point sized hole. But by 4 A.M. the hard ground and rocks awoke him, and he would remain awake for the rest of the day. It had come to be a way of life.
The sun set at about 8 P.M. on June 6, 1967, and left the jungle greenhouse hot. Most of the Marines slept outside. Below, in the jungle, the men could hear the screech of birds and the chatter of other creatures. The Marines standing watch listened to the echoes of an animal roaring in the far distant hills. They felt sure it was the sound of a tiger. None of them had ever seen one, but they knew it stalked these jungles.
As the Marines who stood watch that night listened to the distant roar, faint and echoing between the rock walls of the tall mountains, another, more frightening sound disrupted the stillness of the night.
Inside the bunker, the field telephone croaked. Burke snatched the receiver, pressed the black rubber button on its side and gave his name.
“Got noise on the wire,” the voice at the other end said. “Several cans rattled.”
“Can you see anything in your starlight scope?”
“Nothing.”
“Load up and be ready to fall back to your alternate positions. I’ll roust everybody here.”
Burke felt that familiar tightness build in his stomach. He did not like being on the defensive. It gave one no place to maneuver and only two choices of tactics, to hold or to retreat.
Burke began waking his men. The field phone rang again.
“Corporal Burke,” he answered.
“Sappers! Looks like they’re trying to blow the wire. I see a lot of people out there.”
“Let them commit themselves to the attack, and then turn on the lights with your pop-ups. We’ll all open on them when you put up those flares.”
Hurrying outside, Burke heard the familiar pop of a rocket-propelled grenade.
“Take cover!” he shouted.
And as he spoke, the grenade exploded in the midst of the camp, wounding several of his men. Burke began dragging them to the bunker. He could hear the heavy bursts of his listening post’s M-60 machine gun chewing into the sappers as they hurled their charges to the wire. He hoped it would hold them back until he got help.
More rocket-propelled grenades came whistling into the small outpost.
“Corporal Burke,” a Marine called to him in the orange light of the pyrotechnics that now drifted down, burning as they dangled beneath their small parachutes. “Sappers are in the wire!”
Burke knelt next to the bunker and began picking off the Viet Cong who were sacrificing themselves to break a hole in the wire with their satchel charges. Suddenly a grenade exploded in front of the Marine who had called to him. A large fragment of it struck Burke in the hip but the main force of the blast took out the other Marine who was kneeling thirty feet away.
Burke had taught that Marine the way Carlos Hathcock had taught him, and with a shout he ran toward where the man lay writhing in pain, and as carefully as he could lift
ed him up and began to carry him toward the bunker’s doorway. Before he could get the Marine inside, Burke heard the whistle of another grenade, and setting him down he fell across him. The explosion came a second later from somewhere close.
Burke felt the shrapnel tearing into his flesh, but ignoring his own wounds he got up and pulled his partner inside the shelter.
Burke could hear other wounded Marines crying out for help. He listened for the sound of the machine gun, and it spoke, belching a deadly stream of fire into the wire.
As he and another Marine struggled to pull a severely wounded man toward the bunker, a grenade exploded at his heels and sent them all rolling into the sandbags. Burke was bleeding from every limb. He listened for the machine gun. It was silent. Everyone lay wounded, and the end seemed very near.
Stepping into the bunker, Burke picked up an automatic rifle and hung a dozen grenades on his belt.
“What’s going on?” a wounded comrade asked.
“Those gooners ain’t comin’ in here! Don’t you worry about that! You just keep those rifles pointed out, and don’t hesitate to shoot!” Lifting up his rifle, Burke went out the door.
The Marine charged the dozens of enemy soldiers who were stepping through the tangle of wire and hurled grenade after grenade at them. He held the M-16 in his left hand and with magazines taped end on end, emptied them into the soldiers who fell and scurried and twisted, caught in the wire.
