4

The Royal Capital

OCCUPYING HUE WOULD be a bold step, the most dramatic action taken by Hanoi so far in Chien-tranh Chong My (the Resistance War Against America). It would shock not just Vietnam, but the world. The attack Che Thi Mung and the other girls in her squad were helping to prepare, the Tong-Tan-cong-Noi-day, would be part of a countrywide effort, but Hue was its centerpiece. Years later, Oberdorfer, the definitive chronicler of the Tet Offensive, would write: “The plan of action—a simultaneous surprise attack on nearly every city, town, and major military base throughout South Vietnam—was audacious in its conception and stunning in its implementation. The repercussions were on a scale to match.”56

It would begin early Wednesday morning, January 31, the first day of the Lunar New Year and of Tet. Ordinarily the holidays were honored by a cease-fire, the only respite from the bloodletting. Families gathered to take stock, pray, and plan for their future; to remember their departed; and to beseech Ong Tao (the Kitchen God) for good fortune. Those who could afford it stretched the celebration out for days, having stored food and drink and fireworks enough to celebrate well into the new year. Blossoming cherry trees and branches and colorful lanterns were displayed indoors, much as evergreen trees and boughs and glittering ornaments decked the halls at Christmas in America.

But this year would be known not for joy and hope, but for death. Hanoi had attached VC forces from the region to four full regiments of tough NVA regulars, each with more than one thousand men, who had spent months marching south along treacherous mountain trails to get into position. These numbers had been supplemented by militia troops recruited and trained from the city itself, locals like Che who knew their way around and who would give the invasion a local face. The idea was for the offensive to be seen as a popular uprising. Similar but lesser efforts were planned for cities from Saigon57 to Da Nang to Can Tho and Nha Trang, and also to smaller cities throughout the South. Taking Hue would send an immediate sharp message—perhaps “warning” is the better word—to the citizens of South Vietnam and to millions in the United States who had begun to doubt the wisdom of the whole undertaking.

Hue was a city of both practical and symbolic importance. With a population of about 140,000, it was the third-largest city in South Vietnam, and arguably the third most important in both Vietnams, after the capitals of Hanoi and Saigon, in that it symbolically belonged to both. As a center of Vietnamese culture, it had a significance that transcended the divide. It was a former imperial seat and the major center of learning and worship. Set on a thick finger of land formed by a bend in the Huong River, Hue originally had been just the Citadel, the enormous fortress that enclosed nearly two square miles of flat land. Its walls were twenty-six feet high and impenetrably thick. They were actually two parallel ramparts about twenty to thirty feet apart, the space between them filled with earth—wide enough at the top for there to be homes and gardens and walking paths and guard posts behind the parapets. Although crumbling in places, it was still an enormously impressive sight, bordered all around by a moat that was spanned by only eleven narrow bridges. Each led to a gate before a passageway built long before the age of the automobile. From the air, the structure formed a giant square with an appendage in the northeast corner called Mang Ca.

Westerners regard Asian history as something vast and mysterious that reaches deep into the mists of time, and the brown, silver, and russet stains on the Citadel’s black stone walls certainly conveyed that sense. Reporters would routinely refer to it as “ancient” or “medieval,” but it was neither. Most of the truly ancient rulers of Vietnam had been based in the north, closer to Hanoi. Hue had not become the ruling seat until 1802 under the Nguyens, who would rule for 143 years, an impressive run but a mere eyeblink in the land’s long history. There were far more important dynastic periods. The longest lived was the Hong Bang, which was truly ancient, ruling from its seat in the region of Hanoi from 2879 BC to 258 BC, before the advent of the Roman Empire. From the fifth to roughly the fourteenth centuries, which in Europe spanned the Middle Ages and Renaissance, the land was intermittently ruled by the Chinese. When the Nguyens seized power and decided to erect their capital in Hue, they adopted the military principles of French architect Sébastien de Vauban. Thomas Jefferson was president of the United States. The fortress was as Western as it was Asian, and was younger than the White House in Washington, DC—although in considerably poorer repair.

Still, it looked as ancient as Troy. Its walls rose startlingly from the Huong River’s north bank, sheer and unassailable. About half of the city’s population lived inside it in 1968, many in neatly appointed neighborhoods, some quite affluent. There were one- and two-story masonry houses with red-orange barrel tile roofs originally built for those employed by the royal government. The taller ones had ornate wrought iron balconies. Many were painted in bright pastels, and housed extended families, often several generations, a traditional village way of life imported to the city. They were surrounded by high stone walls that enclosed elaborate, lovingly tended gardens. Most things grew in the semitropical climate, and some of these floral displays were extraordinary, with small, sculpted trees, bamboo thickets, broadleaf plants with exotic flowers, enormous palm fronds, and ponds stocked with colorful koi. The city had outgrown the fortress. There were neighborhoods just outside the walls and along approach roads on both sides of the river.

At the south center of the fortress were the royal palace and its grounds, which were enclosed by an inner fortress. The emperor Gia Long had modeled it after China’s Forbidden City, with a throne room constructed of intricately painted wood beams and panels and colorful gilded dragons. The palace grounds had larger homes and outbuildings arrayed around lush gardens, lakes, and canals. These had once housed the Nguyen emperors’ wives and children, and their imperial court.

