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.
Along the southern bank of the river, a dirt road winds just above die highest points that the monsoon floodwaters reach. This road serves the farmers, who grow rice along this river, as a pathway to Da Nang’s market. During the monsoon floods, it also serves as their escape route from the deep, rushing water as it courses eastward between densely forested granite mountains. No one knows who first built the road. For the Vietnamese farmers, it has always been there—the only trafficable route out of this mountainous jungle. Because it is the only road, the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese Army depended on it for supplies and reinforcements from Laos.
More than twenty kilometers northwest of Da Nang, heading up river to where the Ca De Song bends north and then west again, rises a velvety green mountain, thirty-three hundred feet high, called Dong Den. Below Dong Den stretches the narrow, elbow-shaped run that infantrymen from the 3rd Marine Regiment named Elephant Valley.
It got its name one June night in 1965 when the Marines atop Dong Den’s jungle-covered ridges heard the trumpeting of elephants. An illumination round was fired to light the valley, and it revealed a train of eight elephants, loaded with heavy cannons. The Marines called for naval gunfire, and after two spotter rounds, the eastern horizon came ablaze with the flash of the ship’s broadside fire. In the valley, the barrage struck, obliterating the Viet Cong and their elephants.
The elephants died near the hamlet of Nam Yen, the heart of Elephant Valley. There the river runs eastward. Two kilometers downriver, where the elbow crooks southward, is the hamlet of Pho Nan Thuong Ha. And two kilometers below this crook, the river again bends eastward at a hamlet called Truong Dinh—the end of Elephant Valley.
It is here at Elephant Valley’s eastern limit that the mountains become hills and the river spreads flat across the rice land, scattering sandbars between its wide channels and dumping silt into Bale de Tourane.
Darkness had swallowed this country as Carlos Hathcock and Johnny Burke slowly made their way over the hills east of Dong Den and descended into Elephant Valley where the Ca De Song bends from its southward to its eastward flow at Truong Dinh. Hathcock planned to move into the big elbow’s crook at Pho Nan Thuong Ha where the valley broadened between the dense mountain jungles.
“We have two, maybe three kilometers left before we’re at the big bend,” Hathcock whispered to Burke as they paused to examine their map and survey this end of the long and crooked valley. “I think we’d be too close for comfort here. Only six hundred meters to work in. Up at the big bend where the valley widens we’ll have a thousand to shoot across, and, by moving into a couple of different positions, we have open fields of fire that extend two or three thousand meters up or down the valley.” The slim Marine stood up and said to Burke with a smile, “It’ll be goooood huntin’.”
These were the first words they had spoken since they separated from Corporal Perry’s patrol. On the move, they communicated with hand signs and facial expressions.
While Hathcock and Burke slipped along the valley’s edge at Truong Dinh, heading toward the big bend, as many as one hundred fifty newly trained North Vietnamese soldiers and their leaders tramped into the western reaches of the valley that follows the Ca De Song.
The NVA company consisted mostly of sixteen—and seventeen-year-old boys. They were the children of the new society of Uncle Ho—its first generation. They began school under the Communist state, established in 1954, and passed from childhood into adolescence following the valiant struggle of the Viet Minh rebels against Ngo Dinh Diem. Diem was overthrown on November 1, 1963, by Gen. Duong Van Minh, and unrest lasted through 1964. It seemed as if the National Liberation Front and its National Liberation Army, the Viet Cong, would finally claim victory and bring about the unification of Vietnam. But the United States stepped in following the ouster of Minh, propping up the south’s new chief of state, Gen. Nguyen Van Thieu, and premier Gen. Nguyen Cao Ky, and flooding South Vietnam with American forces.
Now the young Communist soldiers realized that the war might rage for years. They were valiant enough, these young men, but they were new to combat. Their uniforms looked fresh, their turtle-shell-shaped helmets showed no dents or scars, and each man’s Kalashnikov rifle looked as if it had just been unpacked.
They were a far cry from the typical National Liberation Army soldiers who had no uniforms other than khaki shirts and shorts, or black pajamas, and whose rifles were old and well worn. Men like these had often been in the jungle for years, and they waged war with whatever they could steal or capture, and with what little they could carry over the mountains from Laos.
These youngsters followed an officer who had only a little more experience than they did and who was assisted by a few subordinate officers and NCOs, who had seen some combat. Each officer and NCO carried a pistol—a symbol of authority—on his hip.
