1

Fireworks

THE FIRST BIG blow was struck by a five-man team of commandos, part of the NVA’s Fifth Regiment that called itself Thanh doi Hue (the Hue City Unit). For weeks they had been living underground in the mountains west of the city, planning how to destroy the tanks at Tam Thai, an ARVN armored base less than two miles south of Hue’s center.1 Based there were more than two dozen M41 Walker Bulldogs, ­American-made tanks, which were parked behind four concentric barbed wire fences off Highway 1 just beyond the southern tip of the triangle. The small, antiquated tanks were no match for more modern antitank weaponry, but in the streets of Hue they could do a lot of damage to infantry armed mostly with rifles. Destroying them would be key to the attack’s success.

As they prepared, Nguyen Quang Ha and his team had lived in a hole big enough for all of them with a thatched cover to make it invisible from the air. Camped with them were hundreds of comrades, a full NVA battalion, which would swarm the base after they blew up the tanks. Ha had heard a lot of talk about a battle that would end the war once and for all, but for him and the others in his squad, after months of living in the mountains or on jungle trails, it meant their days of living in the dirt were over.

Ha was not a career soldier. Until the year before he had been happily employed as a middle school math teacher in Bac Ninh, a village north of Hanoi. He was thirty years old, older than most of his comrades, and his maturity and education had marked him for special training. Months of climbing, constructing bombs, slithering in wet ditches, and learning the fine arts of camouflage and infiltration had gone into his preparation. He had, for instance, learned to hide himself and move silently and invisibly across an open field. This involved smearing himself with mud from head to toe and inching his way forward, halting every few inches to remain as still as a lizard. To traverse a hundred yards might take most of a day. Working through the barbed wire barriers at Tam Thai without alerting guards would take all his acquired stealth. At sunset, the City Unit devoured all their remaining rice. They figured they would need their strength for the fight and, once they had taken the city, food finally would be plentiful.

Overall, the invading force was divided in two, one part for the north and the other for the south. The northern one would take and hold the Citadel and the areas around it, and the southern one would do the same in the triangle. Their combined strength was four NVA regi­ments (Nine, Eight, Five, and Six) and eight Viet Cong battalions, along with local militias (like the one created by Nguyen Van Quang). Each of these twenty-four battalions (in each regiment there were four, of varying sizes) had support companies for scouting, communications, special operations, artillery, and crew-served weapons.

The northern force was led by Major Nguyen Thu, a veteran NVA officer. He would command the Ninth and Eighth NVA Regiments, four VC battalions and their support companies, and the local militia troopers. The southern force was led by Major Than Trong Mot, who commanded the Fifth and Sixth NVA Regiments and four VC battalions.2 His real name was Than Trong Thoan, and he had been fighting for his country’s liberation for more than twenty years. He took the name “Mot,” which means “first,” because the combat unit he commanded in the French War was then the first of the MVA’s 101st Regiment. Both of his parents had died in French custody, and were believed to have been tortured to death. Within both combined forces, north and south, were commissars responsible for sparking and steering the anticipated popular uprising.

The northern thrust was more difficult and important. The Citadel and its royal palace had tremendous cultural significance, and Mang Ca was the city’s hardest military target. There was also the airstrip at Tay Loc, on the west side of the fortress, which had important tactical value—not the least of which was denying the enemy a place to land men and supplies. Major Thu was a twenty-two-year army veteran who had fought in the French War. He did not accept the party’s grandiose ambitions for Tet. There was, in his opinion, zero chance that the people of Hue would rise up spontaneously, certainly not to the degree hoped. Like his commander, General Kinh, Thu knew they could take the city, but also that they could not hold it for long. Achievable goals, he believed, were to destroy the ARVN division at Mang Ca, and to violently uproot the local government by rounding up and punishing (by execution in some cases) those who represented the Saigon regime. This could be done in five days to a week. To inspire, recruit, organize, and lead a mass revolt was another matter. It would take much longer than a week even if they would not have to prepare for the coordinated American and ARVN counterattack he knew would come. When that came, it would be all they could do to hang on. He nevertheless believed the effort was worthwhile. Hitting Hue and other South Vietnamese cities would not bring the war to a swift end, but it would bring the war’s violence to the doorsteps of the more well-to-do urban citizens for the first time. Fighting in city streets would erode confidence in Thieu’s regime, and undermine the American effort, which, as Thu saw it, was already failing. The bombing in the north had not slowed Hanoi’s war effort, and dealing the Americans a strong blow on the ground, in areas they supposedly controlled, would also undermine support for the war in the United States.3

