5

Moonshine and
Half-Hatched Ducks

THE MISSION SCARED Nguyen Van Quang. He was not ordered to do it, just firmly asked. The highest-ranking Viet Cong official in his sector, Tran Anh Lien, sat him down and talked about the need to deliver weapons into the city.

“Do you think you can do this?” Lien asked.

There were secret police and informers everywhere in Hue. Quang59 had been avoiding them for years, spreading the word about liberation and assembling an underground militia. Distributing leaflets or speaking critically of the regime could get him locked up; smuggling weapons could get him shot. He was proud of his service and success in recruiting a local militia, and it clearly did not make sense to leave his cell of fighters unarmed, but he never imagined he would be the one to smuggle in the weapons. He didn’t answer at first.

Lien tried a different tack. He asked, “Do you have any organization that dares to bring these weapons into the city for you?”

Quang stood.

“My dear comrade,” he said. “This is very difficult for me.” He explained that his activities so far had exposed him to a great deal of risk, but that this was worse.

“I might be able to encourage some people to bring guns into the city, but as for me . . .” He confessed that he did not know how it could be done.

“If that’s the case, can you go back into the city secretly . . . avoiding the people who know you?” Lien asked.

“Yes. It would be difficult, but I can do that.”

“Then you go back and form a group to transport guns in for you,” Lien said. “And you will receive the guns and participate in that mission, all right?”

Quang had fled Hue when he was a high school student. He had been in the eleventh grade, little more than a wisp of a boy—small even by Vietnamese standards—and wiry. But even at sixteen he possessed an abundance of boyish energy and charm. People were drawn to him. He came from a family of intellectuals who lived inside the Citadel in a neighborhood abutting the walls of the royal palace. His father was a teacher, and all eight of his uncles had also pursued learned professions. All were known nationalists who had joined the Viet Minh in 1945. Two had died in that struggle. Young Quang felt pressure to measure up.

In high school, he had been elected secretary general of the Student Union. In 1965, when American troops began to pour into the heart of Hue, when he had seen for the first time foreign tanks and military vehicles and heavily armed soldiers moving across the Truong Tien Bridge, it had given him the push he needed. Until then he had seen President Thieu’s government as wrongheaded but at least Vietnamese. He saw the war as a conflict between two factions of his own people with different ideas about governance. When those allied with the liberation movement would urge him to join the fight against the Americans, Quang would say, “How can we resist the Americans when there are none?”

Suddenly there were Americans everywhere. It crystallized Quang’s thinking. This was clearly not just a civil war, but a struggle for independence, a new chapter in the one his father and uncles had fought. It was his turn. When it was announced that still more American troops would be coming, he helped organize a student walkout in protest, and afterward he and his classmates held other peaceful demonstrations. When he saw that this accomplished little, he sought underground representatives of the VC, and joined.

He was sent south toward the Bach Ma National Forest, a stunning and rugged landscape of high green mountains and gracefully curving terraced farms just north of Da Nang. Quang expected the resistance camp to be hidden and remote, but instead found that it was right out in the open in a well-populated area. He shuttled between Dinh Mon and Duong Hoa, villages near the famous Gia Long Tomb.

Controlled by the rebels, these villages were working models of the future, as far as Quang was concerned. He was received as a valuable recruit. His schooling and his familiarity with the city were rare among the VC, most of whom came from rural villages. Having made up his mind to fully commit, Quang was swept up in the idealism and fervor of the cause. The men and women in the villages came from all over Vietnam, from the North as well as the South, and they not only shared his anger at the American presence but also had a clear idea of what their country would become. This shared vision was being practiced in the villages, which were models of communal living. Quang saw exactly what he was fighting for. Poorly supplied and often hungry, the rebels shared a commitment to long struggle and a conviction that they would ultimately prevail. He grew close to these who entered training with him. They received political instruction and were taught to use modern Russian and Chinese weapons as well as older ones that had been seized from the French and the Americans.

Life at the camp so inspired Quang that his heart sank when he was ordered for the first time, near the end of that year, to return alone to the city. He reappeared at his high school in the fall, now working as a VC recruiter. He was good at it. Soon he had ten of his classmates working with him. They started a patriotic newspaper called Hoc Sinh (the Students), aimed at young readers, and written carefully to avoid provoking the nguy. Their stories were copied on a Roneo machine, a mimeograph, and consisted of a single sheet of paper folded in half with printing on all four sides. They reported strictly “legal” news—an account, for instance, of a fight between Americans and the VC near Phu Bai. Such a story broke no rules, but the message it conveyed to Quang’s fellow high school students was subtly subversive. Americans were shooting at and killing Vietnamese. This was a foreign occupation, and some of their countrymen were fighting it.

