2

The Compound

WHEN THE SHOOTING started, Frank Doezema was on guard duty in the northwest tower of the MACV compound.

Ordinarily it was a dull business even in daytime, when the streets below were busy. The tower had a circular platform about twenty feet up surrounded by a wooden railing and topped with a tin roof. It offered a good view of the downtown neighborhood. Below was Duy Tan Street—the stretch of Highway 1 that passed through the city. To the north on a clear night you could see past the white walls of the two-story Hue University to the river, the Truong Tien Bridge, and across the water the Citadel walls, but this was not a clear night. Beneath, just outside the front gate on the corner sidewalk was a sandbag bunker that during the day was manned. With so many advisers coming in for the holidays, the courtyard inside had more parked vehicles than usual. Jim Coolican had driven in a few hours earlier. He had greeted his old radio operator warmly, and then Doezema had retaken his place on the tower.

To practiced ears like Doezema’s, there was no confusion about fireworks. He knew the sound of an AK-47. It made a high-pitched, more mechanical crack than the American rifle, the M16, which made a deeper, rounder sort of pop. And there was no mistaking the pock! of a launched mortar, nor the explosion when it hit.

At once Doezema could see NVA soldiers moving in the streets below, hundreds of them. Most seemed to be congregated in the shadow of Hue University. When they advanced with rifles and rocket tubes, Doezema raked them with an ear-shattering blast of his machine gun.18 Those who did not fall dragged the others back. A few minutes later they came again, he raked them once more, and once more he drove them back. He draped a white towel over his neck, checked his weapon, and waited.

The shooting shocked the sleepy compound awake. Some of the roughly four hundred men staying there were combat veterans like Doezema and Coolican, but most were not. They were nothing like a well-honed fighting force. The compound was considered a rear post, a transit stopover for the army and marine officers attached to ARVN First Division troops. Day to day, it was manned mostly by office workers, cooks, drivers, supply officers, and those serving on the staff of army colonel George Adkisson, who had taken command only days earlier. He was just learning the job, which was to coordinate the relationship between General Truong and the MACV. Weeks earlier, Adkisson had put the compound through the self-defense drill Doezema had mentioned in his letter. The previous afternoon the colonel had heard about Truong’s order recalling his own men and putting them on alert, but if similar orders had been issued from American headquarters in Saigon they had not prompted extra precautions at the compound.

Men scrambled to their assigned positions. Adkisson stepped out of his quarters, having quickly dressed. Two mortars exploded overhead against a roof, and moments later two more struck in the courtyard. One ignited the gas tank of a Jeep, which became a ball of bright orange flame. The colonel stepped back inside. His first thought was that the soccer stadium across the street must be under attack and they were being struck by errant fire.19 After those first mortars and the spasms of shooting by Doezema, it briefly grew quiet.

The roof had literally fallen in on Major Frank Breth, who crawled to his shower stall, clutching his rifle. A second blast sent down shattered ceiling tiles that opened a cut on his forehead. Partly buried and bleeding, Breth panicked for a moment until he realized he had not been badly hurt.20

Pulling himself out of the debris, he went into the courtyard, where he met Coolican. Both raced to inspect the perimeter, making sure all the defensive positions were manned and supplied with ammo. If another attack was coming, these were critical minutes. They directed a young lieutenant, Steve Lampo, to organize the marine advisers who were not ordinarily based at the compound into a makeshift company with a clear chain of command. Then Coolican ran to a bunker at the south end that had taken a mortar hit. Five chopper pilots inside had been wounded. He helped carry them on stretchers to the suddenly very busy dispensary. There was one doctor, Stephen Bernie, who was already hard at work. Coolican then joined Breth to continue making the rounds. Periodically, Doezema cut loose a stream of fire from his tower. Both towers were manned, but the threat seemed to be coming only from the front. Men had piled into the sandbag bunkers just outside the fencing. There was a large open field that stretched to the southeast, but otherwise the blocks outside the compound afforded an attacking force plenty of concealment. If the enemy came from several directions at once, the post could be easily overrun. They were hearing lots of shooting and explosions in the distance. It sounded as if all of Hue was under attack.

Doezema opened fire again. He was working hard when a rocket exploded against the tower’s roof. His gun went silent.

Coolican ran to the tower and climbed up the narrow platform to reman the position. The grenade had sent shards of tin slashing straight down on Doezema. The marine captain found his friend badly sliced and bleeding heavily. One leg was nearly severed. When he tried to move Doezema, putting him over one shoulder to carry him down the ladder, the mangled leg prevented them from threading the opening. So Coolican laid him back down on the tower floor. He took the towel Doezema had draped around his neck and used it to tie a tourniquet. He then injected two shots of morphine, and with his combat knife cut through the remaining tissue attaching Doezema’s leg. He then put him on his shoulders, threaded through the trapdoor, and carried him to the ground.

He put one hand on his friend’s chest and leaned down. He wasn’t sure, because of the morphine, that Doezema could even hear him.

“Frank, we are going to get you out of here,” he said. “And when I get home I’m coming to see you in Kalamazoo. I’ve got to go.”

He ran for one of the grenade launchers he had collected the previous day on his trip down to Hue, grabbed several bands of machine-gun ammo, and climbed back up the tower.

Breth made his way up to the roof of the main building on the north side. Below he could see enemy soldiers all over the streets a block away, and started squeezing off shots at them with his rifle. Guards in the bunker outside the main gate were shooting. They had plenty of targets. As Breth watched, too distant to shout a warning, one determined enemy soldier crossed the street, crept up behind the bunker, and dropped a grenade inside. The explosion silenced the bunker’s guns. Breth started firing on automatic and threw down several grenades.