Apart from Mang Ca, the primary targets inside the Citadel were the airstrip (where the tenacious Hac Bao unit was quartered along with an ARVN ordnance company), the royal palace, and Ngo Mon flag tower. In southern Hue, the primary targets were the armored base at Tam Thai, various large government buildings along or just off Le Loi Street—the province headquarters, the treasury, the hospital complex, the post office, the prison, and the radio station—and the sole American base, the MACV compound. There were long lists of smaller targets, mostly the homes of local South Vietnamese government leaders and regime supporters, who were marked for arrest and punishment. Small sapper units were assigned to blow up bridges—the Truong Tien, the Bach Ho Bridge about one mile to the west, and the An Cuu Bridge at the southern tip of the triangle. If these went down it would impede the inevitable American counterattack.

Some commandos had sneaked into the city the day before, moving through storm drains or among the crowds of citizens entering or leaving the city for the holidays. A few wore ARVN uniforms so they could approach the fortress gates from the inside and surprise the guards.

The low-lying fog, especially near the rivers and canals, helped hide the major troop movements. As the village girl Che Thi Mung led her contingent across open fields, she could not see far enough in the darkness to count how many followed her. She guided them across the rice fields of Thuy Thanh up to Thuy Van, then to Vi Da and into Dap Da, the neighborhood where she had stayed on her spying mission. They would set up a roadblock right in the middle of Ba Trieu Street, which formed the eastern edge of the triangle and led down to Phu Bai.

Mai Xuan Bao was part of that force. He was a veteran commando with a local Viet Cong battalion. They had been preparing for the offensive through most of the previous year, accumulating three tons of food and ammo in a warehouse. They had carried it there in small deliveries, floating it across rivers and canals at night on makeshift bamboo rafts. They had no vehicles, so they did it all on foot, carrying it cross-country on treks that sometimes lasted a week, moving at night. On those long marches, they had their own version of C rations; they carried live pigs, some of them weighing upwards of two hundred pounds, drugging them to keep them quiet and still. The animals were slaughtered and eaten along the way. On this night the men each carried two hundred rounds for their rifles and double the normal number of grenades and rockets—twenty grenades each and up to eight rockets, which were heavy. To fight in the city, they had practiced scaling walls and also how to blow holes in them. They had done all this without knowing exactly what they were preparing for. They had celebrated the holiday early, watching skits performed by the propaganda troupes. As they watched, they had sewn bandoleers and filled hand grenades with gunpowder, so absorbed in the performance that they kept sticking themselves with their needles. At the feast afterward they couldn’t enjoy the food because the bitter taste of powder from the grenades had gotten into their mouths and noses.

They had marched out of their camp in the jungle late Monday night, January 29, toward Truong Ha, south of the city. On their way out, one of their units tripped a signal from an American sensing device—they called the devices cay nhiet doi (tropical trees), because their antennas were disguised to look like branches—and they were hit by an artillery barrage. Most had escaped unharmed. Bao’s group had slept at homes in Truong Ha from three o’clock Tuesday morning until noon, and then prepared to move into Hue that night. Waiting now by the base of the Truong Thien Bridge, Bao could hear the chug-chug-chug of machines in a nearby ice factory.

Bao’s battalion would attack the police headquarters. A handpicked group of commandos, including him, would blow a hole in the wall for the initial assault. After they had cleared the building, large numbers of others would follow to occupy and hold it.

Another battalion approached southern Hue from the west. With them was Dang Dinh Loan, a commissar, whose main work would begin after the city was taken. They had stayed the night before in fields near the Gia Long Tomb and had been delayed when an American plane dropped a bomb near their position, wounding several men. They had to cross the Ta Trach River, and Loan did not know how to swim, so his comrades threw together a raft made of banana trees and floated him across. Several times as they moved, the overcast night sky lit up with flares. Everyone would hit the ground and would lie very still. This slowed them, but no attacks followed. They did their best to move silently. Across open fields they heard sounds of worshipping: chants and the hollow percussion of the “wooden fish,” instruments used to accompany Buddhist chants. They trampled through a field of coriander, which filled the moist air with a pleasing peppery odor. As the hours passed they fell behind schedule, so they began moving at a trot.