The newspaper attracted new recruits, including the workmen who helped them operate the Roneo machine. In his final year of high school, Quang had an underground cell of more than thirty. His success was noticed. By the summer of 1966, as he was preparing for his second round of exams for Hue University, he noticed for the first time that he was being shadowed by a policeman. When his like-minded older brother was arrested and imprisoned, accused of being a Communist sympathizer, Quang was warned by friends that he would be next. He fled back to the rebel villages.

This time he did not stay long. The local commissar asked him to return again to Hue, despite the danger of arrest. This time he would be given a different name and new identity papers, and he was to avoid his old school and neighborhood. He would go to the fishing village of Kim Do, northeast of the Citadel. The work he was asked to do was still dangerous. He had always lived in the city, and sooner or later he was bound to come across someone who knew him, but there was something big in the works, he was told, and the risks were necessary.

He moved in with the family of Nguyen Ngu, which raised ducks, thousands of them. Quang worked as a tutor to the Nguyen children, and slipped back into the city at night to meet with his cell and to find new recruits. He had a number of close brushes with the police, but he never came across anyone who recognized him. Armed with his natural charisma and his devotion to the cause, he had more success than either he or his superiors had imagined. His original cell members were encouraged to recruit on their own. Through them he made contact with some of his old friends at the university who regarded him now as a hero, and they, too, agreed to help. There were now many students who sympathized. His underground militia swelled to one hundred members.

At night he moved around the city on a scooter wearing a helmet and visor; he often took these trips with a girl riding behind him so they would look like a young couple on a date. Once he was in a coffee shop when police entered. One officer stood right beside him at the counter. Quang’s heart pounded but the policeman took no notice of him. His organization was built in concentric circles. Few outside his original group knew him. Among his cell were students, teachers, monks, young laborers, and small shopkeepers; there was even one uniformed ARVN soldier. The most capable he sent to Bach Ma for political and military training.

Quang’s was one of a number of such cells in the city. In November 1967, at the same time Westy was visiting Washington, Quang and a number of other cell leaders met at another mountain base, this one about twelve miles northeast in Phong Dien district. Here they learned for the first time about Tong-Tan-cong-Noi-day. Plans were well advanced. A reinforced battalion of the NVA, nearly one thousand men, had already been assembled in and around the village of La Chu60 in an area that the Americans had earlier designated a “secure hamlet,” and that had since been abandoned. It was equipped with American-made concrete bunkers and buildings—a perfect bombproof headquarters, compliments of Uncle Sam. It would serve as the nerve center for the attack on Hue.

Tong-Tan-cong-Noi-day was conceived as an attack from without and from within; it was both an “offensive” and an “uprising.” The bulk of the invading force would be NVA. Mixed with them were battalions of VC, many led by NVA officers who had moved south. So the only truly local part of the National Liberation Front was these local militiamen. Because they knew the city, some of the cell leaders would serve as party representatives, or commissars, once the city was taken. This was a political war, they were told, so the uprising was more important than the offensive. Local cadre chiefs like Tran Anh Lien, who had groomed Quang, would have a big role to play. They would spark and lead the anticipated citizen revolt, and supervise the building of the new Vietnam.

All together the Front would number nearly ten thousand. The NVA’s Sixth Regiment alone, for instance, consisted of three regular infantry battalions, each of which broke down to three companies of roughly two hundred men, which were further divided into three platoons. Supplementing the regular forces were elite commando units, an artillery battalion armed with 122-mm rockets, and various specialist companies armed with mortars, heavy machine guns, and bazookas (either B-40s or the newer B-41s, which had more penetrating power).61 This combined army wore an assortment of uniforms: the regular NVA had dark green Chinese-made uniforms with distinctive metal pith helmets; the VC had khaki uniforms and tan pith helmets of an older vintage, if they had helmets at all; and many wore civilian clothes or black pajamas62 and shorts, or some combination of the above. Most carried canvas backpacks, ammunition, and food tied up in cloth tubes they draped over their shoulders. Most wore sandals. The local militia­men generally wore civilian clothes or pajamas. They would all pin to their left sleeve torn strips of red cloth and blue cloth over a white backdrop. Backing the fighters were scores of civilian volunteers, an elaborate support and supply network staffed primarily by local men and women like the village girl Che Thi Mung, who would steer the army into the city, and then, when the fighting started, deliver food and ammunition, evacuate the wounded to field hospitals, dig bunkers and trenches, and bury the dead. The Front troops had nothing like the firepower of American and ARVN troops, and they lacked the ability to attack and resupply by air or sea, but they had deep roots in the community. With leaders who had been fighting for decades, they were more than a match for the Americans, many possessing infantry skills—defense, firing, and maneuver—that would impress even the most battle-hardened American veterans.