James Mueller had left his cot in such a hurry that he wound up in one of the inner sandbag bunkers in his underwear and shower sandals, wearing a flak vest and a helmet. To their north was a chain-link fence, and they were shooting at anything that moved outside it. One of their outward volleys touched off a flare in the barbed wire, which turned night into day at their corner of the compound. All around them there was shooting, explosions, flares, and the screams of the wounded. Mueller searched across the street for a target, and prayed.21

In a bunker at the southeast end of the compound, George W. Smith huddled in the dark trying to tell by sound what kinds of weapons they were up against. There were green tracers, a color associated with VC guns. A more experienced marine sorted out the sounds for him. This was all frightening and new to Smith, an army captain whose job was coordinating press releases and reporters’ access to Adkisson and General Truong. He had not been in Hue for long. Staying in the bunker seemed like a bad idea. If the enemy got into the compound—and they were close—a grenade could kill them all. As he and the others discussed this, a rocket exploded very close and a man cried out in pain for a medic. Staying in the bunker also had its appeal. The matter was settled when they were ordered to move to specific defensive positions around the courtyard.22

Smith’s was on the second floor in one of the compound’s buildings with a marine captain. He had never been in combat, and, much to his surprise, he felt more exhilarated than fearful. He felt hyperalert, and worked at scanning the street and buildings below continually, as he had been taught in a training exercise at Fort Benning. It was still dark, and he saw no movement.

In fact, after the flurry of initial attacks, the enemy seemed to have backed off. The Americans knew it couldn’t last—but it did. It amazed Coolican, who could see how vulnerable they were. But he took advantage of the lull to turn the tower over to others and climbed back down to raise Phu Bai on the radio. For the time being, he told the command center there, the compound was secure. They needed help, but there was no immediate crisis. More urgent was the need to get some of the wounded men out, like Doezema. He wasn’t going to make it if he didn’t get to a hospital. Could they get a medevac chopper in? He was advised to keep checking back. With surprise attacks throughout the region, choppers were in short supply. One was promised as soon as it became available. He set to work finding a place for it to land. The compound itself was out. There was not enough room. He found a city map. Just two blocks north, on the south bank of the Huong, just east of the Truong Tien Bridge, was the boat landing. Between it and Le Loi Street was Doc Lao Park, a nice wide, flat space. The problem was that they had seen a lot of the enemy in the buildings and streets just outside. Could they safely move the wounded there?

Coolican didn’t know what was going on beyond their immediate neighborhood, but there had been a lot of shooting. Some of the Americans scattered around the city, like those at the radio station, had called in desperate for help. If there were that many NVA and VC out there, where were they? Why were they not hitting the compound harder? It was the only American base of any consequence in the city.

The truth is that Lieutenant Hoang’s overextended battalion, which had occupied the triangle with such ease, didn’t dare. Two support battalions had failed to show up. One battalion had stumbled into a fiercely defended Montagnard post southwest of the city and was tied up there; it wouldn’t arrive until sunrise. Another battalion had gotten lost. Success had been so rapid that Hoang had been forced to leave men behind to hold all the key positions they’d taken. With too few to launch a major assault on the compound, he moved his men into buildings and rooftops around it to set up firing positions. He saw no need to hurry. The whole point of the city invasion was to spark a citizen uprising. If that happened—and they would know soon enough—what hope would these surrounded Americans have?23

The standoff held until daylight, when much of the shooting around the city had died down. There was still gunfire in the distance to the north, but in the neighborhoods around the compound it had stopped. The first day of Tet dawned gray, chilly, and wet over empty streets. The Americans who had spent a long night manning firing positions were tired, cold, and confused.

None of them knew what had happened. The city had been taken. Unlike most of the other assaults throughout the country, including a small abortive thrust into Saigon that would compel the world’s attention for the next few days, Hue had fallen. General Truong and the heroic Hac Bao had held on, just barely, to Mang Ca, but the rest of the Citadel was in enemy hands. In the triangle, the Front owned the province headquarters, the radio station, the treasury, the post office, the hospital, the university, and every other major structure. They were near to finishing off the tough ARVN defenders at the prison, which, when it fell, would free thousands of inmates, many of them members or supporters of the VC. These men could be armed with weapons and ammo stored in warehouses the Front had seized.

Fred Drew, a wiry, towheaded army lieutenant with glasses, shared a bunker with three other men outside the compound on a narrow side street off its northeast corner. There had been no direct attacks on their position during the night, but they had received some gunfire from their left, in the direction of the main guard tower, and several times grenades had been hurled their way. No one in Drew’s bunker had been hurt. They had returned fire, but most of the time couldn’t see who was shooting at them. Drew had used a makeshift searchlight, a headlamp from a vehicle wired to a battery, to sweep the street, and had once or twice spotted someone standing up in the tall grass across the way firing toward the tower. They had shot at him. Now, as the gray sky brightened he saw bodies.

A boy stood up suddenly from the tall grass across the alley. He was drenched, standing in water up to his ankles. He looked to be about twelve. He held his hands behind his back.

Drew knew a little Vietnamese. He shouted across for the boy to raise his arms over his head. He did so. In one hand was a grenade. Drew told him to drop it, and when the boy didn’t, the lieutenant fired a shot to his right. The boy then tossed the grenade off to his left, into the muddy water.

It exploded. The blast knocked the boy over, but he then stood up, dripping and apparently unhurt. It was an odd end to a frightening night.