The offensive was to start with an artillery barrage fired from the western hills toward Mang Ca. The assault on Hue would, of course, be only one of many attacks throughout South Vietnam that day, attacks that would stun the world, but none was more important than this. Westy himself, years earlier, had been asked what move he would make if he were commanding Hanoi’s war effort. He said, “Capture Hue.”4

Nevertheless, the Front’s leaders were confident their attack would come as a complete surprise. Truong Sinh, a VC commander, had carefully watched the busy reshuffling of American and ARVN forces in the previous weeks, and it was clear this had nothing to do with countering the surprise attack. That night, he and other Front leaders were at the command center at the base of Kim Phung Mountain, west of the city. They used a spare radio code to communicate with their forward observers without arousing suspicion, sending messages in coded three-letter bursts. They smoked cigarettes and played cards and ate ginger marmalade brought specially from Hanoi for the occasion. They also sampled Hue specialties—goose tea and sesame candy. Then they listened to the broadcast of Uncle Ho’s Tet greeting before settling in to wait.5

Before the scheduled hour, Ha and other members of his City Unit crept up to the barbed wire fencing around the Tam Thai base. They propped up the bottom of the barbed wire fences and one by one crawled under. The base was quiet. There were a few guards posted, but the ARVN soldiers who had not gone home for Tet were inside two bunkers at the north end. The tanks were parked in neat rows. The commandos crawled from one to the next, placing two packs of dynamite under each, one wedged in the metal tread and the other just under its diesel engine. The explosives were armed with primers that could be detonated remotely. They then crawled back outside the fencing, awaiting the opening artillery barrage.

Part of the Sixth Regiment was spotted moving in a graveyard just north of the Citadel. These men were getting into position to scale the north wall near the Hau and An Hoa Gates. A small ARVN outpost started shooting at them, and inside Mang Ca, General Truong ordered flare rockets over the site. But the commandos had scattered and the flares lit up only headstones and tombs.6

Just a few miles southwest of the city, Terry Egan, an Australian Army adviser working with a small ARVN recon platoon, was startled to observe NVA regulars in what appeared to be crisp new uniforms moving stealthily toward the city. There were far too many for his force to attack. Egan hunkered down in the darkness to watch and to count. They kept coming and coming. Egan counted two full battalions, more than four hundred men. He radioed this information back to Mang Ca, and shortly before midnight General Truong ordered a spotter plane. But the fog hid everything, and after two hours of looking the pilot reported he had seen nothing.7

From an observation point atop Chia Voi Mountain, at 2:30, a Front forward observer reported that all was still quiet.

“Electric lights are still burning,” he said. “Vehicles continue to cross the Truong Tien Bridge. Red and green signal flares occasionally light up the sky.”8

He said there were no disturbances in the areas where the bulk of the Front’s forces were located, and apart from some scattered rifle fire, which was not unusual, there was no sign that these forces had been discovered.9

Fifteen minutes later, commandos reported that they had reached the top of the north wall of the Citadel and were in position to attack Mang Ca. Other units were waiting to move on the north and west gates. Loan’s battalion in southern Hue had been delayed, but was now moving rapidly. The forces around Tam Thai were waiting to blow up the tanks.

Two thirty came and went. General Kinh, who had moved to the top of Kim Phung, reported back to the command center downhill every five minutes. Nothing. Inside the center, the Front’s command group exchanged worried glances. Kinh reported next that there were two “old woman planes,” propeller-driven surveillance aircraft, north of the city, which had dropped two green flares, and that five red flares had gone up in various places over the south side. Otherwise all was silent. The room was also silent. One assistant had a radio handset in one hand, a pencil in the other, and was staring at the luminous dial of his watch. The operations room commander stood up beside him. Ordinarily a calm, reserved man, he nervously directed his assistant to call their various forward observers for reports.

“Do you see anything yet?” the aide asked the first one. “Why haven’t they opened fire? Are there any problems?”

“I am following the situation,” the observer responded. “Wait. Wait a minute.”

The aide called a second observer, who said, “I am awake. I am looking down at Hue. The lights of the city are still on. The sky is quiet. Nothing is happening.”10

Tension built. Sinh worried, Had something happened? Was the operation still secret and safe? Had the main forces lost their way? Are they being blocked by the enemy?11

Presently the boom of mortar shells was heard at Phu Bai, then at Mang Ca, and then throughout the city arose the sound of gunfire. Noise was scattered at first, and then, as if touched off by a fuse, it rose rapidly to a din.