As the company route-stepped along the rice fields, the commander kept his position at the lead. Behind him his senior NCO followed closely. The young officer who led the company planned to join his battalion in the jungles on the northern side of Elephant Valley, and rather than climb through the rough mountains at a crawl, he marched his men through the flat valleys at a rapid pace. This cut days off his trek, getting badly needed soldiers to his commander, whose battalion’s numbers had been cut drastically by the search-and-destroy attacks that the growing American forces had launched against them.
Concealed in the thick jungle growth at the valley’s edge, the two Marine snipers peered from behind a tree fall covered with broad-leafed vines, scanning the open fields through which the Ca De Song snaked. They rubbed light and dark green greasepaint on their faces, necks, ears, and hands. The whiteness of their eyes contrasted sharply with the mixture of green hues that surrounded them, like pearls laid in a mossy pool.
The white feather festooning the senior sniper’s bush hat lay motionless in the still morning air. Soon dawn’s first gray light began to reveal more and more of the wide and flat river valley to Carlos Hathcock’s and John Brake’s shifting and searching eyes. Both snipers felt knots tighten in the pit of their stomachs. As the early morning brightened, they could hear the muffled sounds of men on the march.
A thick fog hung just above the valley, hiding the upper reaches of the mountains that surrounded this place, offering the two snipers a field of fire that faded into grayness eight hundred yards from where they hid.
The distant sound of many voices became audible to the Marine duo. Hathcock searched for scouts who might be moving ahead of what be now concluded was a large unit that he knew could not be friendly. The brashness of their march puzzled him. Was it a ploy by an even larger organization to draw fire and expose an ambush to devastation by a hidden NVA battalion?
The snipers saw no scouts.
Hathcock tasted a mixture of salt and camouflage paint that dripped from above his upper lip into the crease of his mouth. He wrestled with a decision to shoot or wait, as dark silhouettes appeared through the fog directly before him in a lengthening column of inarch. The men were marching straight across the dried-out paddy fields that lay between the river and the hills and jungle beyond.
Hathcock glanced left at Burke who rested prone behind his M-14, aiming at the line of targets that grew in number with each passing second. In a whisper soft as the still air, he said, “Be ready to call for arty and move out quickly. I’m gonna shoot the one on the far right. Back me up on the left.”
Burke confirmed receipt of the order with a slow, subtle nod and then trained his aim to the column’s rear, waiting to follow the Winchester’s report. His heart pounded against the mulch of decayed leaves beneath his chest. The Marine’s coursing blood caused his front sight blade to rise and fall with the rhythm of his pulse.
Hathcock’s heart pounded too, sending the rifle scope’s cross hairs rising and falling over his target—the man who walked at the head of the column and wore a pistol. The sniper waited for his pulse to again settle. He had faced the same dilemma at Camp Perry, Ohio, when he won the Wimbledon Cup in 1965. This shot was not nearly as difficult as firing at a 20-inch V-ring from one thousand yards away.
As his concentration narrowed more and more on the accuracy of this first shot, the pitch of his sight’s cross hairs grew less and less erratic until the steadiness of a national champion marksman held the scope’s center point steadily on the NVA commander.
The surprise of die sniper rifle’s discharge caused Burke to blink, and as he heard the sound of Hathcock’s bolt ejecting the shell and sending a second into the Winchester’s chamber, Burke fired at the suddenly frozen figure on the far left of the advancing column.
The NVA leader lay dead at the feet of his company. A seventeen-year-old recruit lay dead at the company’s rear. A third shot cracked from the distant jungle, and another NVA soldier wearing a pistol reared back with a .30-caliber hole in his chest.
A short dike, approximately one hundred yards long, ran parallel with the column of soldiers. Other than the nearest tree line, nearly one thousand yards away on the base of the mountain slopes, nothing else offered cover to the company. They scrambled to the dike, and as they ran, Hathcock’s and Burke’s shots followed them, claiming soldiers with each report.
“We better move before they figure out what’s going on,” Hathcock whispered to Burke, expecting mis company to react as a seasoned one might.
“Right,” Burke said—his first words in nearly a day.
“We’re going over to the other side of this little finger we’re sitting on,” Hathcock told Burke. “They might buy the bluff that we are spread out along this ridge. We’ll pick at ’em right and left. Keep your eyes and ears open. They could have friendlies closing on our flanks.”
Hathcock moved first and took up a position fifty feet to the left of his previous firing point. Burke followed.
Behind the dike, an NCO raised his head above the mud wall. He tried to locate his enemy’s position in the silence that now met his ears. Wondering if the attackers had gone, he slowly stood. Lifting his leg to step onto the dike, he suddenly bounded backward and crashed into the thick grass—his throat torn away from his collar bones. The fatal crack of another rifle shot echoed through Elephant Valley.
