Ed Kugler - Dead Center: A Marine Snipers Two-Year Odyssey in the Vietnam War

DuBay gave us a few more kind words and then turned us over to Sergeant Rider. Staff Sergeant Rider was everything you loved in a Marine. He was big and bad and proud of it. I would later learn he was a sixteen-year veteran of the Corps. He and DuBay were Korean War vets. Rider was tall, about six feet five inches of nasty. But one thing was certain, you knew who was in charge.

Okay, Marines! Im here to get some volunteers who want to fight a different war. Its a lonely war. A personal war. I want Marines that can stare a gook down eyeball-to-eyeball. I want you to be able to look em in the eye and pull the trigger. Rider spoke my language and kept my attention.

A Presidio Press Book
Published by The Random House Publishing Group
Copyright 1999 by Ed Kugler

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Presidio Press, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

Presidio Press and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

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Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 99-90065

eISBN: 978-0-307-82991-7

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General Scott suggested that Quitman withdraw and renew the attack with Worth in the morning. Quitman replied that unless he was ordered to do so he would not budge. The capital is mine, he said to Captain Baker of the Marines. My brave fellows have conquered it, and by God they shall have it!

Have it they did. That night, Santa Anna withdrew his beaten army from the city which, in the early morning hours, was surrendered to General Scott. While Scott was still eating his breakfast, Quitman took his 4th Division through the streets to the Grand Plaza, which lay in the shadow of the Aztec Palace. From the windows and roof tops Mexican civilians glumly watched the procession of Americans.

Unkempt, smeared with mud, the soldiers and Marines marched by, led by their disheveled general who had lost a shoe in the mud of the causeway. Before the palace they halted and formed in a ragged line. It was 7 A.M . The commands to present arms rang out over the Plaza as a bullet-shredded American flag was raised above the National Palace where the ancient halls of Montezuma once stood.

The victoryaccording to traditioninspired an unknown Marine in Mexico to compose the first stanza of a song. He set it to music of a tune that was popular in those days, taken from an opera called Genevieve de Brabant by the German composer, Jacques Offenbach.

From the halls of Montezuma

To the shores of Tripoli

We will fight our countrys battles

In the air, on land, and sea

First to fight for right and freedom

And to keep our country free

We are proud to claim the title

Of the United States Marine

Thus the famous marching song was bornThe Marine Corps Hymn.

It was cold in Ohio that winter. I sat by the window in Mrs. Lyonss fifth grade classroom at the Gnadenhutten Elementary School. In February, I usually froze by that window, with the ice forming opaque sculptures on the inside of the glass. But I wasnt freezing that day! George P. Hunt had pumped me up with his work, The Story of the U.S. Marines, an infamous book at best.

Liking any book surprised me. I hated reading and doing book reports, especially for Mrs. Lyons. I think I hated her more than doing book reports. After all, she was the teacher who had taken my older brother, stood him before the class, and said, This is an example of how not to be. And I just knew she was out to get me. Especially following the how not to be incident, when Mom went over, banged on Mrs. Lyonss front door, and ordered her out of her own house. Mom was screaming Get out here, and Ill mop the street up with you! I guess you could say she was real protective of us kids, even brother Butch, who gave her most of her gray hair.

Neither the fact I couldnt stand Mrs. Lyons nor my hatred for reading could stop me from loving that book. My heart raced, chasing away the chill of the windows, as I read of the exploits of the 4th Marines in Mexico. Then I traveled around the world as Mr. Hunt took me on a journey of adventure and excitement with the U.S. Marines. Wow! It was the first book Id ever loved. And something changed inside me that cold February day.

Thats how it started. An innocent kid, in an innocent fifth grade class, reading an obscure book and a dream was born. A dream to be a United States Marine. Somehow, I knew then that I had to be a Marine. Id show the people of sleepy little Gnadenhutten. I was more than all the fifteen hundred people in town thought I was. Of course, I never expected that less than a decade later Id be with those same 4th Marines, the ones Mr. Hunt wrote so proudly of in his book. And little did I know Id fight in a place called Vietnam. And fight not just as a Marine but as a Marine scout-sniper.

This is a book about my two years as a Marine sniper in Vietnam. Its about the wild and crazy odyssey of those two years. Its about how I got there. And its about becoming and being a sniper and turning your back on the world. Its about a boy way out in Middle America and his transition from being a small-town kid to a United States Marine. Its a journey inside an eighteen-year-olds mind as he experiences his first combat and the death that comes with it, as a Marine becomes a scout-sniper in a crazy war, as people like me in the death business learn to cope. I did not know how dramatically my decision that cold winter day would impact the rest of my life.

And now that Im in the rest of my life, I can offer the reader a book thats true. Its raw and straightforward, but the events actually took place. Theyre often not very nice, but theyre real. When they took place is as close as I can get them to the actual time. About as close as a game of hand grenades. Most of the names used are nicknames, the standard military fare, but theyre not the actual nicknames. Ive changed them to protect the guilty and the innocent. And to respect those who changed their lives and those who didnt. And its a book about normal people in an abnormal situation, doing shocking things. And its about what becomes of them when they get together for a war.

And now for a final word on what the book is not. Its not a book about me being a hero or about getting the biggest body count this side of Cambodia. Its not about the glory of war or the disaster of Vietnam. And although youll read about our time with various Force Recon teams, I was not a member of Marine Force Recon; I did spend a few memorable months supporting them as a sniper. I had to issue that disclaimer since in the past thirty years, Ive met enough former Recon Marines to populate the entire State of Texas, and thats a bunch.