Simultaneously, the planted packs of dynamite went off under the tanks at Tam Thai, scattering parts everywhere. The combined blast was so loud it startled marines miles away in Phu Bai. One member of the City Unit who had not moved back far enough was killed and several others in the support battalion were wounded by hot shards of flying steel. Vehicles erupted in tall columns of flame against the night sky. Then the support battalion stormed into the base, moving through gaps in the wire left by the commandos and past the flaming vehicles. Among them were forty-six men carrying rocket launchers,12 including Le Huu Tong, who had come on the long and difficult march from the north. All the ARVN troops outside the bunkers were gunned down. Heat from the flames and the pungent odor of gunpowder and burning fuel were so intense that for a few minutes the attackers had to back off.

The view from Kim Phung was spectacular. Le Tu Minh, the top commander, would later write: “The night blazed up like there were fireworks erupting in the sky. It was extremely beautiful.”13

It took an hour to root out and kill the bunkered ARVN troops. Then the base was silent. As the men’s ears adjusted, they could hear gunfire and explosions in the distance to the north and south, but there was nothing more to shoot at inside the base. They had suffered only a few casualties, and had dealt Hue’s defenders a crushing surprise blow. Just outside the gates near Highway 1 was a row of flaming tanks that had somehow made it out, or had been parked there before the raid started. They had been destroyed with rockets. Their crews were dead. One crewman had been blown out of the top hatch, legless. His blackened, scorched torso came to rest on the vehicle’s front. A short time later, when General Truong called for tanks to help defend his base at Mang Ca, there was no one at Tam Thai to respond.14

Eleven tanks and several armored personnel carriers had been away from Tam Thai, and their crews, startled by the sudden eruption of shooting around the triangle, started moving them north toward the Truong Tien Bridge. They came under heavy attack near the center of the triangle. Their commander’s tank took a direct hit, and he was killed. Most of his column made for the nearby MACV compound. Some tanks drove to the bridge, where their crews parked and locked themselves inside. Others simply fled, leaving their tanks in the street, some of them still running.

The forces charged with seizing the southern half of the city moved into the triangle virtually unopposed. At police headquarters, Bao’s squad blew a hole in the outside wall and stormed the building. They came so fast and in such numbers that after firing a few random shots the guard detail fled. Troops flooded into the building and the commandos moved on to their next target a few blocks away. On the way, they ran into a small ARVN squad rushing to help defend the prison, and a brief gunfight ensued before both sides broke off. Some of Bao’s men were hit, including a local man who had been guiding them. Without him they were lost. None were from Hue, and all city blocks looked the same to them, especially at night. In their rush to press the attack, they had left wounded men behind, and without their guide they couldn’t find their way back. It grieved Bao to abandon them, but they could go neither forward nor backward. They sheltered in houses a block south of the riverfront and waited.

Lieutenant Hoang Anh De’s battalion, which had taken part in the attack on Tam Thai, moved north into the triangle completely unopposed. They were delayed by several ARVN tanks as they attempted to cross the An Cuu Bridge, and had to find boats downstream in order to cross over, surround, and destroy them. Sappers set explosives under the bridge that were detonated but failed to topple the structure.

Hoang was a veteran NVA officer, thirty-six years old, who had been sent south to lead a VC battalion. He wore simple black pajamas with the blue and red cloth strips pinned to his sleeve, with no sign of rank. He had lost two of his closest friends already: his unit’s political commissar, who had accompanied the commandos on the tank raid and was killed there; and his scout, who had been killed at the bridge. Both men had been with him for years, and, like him, were more than a decade older than most of the men they commanded. Losing them hit Hoang hard. He had their bodies carried to the Tu Dam Pagoda in southwestern Hue that would serve as the Front’s field headquarters so they could be buried with honors.

They arrived later than expected at the heart of the city, and found most of their objectives along Le Loi Street already taken. One exception was the radio station, where American communications officers, mostly air force men, held out for about fifteen minutes and then fled, retreating to hidden bunkers under an adjacent hostel. It wasn’t until Hoang’s men moved on the prison and east to the MACV compound that they ran into serious resistance. Hoang found that he lacked enough firepower to overrun either location because he had taken so much of the city so fast, and had had to leave men behind in the neighborhoods that he’d seized.

