Posted on 05/27/2002 7:44:48 AM PDT by Slam
AMERICANS SLOW TO RECOGNIZE VALOR OF 'MURDER INC.'
The academics write their mighty histories. The politicians dictate their memoirs. The retired generals give their speeches. The intellectuals record their ironic epiphanies. And in all this hubbub attending wars either lost or won, the key man is forgotten - the lonely figure crouched in the bushes, wishing he were somewhere else: the man with the rifle.
Such a man has just died, and his passing will be marked elsewhere only in small, specialized journals with names such as Leatherneck and Tactical Shooter and in the Jesuitical culture of the Marine Corps, where he is still fiercely admired.
And in some quarters, even that small amount of respect will be observed with skepticism. After all, he was merely a grunt. He fought in a bad war. But, worst of all, he was a sniper.
Gunnery Sgt. (Ret.) Carlos N. Hathcock II, USMC, died Feb. 22 (1999) at 57 in Virginia Beach, Va., after a long decline in the grip of the only enemy he wasn't able to kill: multiple sclerosis. In the end, he didn't recognize his friends. But he had quite a life. In two tours in the 1960s, he wandered through the Republic of South Vietnam, and with a rifle made by Winchester, a heart made by God and a discipline made by the Marine Corps, he stalked and killed 93 of his country's enemies. And that was only the official count.
It's not merely that Vietnam was a war largely without heroes. It's also that the very nature of Hathcock's heroism was a problem for so many. He killed, nakedly and without warning. The line troops called him ''Murder Inc.'' behind his back. When they kill, it's in hot blood, in a haze of smoke and adrenaline.
But the sniper is different. He reduces warfare to its purest element, the destruction of another human being. He learns things no man can learn - how it looks through a scope when you center-punch an enemy at 200 yards, and how it feels - but he learns them at the risk of his own possible exile from the community.
Maybe Hathcock never cared much for the larger community, but only the Marine Corps and its mission. ''Vietnam,'' he told a reporter in 1987, ''was just right for me.''
And one must give Hathcock credit for consistency: In all the endless revising done in the wake of our second-place finish in the Southeast Asia war games, he never reinvented himself or pretended to be something he wasn't. He remained a true believer to the end, not in his nation's glory or its policies, but in his narrower commitment to the Marine code of the rifle. He was salty, leathery and a tough Marine Corps professional NCO, even in a wheelchair. His license plate said it: SNIPER.
''Hell,'' he once said, ''anybody would be crazy to like to go out and kill folks. . . . I never did enjoy killing anybody. It's my job. If I don't get those bastards, then they're going to kill a lot of these kids. That's the way I look at it.''
Though he was known for many years as the Marine Corps' leading sniper - later, a researcher uncovered another sniper with a few more official kills - he took no particular pleasure in the raw numbers.
''I'll never look at it like this was some sort of shooting match, where the man with the most kills wins the gold medal,'' he once said.
The only decoration for valor that he won was for saving, not taking, lives. On his second tour in Vietnam, on Sept. 16, 1969, he was riding atop an armored personnel carrier when it struck a 500-pound mine and erupted into flames. Hathcock was knocked briefly unconscious, sprayed with flaming gasoline and thrown clear. Waking, he climbed back aboard the burning vehicle to drag seven other Marines out. Then, ''with complete disregard for his own safety and while suffering excruciating pain from his burns, he bravely ran back through the flames and exploding ammunition to ensure that no Marines had been left behind,'' according to the citation for the Silver Star he received in November 1996 after an extensive letter-writing campaign by fellow Marines had failed to win him the Medal of Honor for his exploits with a rifle.
He was equally proud that as a sniper-platoon sergeant on two tours, no man under his command was killed. ''I never lost a person over there,'' he told a visiting journalist in 1995. ''Never lost nobody but me, and that wasn't my fault.''
Hathcock was an Arkansan, from a dirt-poor broken home, who joined the Marine Corps at 17. He qualified as an expert rifleman in boot camp and began quickly to win competitive shooting events, specializing in service-rifle competition.
He went to Vietnam in 1965, but it was six months before the Marines learned the value of dedicated sniper operations and a former commanding officer built a new unit around his talents. Hathcock took no liberty, no days off, and toward the end of his first tour finally was restricted to quarters to prevent him from going on further missions.
After the war, he suffered from the inevitable melancholy. Forced medical retirement from the Corps in 1979 - he had served 19 years, 10 months, 5 days - led to drinking problems and extended bitterness. The multiple sclerosis, discovered in 1975, certainly didn't help, and burns that covered 43 percent of his body made things even more painful. But what may have saved his life was the incremental recognition that came his way. His biography, Marine Sniper, written by Charles Henderson, was published in 1985. It sold more than half a million copies.
He authorized a poster that showed him in full combat regalia, crouched over his Model 70 Winchester, his face blackened, his boonie cap scrunched close to his head, the only identifier being a small sprig of feather in its band. In fact, a long-range .308-caliber ammunition was sold as ''White Feather,'' from the Vietnamese Long Tra'ng, his nickname. He appeared in several videos, where he revealed himself to be a practically oriented man of few but decisive words, with a sense of humor dry as a stick. He inspired several novels and at least two non-fiction books, and his exploits made it onto TV, where a JAG episode featured a tough old Marine sniper.
Finally, and perhaps best of all, he ascended to a special kind of Marine celebrity. The Corps honors its best marksman with the annual Carlos Hathcock Award. A Marine library in Washington, D.C., has been named after him, and a Virginia Civil Air Patrol unit named itself after him. In 1990, a Marine unit raised $5,000 in donations to fight multiple sclerosis and presented it to him at his home. They brought it to him the Marine way: They ran 216 miles from Camp Lejeune, N.C., to Virginia Beach.
