THE SEPTEMBER AFTERNOON heat sent Jo Hathcock shopping at Pembroke Mall in Virginia Beach. It was cool there, and it helped to take her mind off Carlos and the dangers he faced in Vietnam.
It was well after 3 P.M. when she walked across the hot, asphalt, parking lot to get into her car and drive the few blocks home. The mirage made the cars look liquid and surreal, and the heat made her head throb.
Traffic was its normal afternoon jam. As Jo waited for the red light to go dark and the green light to flash on, she saw an olive-colored Chevrolet cruise past, just making the yellow light, as she moved out on Independence Boulevard. At .the second light, just before her turn, she read the yellow lettering on the trunk, “U.S. Marine Corps.” She saw the driver clearly—a captain wearing dress blue and a white hat. “He’s no recruiter,” she thought. And as the green car made a left turn, ahead of her’s, and swayed into the drive at 545 Sirene Avenue, she cried aloud, “My God! Carlos is dead!”
She saw the Marine casualty officer walking toward her door, and halting on her front walk, waiting for her to get out of the car.
“Mrs. Hathcock?” the Marine softly asked.
In a few days, Jo received a message from Brig. Gen. William H. Moncrief, Jr., the commander at Brooke General Hospital, Fort Sam Houston, in San Antonio, Texas, that Hathcock had arrived there on September 22 and that she could be with him there. She immediately made plans to go.
It was nearly noon when Hathcock opened his eyes. The ship wasn’t rolling. He could not move. He cried out from the horrible pain that blanketed him. His legs and arms and shoulders and neck and back, even his ears, crawled and boiled with intolerable pain.
“Carlos Jo cried out. “Carlos!”
He turned his eyes toward her and blinked. They were sore and red, and his vision was blurry and tilted. “Jo?”
“Oh, Carlos,” she said softly. She had tried to imagine the worst possible image of her husband’s bums. She felt that if she imagined the worst that when she confronted the reality of his injury, it would not shock her. But it did. She felt guilty because she could not even recognize the man she had loved for nearly seven years. She stood and looked down at him, “Carlos.”
He raised his mummy-wrapped arm and pointed to a table where a green bag sat. Each man had a green bag with black plastic handles, an item similar to the R-and-R bags given to Marines headed for two weeks liberty away from the war.
“Look,” he mumbled, pointing at the bag.
“Yes, it’s a nice bag. They give that to you?”
“Look,” he said again, pointing, “Look inside.”
Every effort to speak sent daggers of pain through him. Raising his arm tore open the eschar—the hard crust of scab and dried body fluid—that covered the third-degree burns there, leaving him breathless.
Jo brought the bag back to Hathcock’s bedside and opened it. On top she found the blue leather box with gold trim. She opened it and saw the Purple Heart medal.
“The medal is pretty, Carlos,” she said holding it up for him to see too.
“Yes,” he said in a soft whisper. “Look more.”
The only other thing was a small, square photograph. She held it up for Hathcock to see, “This?”
“Yes. Look. Look.”
It was the Polaroid photograph that General Simpson’s aide took that day on the USS Repose when he presented Hathcock the Purple Heart. Hathcock was always proud when a general officer presented him with anything, and he wanted to share that feeling of pride with Jo.
Hathcock smiled as Jo looked at it. She saw the general and saw her husband’s bums and bandages. It made her cry. To her, the photo looked horrible. She fought back the urge to scold Carlos for making her look at it, but she restrained herself. “That’s real nice, Carlos. Is he your commanding general?”
“Yes,” he struggled in a whispering, raspy voice. “He commands the whole division and came to see me.”
Hathcock closed his eyes. Jo sat again in the chair. The afternoon drifted away.
Hathcock had been lucky. During the fire his lungs had not suffered any severe bums. The immediate attention that he received from the corpsman greatly increased his survival odds. And the fast action taken to stabilize him on the USS Repose gave the doctors good prospects and hope for his recovery. They had set the stage for the burn specialists at Brooke to do the job of rebuilding the broken man, of keeping him alive through the long healing process that severe burns require.
The day Hathcock arrived at Brooke, he had a 102-degree fever, weighed one hundred fifty pounds and had second-and third-degree burns on his head, neck, anterior trunk, posterior trunk, right upper arm, left upper arm, right lower arm, left lower arm, right hand, left hand, right thigh, left thigh, right leg, and left leg. More than 43 percent of his total body area suffered “full-thickness” bums with several areas where that full thickness of the skin had burned completely away (third-degree burns).
With a partial thickness bum, a patient’s skin can regenerate from the epithelial cells lining the skin appendages—hair follicles, sweat glands, and sebaceous glands. Full-thickness burns destroy all these cells and prevent any regeneration. Small full-thickness burns can heal from the skin margins, but large areas require skin grafting.