On the right and left ends of die dike, eight frightened soldiers leaped to their feet, set their rifles into action, and charged toward the mountain’s tree-covered base and their enemy.
“Here they come,” Burke spoke.
Hathcock answered with a shot that dropped one young soldier, and Burke replied with a crack that dropped another. Hathcock worked his rifle’s bolt so rapidly that his fire kept pace with Burke’s, whose bolt operated automatically.
After they had downed six men, die charge evaporated; the last two retreated toward the dike but were shot before they reached it. All the enemy fire was wild.
At that moment, one of the North Vietnamese officers scrambled to his feet and ran toward the river, which was five hundred yards behind the company. After he had gone fifty yards, he leaped into a flooded rice field. His cries echoed across the valley as he splashed and churned his way through the knee-deep bog. Just as he was about to disappear in the fog, a rifle shot cracked from the tree line, and he fell on his face with a .30 caliber boat-tailed bullet lodged in his spine.
The officer frantically struggled to raise his head above the rice paddy’s slime, but the paralysis caused by his shattered spine made it impossible, and he sank beneath the muddy water.
Now none of the frightened soldiers moved, for they saw mat cowardice and valor purchased equal plots in the snipers’ killing field.
The two snipers crept cautiously and silently around the broadly curving base of Dong Den mountain, hoping to expose the NVA’s left flank. The three hundred-yard move took the pair more than two hours to complete. It offered only a slightly new angle of attack.
The sun climbed in the March sky, lifting and clearing away the morning’s foggy shroud. It revealed a blue heaven scattered with white puffy clouds that towered above the mountains and grew ever higher on thermal currents, reflected from the earth’s surface. By mid-afternoon, the towering cumuli changed to cumulonimbi with great anvil-shaped heads and broad, black bottoms that flashed lightning and rumbled thunder down the Ca De Song and through Elephant Valley.
Hathcock listened to the rumble of the approaching storm. He caught tine refreshing scent of rain, carried into the deep valley by a breeze that drifted down Dong Den’s slopes. The first few drops of rain pattered on the broad leaves mat hid the two snipers. They continued to watch the short mud dike where the North Vietnamese soldiers awaited the night and the possibility of escape.
The afternoon wore on, and Burke lay back to rest while Hathcock continued to observe the dike. The enemy had remained still and quiet for more than seven hours. It was clear the snipers held the upper hand. With each passing hour, the Communist soldiers’ situation became more desperate. They lay unshaded and baking in the midday heat. The sound of the river*s refreshing coolness teased them with its inaccessible nearness. Their water supply was being quickly consumed. They impatiently watched the thunder shower’s black cloak sweep down Dong Den and wished that it would hurry toward them.
In the lush shade where Hathcock and Burke lay hidden, alternating shifts of observing and resting, the heat also rose, raising sweat on both men. Hathcock took a slow sip from his canteen, “Those guys have got to be miserable out there, cooking under that sun. It’s way over ninety degrees right here. It’s gotta to be close to a hundred out there.”
“Think they’ll make a move with this storm blowing in on us?”
“Not unless it gives them enough of a screen. They might make a run for it then. It would have to get pretty bad, though.” Hathcock capped the canteen and looked down at the long line of the dike. “My guess is after dark, We’ll let them try to slip out and then catch them with illumes-light up those hamburgers and rain all over them.”
“Rain would feel good,” Burke said, wiping sweat off his head. “These few little drops just make you wish it would hurry up and turn loose.”
“Think of what it’s doing to them,” Hathcock said.
On Hill 55, an assistant operations officer dropped a stack of yellow message slips on the intelligence chief’s field desk. The gunnery sergeant took the stack and peeled through the first few until he saw Hathcock’s sniper report.
“What’s going on with Hathcock and Burke?” he asked the young lieutenant.
“They reported contact this morning and asked for illumination rounds on call through the night. They say they have a sizable NVA unit pinned behind a paddy dike in Elephant Valley. Division wants to wait and see what develops.”
“What’s Division going to do if the NVA decide to overrun Hathcock?”
“They have units ready to move by chopper. They can be in there in less than an hour. I think Division wants to see if the enemy goes in to pull their pork out of the fire, and then they’ll hit ’em.
“You think those two can hold for an hour if they’re stormed?”
“No. But I don’t think they’ll storm Hathcock. He probably has those gooners scared shitless.”
Rain partially obscured the valley, but it did not provide the cover for which the pinned NVA soldiers had hoped. The two snipers lay in their leafy blind and watched heads pop above the dike and quickly drop back down.