North of the river, in the Citadel, there were bigger fights. Major Thu’s assault focused primarily on the northern and western gates. Mang Ca was subjected to an extended mortar bombardment and then attacked by forces that had come either over or under the north wall. The attack was bigger than General Truong had imagined, and bigger than any he had seen before. His reduced forces were outgunned and outnumbered. The fight there would rage well into daylight, with the ARVN base fending off waves of determined enemy assaults.

On the west side, six commandos dressed in ARVN uniforms and armed with rifles approached the guards at Chanh Tay Gate at the northwest corner, then opened fire. Explosives were used to blow open the doors, and Nguyen Van Quang, the militia recruiter, led the first wave through.

Shouting “Attack!” Quang ran through the dark passageway into the fortress, firing his rifle as he came. No one fired back. The commandos inside shone red flashlights to mark their positions. They said all the ARVN guards there either had been killed or had run away.

There were fights at each of the entrances, but by far the biggest was at Huu Gate, farther down the west wall from Chanh Tay. At Huu a forty-man assault company had to improvise an attack. It had originally planned to slip into the fortress through a water main just outside Mang Ca, but had been blocked by an impenetrable thicket of barbed wire. Before the attacks began, it had made its way around the northwest corner and down past Chanh Tay Gate. There was no assault force to attack Huu Gate from the inside, so the company had no choice but to assail it head-on. The tower machine gun covered the narrow bridge over the moat. It had walls on either side that were only knee-high. Surprise was their only hope, and surprise had been lost when the attacks kicked off citywide. The first group that tried to run across the bridge was mowed down. Two-thirds of the men, including their leader, were killed or badly wounded. Those remaining fell back and settled into a prolonged exchange of fruitless gunfire with the tower guards. More of the attackers were killed. Desperate, several bravely set off to crawl across the span, hugging the low walls. They made it all the way to the closed iron gate directly under the tower gun, which could not fire straight down. They placed a charge against the doors and retreated to both sides before the blast. The explosion blew open the gate, and they ran inside. The ARVN machine gun was now under attack from front and back. It was finally silenced by a rocket. Only fourteen members of the assault company remained.15

One of those fourteen was Nguyen Duc Thuan, an experienced NVA commando. He and his men, once inside, were lost. They had not planned to enter the Citadel there, and their local guide had been killed. They split into two groups, one for the airstrip, and the other, with Thuan taking the lead, for the palace and flagpole. They immediately came upon an old man carrying an umbrella and making his way to a family altar to offer his Tet prayers. Startled and frightened, he bowed repeatedly and pleaded for them to spare him.

“No, we are liberation soldiers,” Thuan assured him. “We came here to liberate the people. You have nothing to worry about. Just lead us to the flag stand and to the royal palace.”

So the old man started them through the streets southward. On the way, they surprised and grabbed an ARVN soldier who, hearing gunfire, was hurrying back to his ordnance company at Tay Loc. The old man was thanked and released. The prisoner’s hands were bound and he was pushed forward to guide them. Thuan demanded that he lead them to the royal palace, which the old man had told them was nearby.

They went just a few blocks before gunfire started. Thuan felt a sharp blow to his knee and dived for the side of the street, pulling the prisoner with him. He could see they were nowhere near the palace. Their prisoner had led them into a trap.

“What the hell is this place?” Thuan asked angrily.

“This is my company,” the man said.

“What company?”

“The ordnance company.”

“We asked you to take us to the royal palace! Why did you take us to your company?”

It was an honest mistake. The words for royal palace in Vietnamese were dai noi, but because Thuan was from the North, his accent was slightly different, and his prisoner heard the words dai doi, which meant “company.”

The firing stopped once they cleared the street. Thuan inspected his knee, which was bloody. A bullet seemed to have passed clean through its front, under the kneecap, without damaging the joint. He could still move it and even bear some weight on it. So he wrapped a cloth tightly around it and his little group continued south. They captured another man, a city guard, who understood their northern accent better, and he led them exactly where they wanted to go.

Quang’s advance group was at the airstrip, where the Hac Bao were dug in. The nearby ordnance company was an easier target. Quang knew an ARVN soldier based there, who as a student had worked with him years earlier. The man had been drafted into the ARVN, but Quang had kept in touch and had written him a letter telling him that although he now wore the nguy uniform, he should “keep the revolution in his heart.” He now called out the man’s name with a megaphone, telling him to convince his comrades they were surrounded and should surrender, which they did.

Quang removed his friend from the prisoners, and handed him his pistol.

“No,” the man said. “Let me take your AK. If you trust me, chief, I will fight alongside you and protect you.”