They moved Hathcock to Ward 13B. There he made daily trips to the Hubbard tank where he could soak and soften the hard, crusty eschar that covered his bums, while the burn specialists examined diem. There they noticed a black spot on his hand, an infection that a biopsy later revealed was phycomycosis. But they felt that this fungal disease did not explain the fever that he could not shake—a fever that rose from 102 degrees on his first day there to 103 on the second and 104 degrees on September 24. They suspected malaria and treated him for it.
To complicate problems, on September 30, before doctors could begin burn therapy, Hathcock developed bronchopneumonia in his left lung. That deferred the therapy until October 6 when the pneumonia finally began to clear.
On October 13, the doctors began the burn therapy-thirteen different operations in which they stripped away the bum eschar and damaged flesh, and applied skin grafts. The operations continued until November 17. Hathcock received eight homografts (skin grafts taken from donors), three autografts (small grafts of healthy skin taken from his own body), and two heterografts (skin grafts taken from animals).
Hathcock’s right side suffered the worst and required the greater portion of skin grafting. His grafts included the use of dog skin and pig skin on his right arm and thigh on November 3 and 6.
During this period, Hathcock also developed staphylococcus infections and his red blood count dropped 28 percent. Doctors began waging a battle against die infections and gave him transfusions of 1500 cc’s of whole blood. To combat the effects of the pain and infection, they gave him daily doses of narcotics.
For the six weeks that Carles Hathcock balanced on a tightrope above the abyss, Jo sat at his bedside. She fought his lapses into hallucination and coaxed him back out of the misty black cloud that would have led him into the peacefulness of death. She coaxed him back again and again.
“Mack,” he said. He saw Mack back at Hill 55 and there were shells incoming. “Mack! Mack! Incoming!” And Mack kept walking down the finger to the sniper hooch with Yankee, who trotted at his heels.
There was Burke. “Burke!” Hathcock shouted from his dream. Burke had covered his face wifli camouflage paint and smiled. “Don’t let your mascara run,” Hathcock heard Burke say. Then he laughed.
“Don’t go in there. Stay down! Hathcock shouted from his bed. “My rifle, my hat. Where’s my hat?”
“Carlos! Wake up!” Jo shouted, shaking Hathcock’s bed. He opened his eyes, yet he still dreamed. He did not see Jo, he saw Mack.
“Mack! You gotta take care. You gotta be more careful!”
She kept shaking the bed. “Carlos! You listen to me!” But he was moaning about Que Son and Route 4.
“Carlos!”
Finally he blinked and said nothing more.
“Carlos,” Jo said in a loud voice. “Where are you?”
“Hill 55, Vietnam.”
“No! You’re at Brooke General Hospital in San Antonio, Texas!”
He blinked, not knowing what to believe. He had just seen the hooches and the shooting and the smoke. It didn’t make any sense. He was in Vietnam.
“Repeat after me, Carlos!”
“Whaaa…”
“You are not in Vietnam!”
Hathcock looked at Jo. It was Jo. He recognized her. He felt the pain. He was alive.
During the lucid moments, Jo would open a letter from one of a hundred friends who wrote to him while he fought for his life, and she would read it. It seemed mat everyone who had ever shot a rifle in Marine Corps or Interservice or National Rifle Association competition wrote to him, telling him to get well.
There were letters from Jim Land, filled with lines borrowed from great coaches. He called Hathcock a winner. There were letters from Vietnam—from Moose Gunderson and Boo Boo Barker. And several letters from Ron McAbee.
Mack’s first letter told Hathcock how he tried to get out to the ship but could not find a way. In other letters he told Hathcock that Yankee was well and David Sommers too. He told him about the platoon and how it had been a good thing that they had not traveled together that day. This way the platoon did not suffer a break in continuity of leadership. Mack told Hathcock how he pushed the platoon hard—he wanted vengeance. So did the men.
By November 10 Hathcock stopped hallucinating. His infection had retreated, and much of the grafted skin was now healed and showed great promise. His grafts had nearly all taken. The only bad spots were on his right shoulder and right leg. The doctor had removed the animal skin grafts and placed donor skin on the debrided areas.
But the pain continued. He cried out when he saw the doctors coming with the bundles and tools. The pain of debridement sent chills of horror through him. The pealing of flesh and scab from a burn renders a pain that is indescribable.
Hathcock had endured and had suffered not just to survive, but to recover. To become a whole and vital man again. To hunt and to shoot. To become an Olympic champion and fulfill a dream.
On November 10, 1969, Carlos woke out of a sound sleep. Jo was sitting beside the bed.