“Those hamburgers are getting ready to move,” Hathcock whispered to Burke. “Sun’s going fast and I’d stake my stripes on them making a run for the trees or them hooches down the valley soon as it is dark. Just hope those cannon cockers give us the illumes when we need ’em.”
Burke nodded and put his binoculars back up to his eyes. Hathcock lay behind his rifle and slowly moved his scope along the paddy dike, watching and waiting.
The afternoon showers faded and left the sky orange above the western mountains as the sun set behind them. Long shadows from the high peaks crossed Elephant Valley, and as darkness descended, the two snipers watched for movement emerging from behind the dike.
“I can’t see a thing,” Burke said, dropping the binoculars from his eyes.
“Call in an ilium,” Hathcock said.
Humid air hung through the dark valley, and only water dripping from the jungle’s leaves offered any sound for the two snipers to hear.
High overhead a muffled bang echoed, and like a miniature sun dangling beneath a small parachute the illumination round exposed the NVA soldiers nearly one hundred yards from the dike, moving eastward down the valley toward a group of huts that lay another one thousand yards away.
Without a word, both snipers’ rifles fired on the line of men who ran toward the huts.
“Turn ’em back,” Hathcock told Burke. “Concentrate the fire at the head of their column.” As quickly as he could squeeze the trigger, Burke fired on the fleeing men. Hathcock followed as rapidly as he could work his rifle’s bolt.
One after another the soldiers at the front of the column fell. The rest of the company hurtled back to the dike, leaving their fallen comrades behind them.
“Well, I guess they won’t try that again for a while,” Burke said.
“Don’t count on it. If I were them, I’d make a run for it right now.”
A second illumination round burst overhead, lighting the valley with its eerie glow, showing no movement.
“Sergeant Hathcock, those guys are just plain scared to move. I don’t think they’re going anywhere.”
“Let’s give ’em some dark for a while and see what they try. Tell them to hold the illumes for a few minutes. Maybe they’ll make another run for it.”
The two snipers lay quiet, listening to the sounds of the dark jungle. Croaking gecko lizards and small tree frogs chirped. Echoing through the jungle came the shrill cry of a foul-sounding bird, “Fauk-U, fauk-U, faaauk-uuuu.”
“My sentiments exactly,” Hathcock mumbled.
Down below, in the rice paddies of the valley, they could hear only a deep silence, but, as soon as they called for another flare, it exposed a squad-sized group dashing for the huts that were just beyond the trees, east of the dike.
“Don’t let ’em get to those huts. We’ll lose them in the trees and they’ll be on our backside in no time.”
Both Marines fired as rapidly as their rifles could chamber rounds. The running NVA soldiers dropped to the ground and began returning fire.
“Tell that battery to keep the illumes rolling in here. We can’t let it get dark or we’re dead,” Hathcock commanded Burke.
The soldiers who remained behind the wall now joined in the fire, shooting toward the muzzle flashes that gave away the Marines’ position.
“Concentrate on those hamburgers out in the open. Well-aimed shots—don’t waste your fire,” Hathcock told Burke, as he rejoined the battle. Hathcock laid his cross hairs on one prone NVA soldier after another and squeezed the trigger, killing a man each time.
Burke shifted his fire to the NVA company’s main body, which now appeared to be charging over the dike. “They’re coming at us!” he shouted at Hathcock.
“Well-aimed shots, Burke, well-aimed shots.” Hathcock turned his rifle on the charging company and began dropping a soldier with each shot.
“If they don’t give up, we’re going over the ridge and up the draw, and let them have this place,” he told Burke, pumping his bolt back and forth as rapidly as he could shoot.
“I’m ready any time you are.”
But, just at that moment, the steam went out of the attack, and the soldiers who were left dashed toward the dike.
“Keep shootin’, Burke—don’t cut ’em any slack.”
Hathcock turned his scope to the right of the dike where the escaping squad had thrown themselves down. “I don’t see any life out there. If anyone made it, he got to that hooch down yonder. We better watch our backsides real close from here on out.”
The night passed. The Marines lay listening for any sound mat might mean attack. Under the dim light of the illumes, they potshot at any enemy soldiers whose heads popped up.
“You reckon we ought to call in the cavalry? We’ve been hammering those guys nearly twenty-four hours. Sun’ll be up in an hour,” Burke said.
“I’ll wait till we run out of lead or Division sends in troops. We can hold here awhile. We’ve knocked out a good third of mem already.”
