The Battle for Hue, 1968

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/17/opinion/sunday/the-battle-for-hue-1968.html

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Fifty years ago, I spent five days with a company of Marines in Hue, the imperial capital of Vietnam, as they fought to recapture the city from the North Vietnamese Army. I was a reporter for the Time-Life News Service, but I had a camera with me and took photos of the fighting. I was wounded on Feb. 19 and evacuated; in the process I lost my camera, and by the time I got it back, the fighting was over, and it was too late for the pictures to run. This is the first time they’ve been published.

The North Vietnamese captured Hue as part of the Tet offensive, a countrywide attack on American and South Vietnamese positions that began at the end of January and lasted, in some places, for weeks. In Hue, they occupied the Citadel, with its Chinese-style palace, which was built in the early 19th century to house Vietnam’s emperors. With its surrounding moat, high walls and stone towers, the Citadel provided ideal defensive positions. It took the Marines, operating from a compound across the Huong River, almost a month to recapture it.

I was embedded with Delta Company of the First Battalion, Fifth Marines, nicknamed Dying Delta because of its high casualty rate. On the day I shot my photos, they were advancing south along the eastern wall of the Citadel under fire from hidden positions. Civilians who had been hiding in their homes would appear from time to time and dash down the street, hoping to escape the battle zone. Sometimes they made it. Sometimes they didn’t.

The streets smelled of cordite, burning houses and dead bodies, all under a cold, dark sky and a misty drizzle that French soldiers in the previous war had called “crachin,” or “spit.” Along the wall ahead of us loomed a stone edifice, the Dong Ba Tower, that had been reduced to rubble by artillery, airstrikes, even gunfire from ships off the Vietnamese coast. Still, a few North Vietnamese remained alive and dangerous in the rubble.

It took the Marines several days to breach the wall and enter the Citadel, but the combat didn’t end. The Communists refused to retreat or surrender, which meant that the Marines and South Vietnamese had to clear the city block by block, driving up the casualties on both sides, and among the many civilians unable to flee.

During lulls in the fighting, the Marines would shelter in abandoned houses, eat their combat rations, even shave in broken mirrors. Marines had never seen urban fighting like this, and they wouldn’t again until the Battle of Falluja, almost 40 years later.

On Feb. 19, I was wounded in a blast and had to be evacuated. The battle ended six days later. During the 24 days of fighting for control of Hue, the North Vietnamese and their Communist allies from the south lost 5,000 combatants; the South Vietnamese Army lost around 2,500; and the Americans lost 1,800, including 40 percent of Delta Company. Some 80 percent of the city was destroyed, and untold thousands of civilians died in the crossfire or from Communist reprisals carried out during the occupation.

H.D.S. Greenway, a former reporter and editor at The Boston Globe, is the author of “Foreign Correspondent,” a memoir.