Planning had been meticulous. By the end of 1967, the Front had broken down its assault to hundreds of specific missions. An unusual one was assigned to a VC veteran, Sergeant Cao Van Sen, who was to make and deliver a special flag to be run up the 123-foot flagpole at Ngo Mon, the monumental three-story platform that stood just outside the royal palace, before the Citadel’s southern wall. Set on the north bank of the Huong River, it was visible all over Hue.

Careful thought had been given to this flag. Because many in the city were not yet committed to the revolution, a flag that flew so prominently would have to send a careful message. The party wanted Tong-Tan-cong-Noi-day to be viewed not as an invasion or occupation, but rather as a liberation. The party flag, bright red with a large yellow star at the center, would not do. This was the symbol of North Vietnam, which many in Hue still saw as a faction in the civil war. Nor would running up the VC flag, two horizontal stripes, the upper one red, the bottom one blue, with a yellow star at the center. The rebels were a minority in Hue. What the planners had in mind was an ensign to inspire the uprising, a flag that purported to symbolize Hue’s own aspirations. The idea was to recognize real political differences between North and South, and to establish a neutral, independent South Vietnam with which Hanoi could negotiate terms for unification. Since much of the city was home to secular intellectuals, Buddhists, and Catholics, a politically correct flag would herald an alliance of these groups. The final design featured the yellow national star at its center, against a backdrop that was still bright Communist red through the center, but with two wide blue horizontal stripes on the top and bottom. The blue stripes represented the intelligentsia and the city’s religious factions—Buddhists and Catholics.

This vision was more wishful than real. The efforts of Quang and others had drawn volunteers from the university, but these were nearly all students, not the city’s true intelligentsia. Rural recruits like Che and the other girls in her Huong River Squad were typical of the VC’s peasant base. There was negligible support from Hue’s Buddhist community, beyond the endorsement of one venerable monk, Thich Don Hua, a champion of reunification. There was outright hostility from the city’s Catholics, who ordinarily fought or fled from the rebels. The great hope of the Tet Offensive was that its very size and daring would trigger a surge of nationalism that would transcend barriers of ideology, class, and faith.

Sergeant Sen was a good choice for the flag mission, even though he had never done a thing like this before. He was a short man with a broad face and dark skin, born in a village on the northern outskirts of Hue. He had a dark gray birthmark that colored the whole right side of his face. His father had held an official job in the royal palace, and both he and Sen’s mother had fought with the Viet Minh. Now Sen’s large family, like the country, was divided. Three of his brothers fought with the ARVN, something his father considered a disgrace. Sen himself had joined the fight against the French when he was just seventeen, in 1950. When the Geneva Accords ended the war four years later, dividing the country, Sen and the other men in his unit were disappointed, but they believed the promised election in three years would reunite the nation. The men would hold up three fingers to each other as a reminder of the promise. Sen remained a soldier, attending school in the North for two years, and when the South reneged on the elections, he had been ordered to don the black pajamas of the VC and go back to his old district. He had helped establish the base at La Chu, and had taken part in small firefights against the nguy and American forces. In the months before Tet, he and his platoon of commandos had been learning to cross rivers at night, to remain hidden, and to scale walls. They would form a human pyramid three men high. The top man would fling a rope over the top of the wall and pull himself up and over, then lower the rope for the others.

But Sen was relieved of these climbing exercises to assume the flag mission. He obtained a sewing machine and cloth, and found a woman named Le Thi Mai to make the flag. It was so large and heavy it took two men to carry. Sen was given a journalist and a cameraman to document its raising. They were to deliver the alliance flag to Ngo Mon once the Citadel was taken, and run it up the high pole so every person who awakened on the thirty-first of January would know the city had changed hands.

The entire Tet Offensive was a masterpiece of clandestine effort. One US Navy commander would later call it “a logistical miracle.”63 By late fall of 1967, the regulars had begun moving into position by the thousands, passing through rural villages and along roadways. Local recruits made regular night trips past villages on the city’s outskirts just to make guard dogs bark, which became such a nightly occurrence that few paid attention to it anymore—either that or the dogs would grow so accustomed they no longer stirred.64 Still, there was no way to completely hide such a large number of men. It was the kind of troop movement that could remain secret only if the citizenry supported it, or didn’t care enough to sound an alarm.

In November, on the visit to Commissar Lien when Quang was finally apprised of the mission, he was told that his militia would help attack Chanh Tay Gate, the northernmost of two on the west wall. It and the other, Huu Gate, were critical, because the bulk of the NVA Sixth Regiment would be coming from that direction. Starting the previous winter, commandos had begun to explore alternative ways into and out of the fortress. There were flood-control canals that flowed through its walls in stone and plastic conduits, some of them six feet tall. By the beginning of the year these had been fully explored, and would afford another way of infiltration.