“What day is it, Carlos?” Jo said happily.
Hathcock thought for a moment and began to look anxious. He did not know. Was it Wednesday or Thursday or Saturday?
But before he could answer that he had no idea, a woman pushed open the door and held a large birthday cake in her hands. It was Mrs. Dickman—Colonel William Dickman’s wife. Colonel Dickman was a member of the Marine Corps Reserve’s 4th Reconnaissance Battalion and was the officer in charge of their scout/sniper school at Camp Bullis. He had met Hathcock several years earlier at the Texas State and Regional NRA rifle championships at the Camp Bullis rifle range. He had later heard and appreciated the legendary Carlos Hathcock sniper stories too. And because of this kinship, he and Mrs. Dickman took care of Jo and visited Hathcock often.
“Happy birthday!” Mrs. Dickman said.
“Birthday?” Carlos asked. “I may not know what day it is, but it sure ain’t May 20.”
She said, “Carlos… Marine. It’s Monday, November 10, and your Corps 194th birthday! Now you ought to remember that!”
Hathcock looked at Jo and laughed. He shared the cake with the other Marines in the ward—Marines like Captain Ed Hyland (promoted in the hospital) and Pfc Roberto Barrera, who had also been in the amtrac.
Hyland, now with only one arm, wished Hathcock happy birthday, and Hathcock returned the wish to him and all the other Marines in the ward.
Captain Hyland wanted to write a recommendation for Hathcock to receive a medal for his courageous action on that burning amtrac. But Hathcock responded with an emphatic no. He told Hyland, “I happened to wake up first. That’s all. I did what any of the rest of the Marines on top of that amtrac would have done.”
Since Hathcock refused any sort of official recognition, Captain Hyland offered him something personal: a simple pewter mug with names and dates engraved on it. And Hathcock accepted that.
Jo left San Antonio on Friday, November 14, in order to be home for Sonny’s birthday that Saturday. Hathcock wanted to go home too.
A few days after Carlos Ill’s fifth birthday, Jo’s mother died unexpectedly. Jo was shattered but she dared not call Carlos because she knew he would do what he did the day after Sonny was bom: he would get out of the hospital, whether he was well or not.
But she thought more about it and talked to her sister and to her sister’s husband, Winston Jones. And he asked, “What about Carlos? How will he feel if you don’t tell him?” She called Carlos that afternoon.
Because of the death, the doctors allowed him to make the trip home. His bums were completely covered now, and all the grafts were healing well. He would return to the hospital on December 30 for further treatment and evaluation. Then on January 5, 1970, he was released and placed on convalescent leave. On January 31, 1970, he reported back to Quantico,
Virginia, as a member of the Marine Corps Rifle Team.
Because of his bums, he could not compete: He could not stand the rigors of strapping himself into a shooting jacket and withstanding the pull and twist of the tight leather slings on the M-14 rifles that the team members shot. He could not take heat or cold. He could not even withstand the effect that sunlight had on his tender, bum-scarred body.
Hathcock wore long-sleeved shirts and utilities with the sleeves rolled down. He wore his wide-brimmed campaign hat. And he wore white gloves. He avoided all exposure to direct sunlight. The only job he could perform was that of coach.
During that first year he made several trips to the hospitals at Portsmouth and at Quantico. His burns were healing but something else was wrong. He felt dizzy. He felt exhausted. He shook and lost control of his muscles. He walked with a straddle-legged gait. Something else was wrong—something that the doctors had missed. Something that had sent him to the hospital in Cherry Point when Sonny was bom and plagued him in Vietnam.
But they found nothing. It was the bums, they told him. It was his body’s inability to sweat and control his internal temperature. In cool weather he suffered hypothermia and in warm weather he suffered heat sickness. It was a condition from which he could never recover.
Hathcock was angry. In his soul he was still straight and strong, a champion. Had he cheated death, beaten the odds and survived bums that would kill most men, only to stand and watch others perform the activity—the sport—that had been the inspiration for his recovery?
The Marine Corps transferred him to the 2nd Marine Division at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, on February 13, 1972. There he gained the reputation as one of the finest rifle-team coaches ever in the Marine Corps. No one could come near his teams in the High Power, Long Range competitions—he owned the six hundred—and thousand-yard lines. But still, within his heart, he wanted to shoot. He rarely smiled anymore. And the shaking and dizziness grew worse.
On September 20, 1973, after nineteen months of coaching and teaching marksmanship at the rifle ranges near Sneed’s Ferry and Topsail Island, after nineteen months of trying to regain his long-lost steady control and unmatched long-range marksmanship prowess, Carlos received another set of orders. Orders away from rifle ranges and gun powder and the sweet smell of Hoppe’s Number 9 powder solvent. Orders away from the greatest love of his life outside his wife and son.