He would stay with Quang throughout the battle.16

All over the city, residents were jarred by the fighting. Some were awakened, while others, still up, were just startled. They had stayed up through the night playing cards, drinking, and talking. Many at first mistook the explosions and pops of gunfire for Tet fireworks. But wherever the shooting was close, there was no confusion. Tran Thi Thu Van, a writer and poet17 who had come to Hue from Saigon to attend her father’s funeral and had stayed to offer prayers for him at Tet, was sleeping in her family home close enough to Tam Thai that there could be no mistake. Each blast snapped the wooden shutters on the windows open and then shut. In the small house with her was much of her extended family. Her ears ringing, she rolled out of her wooden plank bed and huddled terrified with her brothers, uncles, aunts, cousins, nieces, and nephews in the center of the room. The burning candles and incense at the family’s ancestral alter were doused. The gunfire seemed to be coming from every direction at once.

Fifteen-year-old Le Ngoc Thinh hid with his family in a metal drainage pipe. A friend had come running past their house shouting that “they” were coming, and everyone knew what “they” meant. The drainage pipe was well over one hundred feet long and about four feet high. So many people were huddled there that it was hard to breathe. The adults talked in hushed tones about the VC and everyone listened to the sounds of gunfire.

Twelve-year-old Le Cong Thanh had been allowed to stay up late with the rest of his large family. They lived in the shadow of a Catholic church just outside the Citadel, near the Truong Dinh Gate—the northeastern passage that led directly into Mang Ca. Le’s father, Le Van May, was a captain in the ARVN, but he was home to spend the holidays with his wife and nine children and an assortment of close relatives. The family had stocked up enough food for a week, and were gathered very early that morning around an altar to begin. The table was laden with offerings, flowers, food, sweets, and candles. But their prayers were interrupted by gunfire. Le saw green lines in the sky from tracer bullets, and gunfire and explosions that were close. He ran inside with his family, and his father locked the door. He told the children to crawl underneath a big wooden bed. It sounded as though a terrible battle was being fought at the police station nearby. After a while, Le crept to the door and peeked out the keyhole. He saw soldiers moving through his front yard, skinny men in black pajamas wearing round pith helmets. His father whispered, “VC.” In school he had been told the VC were like monkeys who lived in the forest. Le was surprised that these did not have tails.

Tran Huy Chung was eleven. His family, now up late celebrating Tet, lived outside the Citadel near Mang Ca. Before the shooting started, some Front soldiers asked for directions to the ARVN base, which he gave. They wore shorts and carried backpacks and rocket launchers, and they spoke with northern accents. When the battle began, his family stayed in their house, but he ran to hide in a trench at a nearby construction site. He couldn’t figure out what was happening. Early that morning he climbed a guava tree in his yard and watched bright flashes and fighting by the Tay Loc airstrip. Chung had heard that the Communist soldiers were cruel, and bad. But later in the day, when the shooting died down, some of the soldiers played games with him and the other children, shooting marbles and flipping coins. That day, the people in his ward who had worked for the local government were arrested.

Shooting also awakened Harry Hue, the Hac Bao commander, at his family home. Hue was stocky with a broad face and small, wide-set eyes. He was a fierce and extremely competent commander, one whose abilities outstripped his rank. To his battle-trained ears there was no mistaking the sounds, which were coming closer as the invading forces made their way down from the upper gates. Hue rounded up his three children and his parents, and herded them with his wife into the family bunker. He then jumped onto his father’s bicycle, the sounds of the battle coming closer, and began pedaling furiously toward Tay Loc. He was shocked to see NVA soldiers—many of them—moving through the streets. He was not in his uniform, and the soldiers for the time being were ignoring him. He considered stopping and turning back. He would be safer, at least initially, as a civilian with his family, but it wouldn’t take long for them to figure out who he was. Besides, his duty was to be with his men at such a dangerous moment. Thirty of them were staying in barracks at the airstrip. He slowed down to avoid attracting notice and finally fell in behind a group of NVA soldiers, following at a short distance. When he reached the outskirts of Tay Loc, he made a dash for it. Some of the encircling enemy troops shot at him, but missed. His own men recognized him even in the darkness.

