The brim of Carlos Hathcock’s faded camouflage bush hat sagged over die dull green tube of die telescopic sight as he observed a distant speck wobbling toward him up the dirt road.
Slowly the boy on the bicycle grew larger in Hathcock’s gun sight, and a troubled expression crept across Hathcock’s narrow, suntanned face. He saw a number of rifles—four dangling from the handlebars, two on each side, and three more tied sideways beneath the bicycle’s seat. A dirty, green haversack hung from the center of the handlebars, bulging fat with hundreds of rifle cartridges packed in bandoleers or loaded in a dozen banana-curved magazines that protruded from beneath the flap of the old canvas pack. This boy was not just another kid on a bike; he was a Viet Cong resupply “mule,” carrying arms and ammunition to an enemy patrol. When night fell, that patrol would turn the rifles that this underfed, twelve-year-old boy now struggled to deliver, directly on Hathcock’s brother Marines.
Hathcock never wanted to kill men, much less children. He knew, however, that this was no ordinary child. Children in war grow up quickly. And Marines die as fast from bullets fired by twelve-year-old boys as they do from bullets fired by twelve-year-old boys as they do from bullets fired by men.
The bicycle teetered closer and closer. The sniper’s grip tightened on the gun’s two wooden handles. His thumbs rested firmly on the butterfly-shaped trigger, which was mounted between the handles at the gun’s butt. He followed the youth until the boy came abeam him, allowing for a clean, two thousand-yard, broadside shot.
Hathcock moved his scope’s cross hairs onto the front wheel and fork of the boy’s bike. He pressed his thumbs slowly down on the trigger and sent a heavy (two and-one-half-inch, seven hundred-grain) bullet ripping into the bicycle’s framework.
The boy somersaulted over the handlebars and crashed into the orange dust that covered the road. His deadly cargo scattered, and Hathcock smiled. Maybe now this boy would run away and leave the work of death to men.
That hope rapidly vanished. The shaken lad grabbed the nearest automatic rifle and, with a quickness gained from many firelights, jammed a banana-curved magazine into the weapon. Then he raised the gun. Just as he began to shoot, Carles Hathcock dropped him dead.
A Marine patrol walked down to the road and took the load of enemy rifles and ammo. Vietnamese farmers who had been working in the nearby rice paddies carried the boy’s body away.
As he always did after engaging the enemy, Hathcock jotted down the facts of the incident in a dog-eared, green notebook—his “sniper log”—that he carried in the slanted breast pocket of his camouflage shirt. Later that evening, he would describe the “kill” in a situation report that would be sent to his new officer in charge, Maj. D. E. Wight.
Hathcock didn’t need to take notes, however, to keep that experience forever vivid.
He and Roberts looked over the sandbag wall and watched the villagers carry the boy’s limp body toward the mud-and-rice-straw huts that stood a few hundred feet away. The broken bike lay unattended on the roadside. It would be gone by morning.
The sniper’s dark eyes followed the road back toward the mountain passes—the many corridors of the Ho Chi Minh Trail. No doubt those weapons had been boxed in China and had ridden the rails through Nanning and Ningming, across the North Vietnamese border to Lang Son, Kep, and into Hanoi. There women took them from their boxes and repacked the rifles into smaller lots for their trip southward to the Mu Gia Pass, the main funnel from North Vietnam to the Ho Chi Minh Trail and to South Vietnam’s combat zones.
During the United States involvement in the Southeast Asian conflict, American forces divided South Vietnam into three zones of combat. In the far south, Saigon rested in the heart of the III Corps Tactical Zone—the Mekong Delta lowlands; Camau Peninsula (later designated IV Corps); and the hill country north of Bien Hoa Air Base. The n Corps encircled the vast Central Highlands with Dac Son and Da Lat bordering the south and Pleiku and Phu Cat the north.
From the 17th parallel—the cease-fire and demarcation line of July 1954, popularly called the DMZ—to the Central Highlands’ northern ridges is 1 Corps.
In 1966 and ’67, 1 Corps was a tough place for an American fighting man to live. Primarily controlled by Viet Cong and North Vietnamese forces, that combat area’s western border blended into Laotian jungles where the Ho Chi Minh Trail’s three main arteries flooded arms and freshly trained troops into Vietnam’s war.
At the point where the southernmost route of the Ho Chi Minh Trail enters I Corps, the Sihanouk Trail joins it, giving the Viet Cong, or VC, a second supply flow of Soviet—and Chinese-built arms and ammunition, landed into Cambodia via the Gulf of Siara and carried by elephant, by train, and on human backs into Laos for entry into Vietnam.
A few kilometers inland from where the South China Sea washes Vietnam’s east coast, at a place called Due Pho—1 Corps’ southern-most tip—a high, lone hill overlooks miles of farm fields and hundreds of mud-and-straw huts. Off to the west steep mountains rise and, between the peaks, streams and rivers flow into broad valleys that spread like fingers on an outstretched hand, feeding water to this rich, rice-growing countryside.
From where the Ho Chi Minh and Sihanouk trails meet inside Laos on the Vietnamese border, a lacework of roads, footpaths, and tunnels branch out across the rugged mountains, following ridges and streams across the breadth of Vietnam to the rice lands that Due Pho’s solitary hill overlooks.
On that hill, Carlos Hathcock sat with his spotter watching this “Indian Country,” slowly scanning the miles of terrain spread out before them, and hunting and killing “Charlie”—Charlie the man, Charlie the woman, and Charlie the twelve-year-old boy.
That youngster had ridden a long way, judging from the salt rings that encrusted his shirt. He had peddled and pushed that rifle-laden bike since before daybreak. The sun was just setting now above the rugged peaks of the mountains that make up the high backbone of Vietnam, the Annamite Cordillera. No doubt the rifles had almost reached their destination halted their transport and, in the process, killed a child.
He wondered if the men who lay waiting for that delivery had seen their cargo stopped dead by his bullet. To him it was cowardly to send a child to do a soldier’s work, and as he leaned back against the sandbags and lit a cigarette, he shook his head. He thought of occasions on which the Viet Cong had wired three—and four-year-old children as booby traps and had blown away the unlucky Marines who stopped and offered the tots chewing gum or chocolate, and of the Marines who had accepted cold sodas from slightly older children. The sodas had been poured into cups filled with tiny shards of broken glass, mixed with chipped ice. It did not take many stories like those before a Marine learned to stay clear of children.
Hathcock stood and dusted the seat of his trousers, and as Roberts departed up the hill, disappearing behind large rocks, be took one final look down the narrow road that led to the mountains and the setting sun. This was his favorite time of day. It had always been special for him, ever since he was a kid staying with his grandmother in the countryside near Little Rock, Arkansas, It seemed long ago now. He wondered what she would have thought about his killing the boy this day. Would she understand that he had no choice?
He looked at the graying sky and wished he could be home. “Tour’s almost done, Carlos,” he said to himself, trying to kill the pang of homesickness that struck. “Golly, I’ll bet Sonny has grown a foot taller by now.” In a few months he’d be home to celebrate his twenty-fifth birthday, and eighth year in the Marine Corps, with his wife, Josephine, and his little boy, Carlos Norman Hathcock III.
For now, he closed out another day on his hilltop position. Here, he was one small part of a special landing force operation called Deckhouse IV that had been dovetailed into another operation called Desoto, now underway for several weeks.