Marine Sniper by Charles Henderson Read Free Book Online Page B

Valley
     
    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