Behind these soldiers, rifle fire erupted, and the familiar sound of rocket-propelled grenades echoed in the night. But Burke kept charging, killing the enemy, and because of his fury, the Viet Cong fled. They did not see Burke fall. They did not look back.
On April 30, 1968, nearly a year after his death, the Secretary of the Navy, Paul H. Ignatuis, acting for President Lyndon Johnson, signed a citation awarding Burke the United States’ second highest medal for valor, the Navy Cross.
EVEN THOUGH THE WEATHER REMAINED COOL AND PLEASANT AT Quantico, Virginia, this April afternoon of 1969 burned hot in eastern Texas as Carlos Hathcock drove his blue Chevrolet Bel Air along Interstate 10 outside Houston on his way to the National Rifle Association’s regional rifle matches at San Antonio.
Hathcock looked forward to the San Antonio shootout because it would launch him into the 1969 Marine Corps Matches riding near his crest. If he did well there, he would reach his peak for the Interservice Matches and the National Championships at Camp Perry a week later. Just as in 1965, he saw the earmarks of another big year in 1969. He felt certain of that.
Squinting behind dark glasses, Hathcock strained to see the highway that disappeared into the setting sun. The radio blared a steady flow of country music above the hot, coastal Texas wind that roared through his car’s open windows as the speedometer needle pointed at seventy and the dashed white line on the highway blurred past the left side of his car. He had left Jo and Sonny the day before at Quantico, and as he sang “Waltz Across Texas” with Ernest Tubb on the radio and watched the darkening Houston-skyline grow smaller in his rearview mirror, he thought of his wife and son at home.
They had endured the long shooting seasons since the summer of 1967, seeing Hathcock only one or two days a week. If they wanted to see him more frequently, they had to drive to the rifle ranges and watch him shoot. Jo had never complained.
She knew that Carlos’s shooting could not last forever. He had to do something else, other than compete with the rifle. She prayed for that day to come each time she watched her neighbors at Quantico enjoy weekends and evenings with their husbands.
But, hidden in her thoughts, also loomed the war, and she considered herself lucky compared to her friends whose husbands now fought in Vietnam. Each night on the news Jo watched wounded American soldiers looking into the cameras as their buddies lifted them onto helicopters. She saw the faces of men who, to her, looked too much like her husband.
Tonight, on the news, President Nixon talked of the prospects of peace with honor, yet during this very month of April 1969, as Hathcock drove through Texas, the United States reached its peak of military involvement in Vietnam with 543,400 American servicemen committed to combat there.
While Jo watched the nightly news, the telephone rang. She looked at the clock and reckoned Carlos had finally reached San Antonio. “That must be your daddy,” she said to her son as she walked to the telephone.
“Hello.”
“Honey. I got here all right, but I have a little bad news,” Hathcock said calmly. “I can’t shoot down here this weekend. I’ve gotta come home.”
“Carlos, what’s wrong?”
“I no more than walked in here and Gunner Bartlett told me not to unpack. I have orders waiting on me at Quantico, and I have to go straight back tomorrow.”
“Carlos! Orders where?”
Jo felt the awful emptiness swell in her stomach as she asked. She held her breath as Hathcock tried to sound cheerful about his next assignment. “Well, it’s to that big shootin’ match across the pond.”
“Oh, no, Carlos. You’ve already been. You just got back. They must have made a mistake!”
“I don’t know. I sure didn’t ask for these orders, but I don’t think it’s a mistake. Jo, I’ll be home tomorrow night or Sunday morning at the latest. We’ll talk about it then. I love you.”
“I love you, Carlos.”
16
Return to Vietnam
“AIN’T CHANGED MUCH,” HATHCOCK SAID AS HE PUT OUT his hand to a sandy-haired Marine with a strawberry complexion who stood on the plywood porch of a hard-backed tent on Hill 55. “Looks like they improved the hooches some since ’67. I’m Staff Sergeant Hathcock.”