According to the account in the Norfolk (Va.) Virginian-Pilot, the old sniper told the men, ''I am so touched, I can hardly talk.''
In the end, he could not escape the terrible disease that had been discovered in 1975. But death, with whom he had an intimate relationship, at least came to him quietly - as if out of respect.
Yes,I can and will. I have the book around here somewhere,amongst a few hundred other books. I'll probably take the easy way out and hit up the "old-boy" SF network.
BTW,I never heard of Russian tanks being knocked-out by LAWS. Where did this happen? I know there was another place other than Lang Vei were they were used,but can't remember where right now.
The guys at Lang Vei killed at least two tanks with LAWs.
The South Vietnamese had some success with the LAWs at An Loc, too.
As you can see,it looks like we were both right about Westmoreland. He WAS in Saigon when Tet started and Lang Vei was hit,but flew to Da Nang the next day to check what was happening there.
The book is called 'Tanks in the Wire', by David B. Stockwell. Here's some quotes:
"Marine radio operators at Khe Sanh sat in a sober silence as their radio speakers coughed Willoughby's request. "Americans are dying up here. For Christ's sake, help us!"
The Marines refused."
"...the marines believed sending troops over land would get them butchered, the Marines decided. General Westmoreland in Saigon was consulted. The Marines said no again. Colonel Jonathan Ladd, commander of Special Forces in Vietnam, tried to intervene. Westmoreland allowed his commanders closest to the action to decide. The Marines stayed put. By first light, Westmoreland was on a plane to Da Nang to confer with U.S. Marine Corps Lieutenant General Cushman on the state of the Tet Offensive in I Corps."
The Marine artillery...1st Bn, 13th Field Artillery Regiment (1/13) did fire 17 minutes after the first call to them came in. They didn't believe the SF had actual tanks in their wire.
The USAF air commandos trace their history back to WWII in Burma with Col. Phil Cochran and his troops carving out DZs and LZs in the jungle behing Japanese lines. The Carpet baggers were also dropping Jegburg teams into Europe in WWII. Never read or heard about USAF having problems working with any spec ops units.
Plenty of good reading about USAF specops and their proud history in Orr Kelly's book "From A Dark Sky". Best pics of USAF air commandos in action would be Randy Jolly's book "Air Commando"
Here a short excerpt from the book by Orr Kelly about the USAF Farmgate crews who flew in the early years of Vietnam and one new pilgrim to flying.
Despite the fiction that they were "advisers," the Farmgate fliers almost immediately began flying combat missions. It was hard, dangerous work. They flew old planes with minimal navigation aids at night and in bad weather against increasingly sophisticated and deadly enemy air defenses, making up tactics on the wing.
One of the hazards was the requirement that the Americans always had to carry a Vietnamese along - to maintain the fiction that they were training the Vietnamese. Any unfortunate Vietnamese who happened to be nearby when a mission was scheduled found himself strapped into an airplane - often the first time he had ever been off the ground.
Richard Secord, then the junior captain among the Farmgate AT-28 pilots and later a major general, thought he was going to die one day because of his Vietnamese passenger.
As he rolled in and started down toward his target, he felt a sudden jolt on the controls. He thought the plane had been hit, Breaking off the attack, he pulled up, decided everything was okay, and rolled in again. Once more, he felt the strange pressure on the controls. His terrified passenger was pulling back on the stick as hard as he could.
Secord ordered him over the intercom to keep his hands off the controls.
Again, he pulled up, rolled in, and headed for the target. This time, he felt the stick jam forward. The dive steepened and the plane headed directly toward the ground. Secord inched the stick back with all his strength, overpowering the terrified Vietnamese. They pulled out just above the trees.
Frightened and furious, Secord pulled his .38-caliber Smith & Wesson pistol as soon as he leveled off and twisted around to point it at his backseater, ready to kill him. Just then, his passenger lost hs lunch all over the cockpit and collapsed into a small bundle of miserable humanity. Secord couldn't bring himself to shoot such a pathetic creature.
In the early morning hours of 6 February 1968, the marines hunkered down at Khe Sanh could hear the anticipated NVA armor attack against the small SF camp at Lang Vei a few miles to the west. Lang Vei's request for the commitment of the planned marine reaction forces received no response. When SF recon personnel at Khe Sanh confronted Colonel David Lownds, the CO of the 26th marines, he declared; he "would not sacrifice any American lives." Major Jim Stanton, Khe Sanh's marine artillery coordinator conceded, "It is true we had an agreement to go to the aid of Lang Vei in the event it was threatened with being overrun, but the situation at the combat base deteriorated so quickly and completely that it should have been obvious to anyone that we could no longer guarantee their security." That morning General Westmoreland flew to Danang and ordered General Robert Cushman to provide helicopter support to lift a small, 50 man SF and Montagnard, reaction force to Lang Vei. He had to issue orders to Cushman's subordinates, violating the marine chain of command, to get it done.
This 'scholar' starts out with BS: "In the early morning hours of 6 February 1968..."
The armor attack was the morning of the 7th. I realize that might be nitpicking, but if he can't even get the dates right, why should you believe anything else he writes?
and ordered General Robert Cushman to provide helicopter support to lift a small, 50 man SF and Montagnard, reaction force to Lang Vei.
These guys got in and got out with no real problems,and rescued a couple of SF guys who were still alive and holed-up in the camp dispensary or radio room. This was below the famous photo where the NVA tank was spinning it's threads over the entrance to try and bust in. Unfortunately,they didn't get there in time to save all of them,and some of that A team dissapeared into captivity.
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