They were surrounded and had been hit hard by mortars. Arranged in bunkers outside their barracks, they were armed with rifles and the rocket launchers that Coolican had thought to collect on the trip south the previous afternoon. Theirs was the only point of serious resistance on the west side of the Citadel once the gates had been breached. After a confusing hour, shooting had temporarily eased. Mortars continued to fall inside their perimeter and there was still some shooting, but it appeared the attackers were waiting for reinforcement. Given the numbers Hue had seen in the streets, it was likely a bigger attack would come. This was no isolated ambush. They could hear intense gunfire to the northeast, from the direction of Mang Ca. The smell and taste of cordite were in the air. When several enemy soldiers got inside the unit’s perimeter, they captured two. The men’s hands were tied and they were placed in a foxhole to the rear of their bunkers.

“Sit here in this foxhole,” Hue instructed them. “Do what I tell you to do. We won’t kill you if you obey us.”

Not long afterward a rocket exploded in the foxhole, and both were killed.

The news from elsewhere was not good. The platoon sent to southern Hue to guard the prison was calling for help. In its last exchange, the lieutenant there asked Hue to look after his wife and seven children. By radio, General Truong ordered the Hac Bao to abandon the airfield and make their way to Mang Ca if they could. The general had armed cooks and clerks and workers at the division hospital to help man his beleaguered perimeter. Truong estimated he was under attack by two battalions. They had come over the base’s high walls in a number of places, and at one point had fought to within sixty feet of Truong’s own office before being driven back. Fighting was hand-to-hand, and desperate. The general was broadcasting calls for every unit in the area to come to his aid.

Not many could. Within hours of the initial assault, ten of the eleven gates into the Citadel were controlled by the enemy. The only way for allied troops to enter was through the Tria Gate at the northeastern corner, but that now had Front forces in neighborhoods immediately outside.

Lieutenant Hue realized his thirty men could not hold out much longer at the airstrip. Their only hope was to make it to Mang Ca and shore up that encircled corner until reinforcements could be flown in or could fight their way in. He assembled his men and rallied them as best he could. Nearly all, like him, were from the city. He did not minimize their plight. He reminded them that they were fighting not just for South Vietnam, but for their families and their homes. He told them they were the best of the First ARVN Division, and if anyone could save Hue, it was them and only them.

“Hac Bao!” he shouted.

His men cheered, and followed. Most knew the Citadel streets, and they had friends on nearly every block. Hue saw that the invading forces had not yet spread out evenly. They seemed to have focused instead on a few specific objectives, and once there, were digging in. For the time being this left whole neighborhoods open. Civilians who recognized the Hac Bao uniforms helped steer them around danger points.

As they approached Mang Ca, they surprised the enemy by coming up on them from behind. The Hac Bao fought its way through the headquarters’ rear gate. Once inside, it tilted the balance of the struggle. Surprised by the sudden reinforcement, and perhaps overestimating its size, the attackers fell back.

The Front was hampered by delays down the line. Lieutenant Tang Van Mieu’s battalion had gotten lost on the outskirts of the city after their local guide ran off. The diminutive battalion commander would arrive at the Citadel with his hundreds of reinforcements a full day late. So a combination of luck and determined resistance was enough to preserve General Truong’s headquarters, for the time being.

At the opposite end of the Citadel, Nguyen Duc Thuan’s bandaged knee was holding up. He was still too filled with adrenaline to feel much pain. They were joined by more men who had come through the Chanh Tay Gate. Outside the palace they split up. The two squads who had met them went for the palace itself, quickly breaking through the small guard detail outside. They took turns sitting on the ornate throne in the emperor’s ceremonial room. Thuan and his men moved on to the flag stand.

The enormous pole was guarded by seven soldiers. A blast of machine-gun fire killed one of Thuan’s men, but he and the others made it into the second floor of the structure. Guards fired down from the third floor. They crept nervously up the stairs, expecting at any moment to be gunned down, but when they reached the top it was empty. The guards had fled.

They found the yellow flag of South Vietnam in a heap at the base of the pole. Apparently it was raised every dawn and lowered every sunset, but the flag detail had not bothered to untether and fold it. Thuan and his men used their knives to cut it loose and then shredded it.

They then waited for their own specially designed flag to arrive.

It was more than an hour before Sergeant Cao Van Sen came, with the flag’s two bearers. Sen also had a writer and a cameraman with him to witness and record the historic moment. It was eight in the morning when they hauled the flag up.

Few saw it at first. The morning was so foggy that the men standing at Ngo Mon could not see all the way across the Huong River. But soon enough the blue and red stripes and yellow star would be seen, not just in Hue, but all over the world.