Quang’s company would join with NVA regulars on the night of the attack. Commandos who had slipped into the fortress would first approach the well-guarded Chanh Tay Gate from the inside, attacking the guards there and opening the doors. Then the main force would pour in, enough to overwhelm whatever ARVN troops remained or responded. Quang’s militia unit would join the fight from the inside, and then get to work fomenting the popular uprising.

But first Quang would need to arm them. He left his meeting with Lien burdened with worry. Smuggling weapons frightened him, and he had no idea how to do it. When he returned to the Nguyens, he spent days debating with himself how or even whether to proceed. Mr. and Mrs. Nguyen had become surrogate parents to him; he called them Uncle and Aunt. They had a boat they used to deliver ducks and eggs to the city for sale. They might be able to hide a substantial shipment of guns and ammo on their boat on one of these trips, but he could not bring himself to ask them. They were sympathetic to the cause but not active revolutionaries. How could he ask them to take such a risk? For days he could not eat or sleep. Finally, Mrs. Nguyen, seeing his distress, asked him to explain.

“Tell me,” she said. “Maybe I can help.”

He confessed to both Nguyens that he had accepted a mission he could not perform.

“I’d do almost anything to help you,” Nguyen Ngu said. “But asking me to do this is no different than killing me.”

There were ARVN checkpoints on the river where all shipments were inspected. When the guards were familiar with merchants, as with the Nguyens, often they just waved them past, but not always. The family sometimes prepared small delicacies—boiled ducks and hot vit lon, a local favorite, a duck embryo boiled and served inside the shell—and offered them with a small cask of moonshine. Still, it was no guarantee. There was no predicting when the guards would decide to poke through everything on board.

Quang backed off. There were not many comrades in his neighborhood and it would have been dangerous for him to range too widely. For purposes of secrecy, he was not allowed to travel to the VC base without being summoned, so he could not go back to beg Lien to relieve him of the task. He spent a week away from the Nguyens, wrestling with the problem, and finally gave up and returned, defeated.

“Where have you been?” Mrs. Nguyen asked.

“I was trying to find another way to bring armaments into the city,” he said.

“Did you find one?”

Quang said he had not.

“It’s too difficult,” he said.

“I think we can help you,” Mrs. Nguyen said. She and her husband had discussed it in his absence, and in short she had talked her husband into it. He would fashion a false bottom on his boat to stash larger things, the guns and rocket launchers. Smaller things, like ammunition, could be wrapped in plastic and placed deep in the baskets of eggs. The guards typically probed merchandise in boxes or baskets with long rods, but they couldn’t do so with baskets of eggs.

“How can we get the stuff off the boat without attracting attention?” Quang asked.

The Nguyens had thought this through, too. Their goods were not off-loaded at a market. Ordinarily they just berthed at a spot along the river and their customers came to them. Quang need only instruct his men to stagger their approach to the boat, purchase some eggs or ducks, and then carry off the weapons and ammo piece by piece.

“This part would be easy for us to do,” said Mrs. Nguyen.

Quang wrote up the proposal in code and sent it by courier to Lien. We now have a plan and someone willing to carry it out. A few days later Lien himself paid a visit to the Nguyens. He brought along the deputy commander for all the forces in Hue. They listened to the plan in detail, and then they feasted on the Nguyens’ ducks. The next morning Ngu started building a false bottom in his boat.

On the appointed day, early in January, Quang left the city with Ngu to supervise the loading. Into the bottom went piles of AK-47s, bazooka tubes, and grenades. The egg baskets were planted with ammo. He stayed behind as Ngu set off. Quang could see how nervous he was, so he suggested that Ngu drink some of the moonshine.

“Not enough to get drunk,” he said, “but enough to look drunk.”

Ngu’s face flushed whenever he drank even a little alcohol. So he looked the part as he approached the checkpoints, and played it up. He staggered and bellowed and waved to the guards, offering them his presents and pleading with them to let him pass quickly: “Because I am drunk and I’m worried I’m not going to get to Hue on time, and my wife will kill me.”

Quang waited back in Kim Do through that entire day. He did not learn until the following afternoon that his “uncle” had made the trip safely, and that his men had picked up the shipment. His force now was ready, armed. He could hardly believe it. As he saw it, the miracle proved the truth of Ho’s teachings, that the party and the army were not enough. Real victory could come only from the people. Here he had been handed a task beyond his ability, beyond his courage. And his friend Uncle Ngu had stepped up. The arms had been delivered by nhan dan, the people.