The sun rose, and the two men began rest cycles—one watched while the other napped. Throughout the second day, the North Vietnamese stayed behind their mud wall. During the twelve hours of daylight, the snipers fired three shots, merely letting the enemy know that nothing had changed.
The first illumination rounds came at sunset and lit the valley at intervals throughout the night. This small battle had reached a stand-off. For the two Marines, time meant little. They took turns shooting and resting, eating their rations of cheese, peanut butter, jelly and John Wayne crackers (large round crackers packed in C ration cans). They felt confident and completely in control.
They lay in the shade with water and food, while die enemy starved in the sun and exhausted what little water remained to mem. Yet the NVA continued to wait.
The third day began as die second had and followed through to the fourth without change. Hathcock knew that unless something happened, he and Burke would move out on the afternoon of the fifth day and leave the NVA company to a sweep team from the 26th Marine Regiment.
Hathcock rested against a tree trunk and spread cheese on a cracker. Burke lay behind the sniper rifle, staring through die scope, slowly moving it along the length of the dike. “Sergeant Hathcock, you reckon that we set some sort of record pinning these guys for as long as we have?”
“I don’t know, Burke. Reckon we’ll find out when we get outa here. Anyway, it don’t mean anything to me. It wasn’t tike we were holding mem off. These guys just want out of here. But I imagine that if we were to let them go, they’d come after us once they reached the jungle. When we leave, we’ll slip off before they know we’re gone and let the sweep team have ’em.
“When you compare it to some of the times we had when we started up the sniper school last October, this is pretty tame.”
Without lifting his eye from the rifle scope, Burke said, “Wonder how Captain Land is getting along back home?”
“I imagine he’s enjoying life one hell of a lot more than we are. He’ll be getting ready for the Division Matches down at Camp Lejeune. I may see him when I get home. Those matches go about a week after I get back to New Bern—about six weeks from now.”
“Intramurals ought to be in full swing right now,” Burke followed. “When did you first shoot in intramurals, Sergeant Hathcock.”
“Back in Hawaii. I won the individuals. That’s where I met Captain Land—he and Gunner Arthur Terry ran the shooting team and the sniper school. I won the individuals and went to the All-Marine shooting matches. You get outa here, look into the shooting team wherever you end up. That’s one thing in the Marine Corps that I really love. I got my greatest sense of accomplishment from shooting and teaching other Marines how to shoot. 1 guess that the biggest moment in my life came when I won the 1,000-yard championship at Camp Perry.
“Did I ever tell you about winning the Wimbledon Cup?”
“No,” Burke replied, still staring down the sniper scope. “I’ve heard other guys tell about it, but I never heard you. I’d sure like to hear your side of it. W; got lots of time. Those guys out mere aren’t going anywhere.”
“Yeah, I know. I won the Wimbledon at Camp Perry, Ohio, on August 26, 1965—the day after I went distinguished.”
Burke asked with a tone of hesitancy in his voice, “Don’t mink I’m stupid or anything, but I’ve heard you and Captain Land and Gunny Wilson all talk about distinguished for six months, and to be honest with you, I never really understood exactly what it is. I figure that it is a high honor for a shooter, but nobody ever told me how you become distinguished.”
“Well, you become distinguished by placing in so many shooting matches. Every time you win a gold, silver, or bronze medal in matches, you get points toward becoming distinguished. A Distinguished Marksman in the Marine Corps is the top dog among shooters. He wears a gold shooting badge and is a member of an elite few marksmen. There are some great Marines among them, for example, Major General Merit A. Edson is distinguished. He died a while back, but he won the Medal of Honor on Guadalcanal leading the 1st Marine Raider Battalion. He went on to become the executive director of the National Rifle Association.
“I went distinguished in 1965. When we got to Camp Perry mat year, I was hard as woodpecker lips. I just missed the National Match Championship by a couple of marks, but the silver medal I won gave me the last few points that I needed to make thirty and go distinguished. The day that I won the Wimbledon Cup was special. It was the biggest day of my life, as far as shooting goes.”
Burke turned from the scope and smiled. “Captain Land talked about Camp Perry and you winning the Wimbledon Cup. I think he was as proud about it as you were. He said that when the smoke cleared, there was one Marine Corps meatball down on the line, and that was you. “He said that everybody who was anybody, including the Commandant of the Marine Corps was there. The whole National Rifle Association was there, and you beat them all.
Burke turned back to the scope and again began scanning the dike Hathcock stretched out and rested his shoulders and bead against the base of the tree. He watched the jungle behind their position, and in a soft-spoken voice he began his story, pausing with caution after every few words to listen for any sounds that might signal an unwelcome visitor.