Gunnery Sergeant David Sommers took the outstretched hand of the slim-built Marine who Sgt. Maj. Clinton A. Puckett, a man who would later become only the sixth Marine to hold the title Sergeant Major of the Marine Corps,* had assigned him to sponsor. Sommers had already heard much about Hathcock, and he wondered how such a slight looking man could command such a reputation. He had expected a much larger, tougher looking Marine.
“I’m Gunny Sommers, 7th Marine Regiments’ career planner and Headquarters Company’s company gunnery sergeant. I also keep house in this hooch. I’ve got you a cot all the way down at the end.”
Sommers opened the screen door, and Hathcock stepped inside the hard-back tent, which had a tin roof and long canvas awnings over each window. New metal cots replaced the old wooden ones that he had known two years earlier, and new plywood covered the floor.
Hathcock looked toward the end of the hooch and saw his cot. And there, atop his new bed, sleeping in the breeze that blew through the rear screen door, lay a shaggy red dog.
“Yankee!” David Sommers yelled, clapping his hands loudly. “Get off there! Get! Get!”
The dog awoke with a start, sprang from the cot, lunged into the screen door, knocking it wide open, and bounded outside like a startled burglar.
“That dog!” Sommers said frustratedly. “I’ve never seen him inside before. Usually you couldn’t get him inside any kind of hooch, even if you threw a steak on the floor.”
The slim but hard-muscled gunnery sergeant walked to the cot where the dog had left dirty paw marks and began sweeping off debris with his hand. “Yankee’s really not a bad dog,” he said. “I guess he’s like any other dog…”
“Or Marine,” Hathcock said, looking back at the front door where Yankee now sat, his tongue lolling out the side of his open mouth and tail wagging across the ground, raising a cloud of dust. Hathcock whistled and knelt to one knee, and seeing the invitation, the dog nosed open the door and trotted to his new-found friend.
“He must sense something about you. Nobody could have gotten him back inside this hooch. I would have taken money on it. That dog is really picky about who he chooses as his friends.”
“What you got around your neck?” Hathcock said to the dog, ruffling the fur on Yankee’s throat and noticing a military dog tag fastened to a makeshift collar that someone had fashion
ed from an old belt. As Carlos read the tag he laughed.
It read: “Yankee” on the first line, followed by a row of numbers on the second and the initials USMC on the third line. Sex was indicated by the letter M, religion simply said, “All.” But it was the last item that brought on the chuckles—“Blood Type: Dog.”
“We’ll have to go down to LZ Baldy if he ever gets shot,” Hathcock said, grinning. “That Army camp is about the closest source of doggie blood.”
Both Marines laughed, and Sommers said, “I don’t think Yankee would like it. He’d probably rather try to get by without it.”
“Sure a fine-looking dog,” Carlos said. “Does he do any tricks?”
“He’s full of ’em. But the smartest thing about him is that he knows an attack is coming ahead of time. You hear him start growling, head for the bunker. I don’t know how he can tell, but a couple of minutes after he starts growling we’ll start getting hit.”
Gunnery Sergeant Sommers took Hathcock’s sea bag and set it in the corner next to a foot locker. He looked out the door at the heat waves that boiled across the horizon and said, “I guess you know all about Arizona Territory.”
“Pretty much. But it sure looks a lot different now. I remember there being a whole lot more trees.”
“There were more trees. The war has gotten a lot worse since you were here last. Mostly what you see now is broken trees and bare fields.”
Hathcock stood next to Sommers and looked out at the hills and valley below where forests had once flourished thick and green but which now revealed mostly gray skeletons in leafless desolation. “Arizona Territory. That all used to be a free fire zone. We never patrolled over there, just shot across at Charlie.”
“We operate out there today,” Sommers said. “Still lots of bad guys. Mostly the 90th Regiment and the 2nd NVA division. I think that we do most of our fighting there. One hot spot in particular is a little valley between here and Charlie Ridge. It has more shootouts than a Saturday night western. Troops call it Dodge City.”
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