But the Nguyen dynasty was long gone. The clan had served as a figurehead for the French colonial authorities, briefly for the Japanese when they occupied Vietnam in World War II, and then for the French again immediately after the war, until the Viet Minh forced them out. The imperial heir in 1954, Bao Dai, was a nationalist who had abdicated after the Japanese occupation ended in 1945, giving his benediction to Ho Chi Minh. This conferred a legitimacy on Ho that proved troublesome when Bao Dai briefly returned to head the French-backed government of South Vietnam. From 1949 until 1955, the faux emperor failed to shake his image as an interloper. Ho had been designated the national leader, and Bao Dai was now seen simply (and correctly) as an agent of the French. Those who followed him to the leading office in Saigon, presidents Ngo Dinh Diem and then Nguyen Van Thieu, shared the same taint. They continued to be viewed as agents, or “puppets,” the word Hanoi’s propagandists preferred, only now for the Americans, the latest colonial pretenders. And the perception was true. While both Diem and Thieu had supporters in the south, neither was beloved nor widely respected enough to stay in power without stout foreign support.

Even as the grand imperial edifices, tombs, and palaces fell empty and into disrepair, the city of Hue grew and prospered. Uncle Ho himself had grown up inside the Citadel, and had received his earliest education just outside its walls. The neighborhoods inside the walls remained among the city’s most well-to-do, while the modern business of the city moved south, across the Huong. All the major government offices and schools were in an area shaped like a triangle, bounded not by stone walls but by rivers and roads. The Huong River was its northern boundary. To the west was the Phu Cam Canal, which flowed southeast from the Huong until it intersected Highway 1, which spanned the waters on the An Cuu Bridge.58 Just north of the bridge the highway reached the southern terminus of Ba Trieu Street, which angled northeast back up to the Huong. The triangle thus formed was roughly bisected by the highway, a road that in happier times ran all the way from Hanoi to Saigon, but that during war became a contested thoroughfare from one end to the other. In the French War, a northern stretch of the two-lane highway saw so much fighting it had been dubbed La Rue Sans Joie (Street Without Joy). Most of it was elevated enough to remain passable even when the rice paddies on either side were completely flooded. In the Hue area, Highway 1 stretched from the big American base at Da Nang up to Phu Bai, a drive of about an hour and a half, then from Phu Bai north to the city. It crossed the Huong over the Truong Tien Bridge, a graceful structure designed and built in 1897 by Gustave Eiffel, famous for the tower in Paris. Topped with six low arches of latticed steel, it was wide enough for two-way traffic and walkways. Beyond the bridge, the Citadel sat astride the highway. To proceed farther north meant either driving around it or passing through the Thuong Tu Gate on the lower right and navigating the narrow streets inside toward the upper left gate called An Hoa.

The Truong Tien Bridge was one of two that spanned the Huong. The other, farther west, the Bach Ho (railroad) Bridge, carried the rail line across. There were numerous other smaller bridges around the triangle, spanning canals and large drainage ditches that channeled river water to the rice paddies that sprawled away from the city in all directions.

Hue had the bustle and appeal of a modern city like Saigon, but it had retained some of the elegance of an older Vietnam. The city’s pagodas and baroque dynastic tombs were architectural treasures. From the park that ran along the south bank of the Huong you could watch sampans and fishing boats moving lazily on the water before the stark wall of the Citadel, or enter the elegant Cercle Sportif, a colonial-era sports and social club with vintage French automobiles parked outside, which on the inside was still furnished and run as if the seven decades of colonial rule had never ended. On the other side of Le Loi Street were mansions, commercial buildings, the treasury building, the post office, a prison, and a Catholic cathedral—the Church of the Most Holy Redeemer. The city was small, but it was thriving and completely urban, home to an emerging commercial class that had been largely sheltered from the war.

In fact, Hue was the one place in all of Vietnam that the war had hardly touched. Its people were not especially supportive of either side in the conflict. Ho knew that Hue’s Catholics, Buddhists, and intellectuals, while not necessarily friendly to his cause, were also cool to Thieu’s government. The president had the backing of his fellow Catholics, but few others. The heavy-handed policies and corruption of the Saigon regime under Diem had provoked in 1963 the shocking self-immolations of Buddhist protesters—broadcast around the world—and stinging criticism and protests by Hue University’s intellectuals. These events led to Diem’s assassination later that year. The protests had abated, but resentment lingered. Buddhists were systematically ostracized by the Thieu regime; only Catholics’ villages were provided arms to defend themselves against Communist rebels. Buddhists and most intellectuals in Hue, even those opposed to Ho, saw Thieu and his government as a creation of the United States. So the city was a tough nut for both the North and the South. It had largely been left alone.

As a result, the military presence in Hue was light. In January 1968 there were fewer than one thousand ARVN troops stationed in the city and surrounding area, and a smaller number of Americans. As the holidays approached, a large portion of the former were looking forward to a long holiday furlough.

In this peaceful city, during Tet, it was traditional to send cups of paper with lit candles floating down the Huong like flickering blossoms, prayers for health, for success, for the memory of loved ones away or departed, for success in business or in love, and perhaps for an end to the war and killing. It made a moving collective display, a vast flotilla of hope, many thousands of tiny flames. They would wind down the wide water without sound, flowing past the bright lights of the modern city to the south, framed to the north by the fortress’s high black walls. People would line both banks of the Huong to savor the spectacle, stepping up and bending to add their own offering. The ritual was Hue’s emblem and signature, a gesture of beauty and calm, of harmony between the living and the dead, an expression of Vietnam’s soul, a place far from the horrors of war.

Not this year.