Charles Henderson - Marine Sniper

“Get word to Master Sergeant Moose Gunderson over at 1st Division G-3. Tell him I’ve been hurt, but I’m okay!” Hathcock said to the nurse. She nodded and he smiled again.

A hand pushed him gently back on the gumey, but when his bloody and cracked back touched the sheet, he popped back up. A hand would push his forehead back and he popped back again, and again and again, all the way to the emergency room where a doctor, masked and dressed in surgical garb, waited.

“How you feel, Marine?”

“I’ll be okay, Sir. Got a little hot,” Hathcock said, trying to sound as though he was in complete control of his life.

“What do you do?” the doctor asked as he inserted the needle on an IV tube into Hathcock.

Fighting back the urge to shout, Carlos panted, “Scout/ Sniper, Sir. I lead a platoon.”

“I think you may be out of action for a couple of days, Marine.”

Hathcock felt something happening to his back and arms. He did not look. He did not want to see those parts of him that he would never have again disappear.

“What’s going on back there,” Hathcock asked.

“Cleaning out a truck-load of gravel,” a voice answered from behind him.

“What do you think about giving every corpsman a jeep, Mariner’

Hathcock thought a moment and said, ’That would be a terrible idea. I mean it would be outstanding for the corpsmen and those people who needed help. But the logistics of something like that would be terrible. I don’t see how…”

When Ron McAbee’s driver pulled the jeep to a stop in front of the operations tent on LZ Baldy, a Marine shouted to him, “They finally got Staff Sergeant Hathcock! I think he’s dead!” Mack raced inside the operations tent where the gunnery sergeant, who sat scrawling notes, said, “Hathcock and Perry were on an amtrac that got ambushed. The VC set off a five hundred-pound box mine under it. Blew that sucker sky high.

All the Marines were burned bad-real bad. I don’t know whether he is dead or alive. He looked bad when they put him on the medevac chopper and sent him out to the Repose. I didn’t get any word on Perry, but he’s on the Repose, too.”

“I’m headed out to the ship to see Hathcock,” McAbee told the gunnery sergeant, and in two giant steps, the tall Marine jumped in the jeep and roared away, slinging gravel and dirt. Ron McAbee spent the remainder of the day trying to hitch a ride out to the ship. He never succeeded.

A day later, Mack got word from Moose Gunderson that Hathcock was badly burned but alive, and he wrote him a letter.

On the day that Ron McAbee wrote Hathcock, Maj, Gen. Ormond R. Simpson, 1st Marine Division’s commanding general, pinned a Purple Heart medal on Hathcock’s pillow. The general’s aide took a Polaroid photograph of the event.

When the general departed, a nurse took the photo and the medal, and said, “I’ll put these in your ditty bag so that you can find them when you wake up.” A person dressed in white inserted a needle in Carlos Hathcock’s pain-ridden body, and in a moment he was asleep.

He never knew when they loaded him on another helicopter and lifted him to the Da Nang air base, where air force medics put him and the seven other burned Marines on a jet bound for Tokyo. Hathcock never knew that he also spent several days in the hospital at Yakota Air Force Base while the world-famous bum center at Brooke Army Hospital in San Antonio, Texas, awaited his and the seven other Marines’ arrival.

And even when he awoke on September 24, more than a week after the terrible fire that would change his life forever, Hathcock did not realize that he was away from Vietnam.

On the afternoon of September 16, (Stateside time) a message arrived at the Navy Annex of the Pentagon, located up the hill, next to the national cemetery, on Columbia Pike in Arlington, Virginia—a complex of buildings where Gen. Leonard F. Chapman commanded the Marine Corps. This message went to the casualty branch of the Marine Corps’ manpower division, bearing the names of eight Marines, their next of kin and home addresses: eight Marines burned on an amtrac a day ago, half a world away. And at the top of the list appeared the name Staff Sergeant Carlos N. Hathcock II.

A day later, at 3 P.M., a Marine captain, a Casualty Assistance Call Officer, wearing his dress blue uniform and carrying a message from Headquarters, U.S. Marine Corps, with Staff Sergeant Carlos N. Hathcock’s name and condition listed on it, left his office in Norfolk, Virginia, and drove to Virginia Beach. He took the Independence Boulevard exit off Route 44, and drove past the Pembroke Shopping Mall on his way to 545 Sirene Avenue and the house that Carlos and Jo Hathcock bought just before Hathcock shipped out to Vietnam. He had no way of knowing that Jo was out shopping since he avoided telephoning before hand for fear of exposing his grievous message. It is Marine Corps policy and tradition that all such messages will be made in person, without exception.

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.