October 16, 1973. Richard Milhous Nixon felt the pressures of Watergate slowly pushing him out of office. On this October day the Army of the Republic of Vietnam fought back the North Vietnamese without the aid of U. S. troops. The last American combat soldiers left there March 29, and the corruption within the ARVN forces that followed that departure would serve as a major factor in the eventual loss of the war in less than two more years. On this same day, while seats of power teetered in those troubled times, Carlos Hathcock stood at a shaky position of attention in front of the desk of Capt. Howard Lovingood, commanding officer of the Marine detachment aboard the USS Simon Lake, AS 33, a submarine tender out of Rota, Spain.
Captain Lovingood saw Hathcock’s value in spite of his injured body, a body that certainly could not pass any physical fitness test the Marine Corps had ever devised. Lovingood saw the great benefit of the leadership and experience that Hathcock offered his Marines, and he confidently made him his detachment gunnery sergeant—his NCO in charge.
Hathcock performed outstandingly.
Lovingood transferred to the Amphibious Warfare School at Quantico, on July 22, 1974, and turned over command of the Simon Lake Marines to a stocky, square-jawed captain who wore a flat-top haircut and saw only Hathcock’s limitations. Walter A. Peeples became the former sniper’s adversary, rating him substandard on his fitness reports and succeeding in having Hathcock returned to the United States, and relieved from duty, with the recommendation that he be discharged.
In that spring of 1975, the Vietnam war came to a bitter end. The defense of Da Nang crumbled, and hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese fled south along Highway One, seeking refuge behind the collapsing ARVN line.
Marines from the 1st Marine Amphibious Brigade out of Hawaii, bolstered by the 1st Marine Aircraft Wing and the 4th and the 9th Marine regiments, waited on the USS Blue Ridge and USS Okinawa and watched as the eight years of efforts by more than 8,744,000 Americans—of whom more than 47,322 died in combat and 10,700 died in support of that combat; of whom 163,303 survived wounds, and of whom 2,500 Americans remained missing in action—ended in bitter defeat.
As the tanks with the single star flags crashed through the gates of the American embassy in Saigon on April 29, 1975, Gunnery Sergeant Carlos Hathcock suffered his own brand of defeat on the USS Simon Lake. A month later, at the United States Naval Hospital at Portsmouth, Virginia, he began two months of tests and review by a medical board. On August 5, the verdict came in.
The final paragraph of the report stated: “The patient is limited only in that he cannot perform his physical training exercises as prescribed by the Marine Corps. He is fully able to perform all the other physical duties required of his position. In addition, the demyelinating disease has caused only mild ataxia and has in no way interfered with his ability to perform his job. However, because of the improving nature of his neurological deficit, it is the opinion of the board that the patient is not yet fit for full duty, but is fit for limited duty.”
Although the report seemed uplifting, its findings actually were not. This demyelinating disease—what the physicians called his neurological deficit—was multiple sclerosis.
The doctor sat back in his leatherette chair and folded his arms. “Gunny. I’ve been around for a while, and I’m familiar with the ways of the Marine Corps. To be honest with you, I don’t think you’re going to make it on active duty. I think with what you have, the Office of Naval Disability Evaluation will give you a 60 percent disability retirement.”
“I thought I was fit for duty?” Hathcock said.
“For six months… maybe a year? If you were in another branch of service, I could see it, but not in the Marine Corps. You need daily rest and no stress.”
Hathcock’s mind went immediately to the one place in the Marine Corps that operated at a different pace with a different breed of people, people who did not rush but were tranquil. Because they had to be. They could not hold a steady aim otherwise. Marksmanship Training Unit—the Marine Corps Rifle Team. It was his only hope.
Hathcock looked at the doctor and asked, “Sir. What if I could find a place in the Marine Corps where I could work my own set of hours. Rest when I needed. Where I could live and work and not have stress. What if I could find a place like that?”
“That might be a solution, Gunny, but there isn’t any such place.”
Hathcock smiled and asked to use the doctor’s phone.
A few seconds later the voice of Lt. Col. Charles A. Reynolds, commanding officer of the Weapons Training Battalion at Quantico and the officer in charge of the Marine Corps’ Marksmanship Training Unit came on the line.
Hathcock told the colonel the requirements that the doctor had placed on him and finally concluded by saying, “Sir, can you help me? I love the Marine Corps, and I don’t ever want to leave it.”
“Hathcock,” Reynolds said firmly, “We will always want you! Just tell that doctor to sign your chit. You’ll have a set of orders in two weeks.”