Over the past two years on my book tour for “Heroes to the End,” I met many Vietnam veterans who told me “I don’t have to read about it; I lived it.”
Maybe since I was only under fire twice during my 1971-72 tour, and seemed to lead a charmed life, I’ve read every book on Vietnam I could get my hands on to see what others went through. The latest is “Hue 1968” by Mark Bowden.
I feel Bowden’s book on the bloodiest and most pivotal battle of the war is a marvelous combination of painstaking research over a four-year period and superior writing.
It will go on the top shelf of my office bookcase next to Neil Sheehan’s “A Bright Shining Lie” and Frank Snepp’s “Decent Interval.”
I rate it ahead of other classics such as Seymour Hersh’s “My Lai 4,” Michael Herr’s “Dispatches,” Philip Caputo’s “A Rumor of War,” Harold G. Moore’s “We Were Soldiers Once…and Young,” Col. David H. Hackworth’s “Steel My Soldiers’ Hearts,” David Maraniss’ “They Marched Into Sunlight” and Al Santoli’s “Everything We Had.”
Bowden interviewed 112 Americans and 43 Vietnamese survivors.
They provided vivid descriptions of bloody, chaotic house-to-house fighting – which American troops had not participated in since the Korean War. “Most of the marines were amazed to find themselves in a city,” Bowden quotes the New York Times’ Gene Roberts as writing. “All they had seen of Vietnam were air bases, rice paddies and jungle. Here were tall buildings, wide paved streets, cars and trucks parked against curbs, parks, bars, restaurants, fine and spacious homes.”
While American commander William Westmoreland was preoccupied with what he felt would be a Dien Bien Phu-style attack on the mountaintop base Khe Sahn, some 10,000 North Vietnamese and Vietcong soldiers instead quietly occupied the historic and walled city of Hue on the central coast in the middle of the night on Jan. 31, 1968, the first day of Tet, the Lunar New Year celebrated by all Vietnamese. It was one of a series of coordinated attacks around the country.
“The surprise achieved in Hue was complete,” Bowden writes. “It was not a case of simply being caught off guard. It was so unexpected it triggered not just alarm but disbelief – deadly disbelief…Many young Americans would die or be severely maimed over the weeks it took for the truth to sink in.”
Underestimating the size of the enemy force, American commanders ordered several platoons of marines into a slaughter pen. They were cut down in courtyards by NVA snipers and machine gunners from second story windows.
It took the Marines 25 days to dislodge the Communists in fighting that sometimes was hand-to-hand and took the lives of 250 Americans, 450 ARVN soldiers, 2,400 enemy, more than 800 civilians and resulted in the execution by the Communists of 2,800 South Vietnamese.
Westmoreland estimated the enemy force in the Citadel to be 500; he was off by a factor of 20. The marines and First Cavalry Division Army troops involved in retaking the city were used to being supported by artillery and tactical air power but commanders initially held off on using those assets due to the city’s historic nature.
It was modeled after China’s Forbidden City with thick walls and a royal palace. The Americans were loath to destroy it. Our troops paid the bloody price.
“One second they were there,” Bowden writes of a mortar attack, “living and breathing and thinking and maybe swearing or even praying…and in the next second [they]…had been turned into a plume of fine pink mist – tiny bits of blood, bone, tissue, flesh and brain – that rose and drifted and settled over everyone and everything nearby it.”
Other vignettes Bowden recounts include: a wounded soldier waking up in a zipped body bag to protest that he wasn’t dead; a marine caught in a mortar barrage while defecating into a bucket; the death of Alfred Gonzalez, who would posthumously receive the Medal of Honor; marines using flamethrowers to burn stacks of enemy dead; the stench from mass graves; the bravery of troops under fire who wiped out defenders, lowered an NVA flag and raised ours. But the book’s theme is a sense of loss.
“No matter who died,” Bowden writes, “there was no time to grieve…There was also something shameful about violent, shattering death.
It wasn’t rational. How you were killed was rarely your fault, but part of the horror was the humiliating display – bodies ruptured, insides horribly spilled.
No matter how dignified or admired or liked a man had been in life, here he was very suddenly and publicly dead.”
Based on body count, the Tet Offensive was hailed by the brass as a huge American victory. But the world press felt America was embarrassed, the anti-war movement was re-energized, Walter Cronkite painted a gloomy picture, and a month later, President Lyndon Johnson announced that he would not seek a second term.
Fifty years ago, after Hue and Tet, the question became not when we would win but how we would exit an unpopular and costly war.
