4

Consternation Had
Been Achieved

THE TET OFFENSIVE was a huge story in the United States, but was being portrayed by most news outlets as a series of mostly ineffectual surprise attacks throughout the country. That Thursday morning’s New York Times, in a story written by Mohr in Saigon, focused primarily on the raids in the capital. It was accompanied by a photo of a dead American soldier on the back of an armored personnel carrier and one of a heap of dead VC outside a local radio station. Mohr wrote of “pockets of resistance” throughout the country, and added, in passing: “The Vietcong still held parts of Hue.”17

Chris Jenkins, the IVS worker hiding in a house in the Citadel, heard the same “pockets of resistance” report over Armed Forces Radio. His Vietnamese hosts told him the Front soldiers were everywhere.

The official assessment, from the South Vietnamese government and from the MACV, was that the enemy had taken very heavy losses in exchange for questionable “psychological” gains.18 All the reports insisted the enemy had not captured any territory. Mohr quoted Westmoreland, after the general had toured the bullet-riddled embassy grounds in Saigon, saying the enemy’s efforts had failed, and that they had sought “to cause maximum consternation in South Vietnam.”

“It was clear that consternation had been achieved,” Mohr wrote.19

But it was also clear to Gene Roberts, picking up information at the MACV compound in Hue, that something bigger was happening there than anyone knew, or than anyone would admit. He was told the Front’s flag was flying over the Citadel, although he couldn’t see more than a block or two out in each direction. He saw South Vietnamese planes moving over the city, dropping bombs. Marines on the roof of the compound’s main building were occasionally shooting at targets across the streets, and while the place itself was not under attack, patrols that ventured out made it only a short distance before being forced to turn back carrying new casualties. The mood inside the compound was surprisingly calm. He heard how Frank Doezema, at least in the retelling, had single-handedly saved the compound the night before. No one said it, but it gradually dawned on the Times reporter that the compound was completely surrounded.

He had expected to spend some days reporting there, but now he felt the need to get his story out immediately. Vietnam was twelve hours ahead of New York, where the Friday paper was already being set in type. In order to make the Saturday paper, Roberts would have to send his story no later than the next morning. If he stayed in Hue, he’d have to dictate the story to the office in Saigon over the phone, but there were only two lines out of the compound, and both were busy with military business. So to tell the world what was happening, he’d have to get back to Phu Bai.

By Thursday, a little more than a day after the offensive began, battle lines had solidified, north and south. The Hac Bao company along with General Truong’s men, had stabilized defenses in Mang Ca, and at midday they were reinforced with ARVN troops by helicopter. The American Sea Knight choppers that flew them in did so at great risk. Thick cloud cover blanketed the fortress just two hundred feet up, and below that was a heavy mist. The pilots set down under intense small-arms and mortar fire. After just one run, delivering only half of Truong’s reinforcements, remaining flights were scrubbed.20 The bulk of ARVN troops, their ranks thinned by the holiday furlough,21 were prevented from entering the Citadel by enemy lines dug in around the gates. By midday Friday, one battalion22 managed to break through. Aided by American helicopter gunships, it had moved up the Huong River east of the fortress in three junks and fought its way through the northeast gate, Tria.

Before those troops arrived, and with a poor understanding of the Vietnamese general’s plight, General LaHue was urging Truong to clear the rest of the enemy forces out of the Citadel. The Vietnamese commander was just getting to the point where he could defend his own base. LaHue nevertheless ordered that operations within the fortress would be left to the ARVN, while the marines he’d sent from Phu Bai would concentrate their efforts south of the river, in the triangle.

“Very definitely, we control the south side of the city,” he told reporters, falsely. “I don’t think they [the enemy] have any resupply capability, and once they use up what they brought in, they’re finished.”23

In fact, the Front had established supply lines reaching back to their mountain camps to the northwest. They controlled all the western and northern gates of the Citadel, nearly all of southern Hue, and the land around it to the west and southwest. They had hospital clinics up and running, and regular infusions of men, ammo, and food. Their hold on the city had stiffened. The six-hundred-man battalion led by Lieutenant Tang Van Mieu, the commander falsely reported to have been captured, finally made it into the city through the Chanh Tay Gate, and was thrown decisively into the fight for the airstrip. In the triangle, the marines were outnumbered by as many as ten to one.

Captain Meadows, whose company had gotten slammed on the Truong Tien Bridge, probably had the best handle on the size of the mismatch. He and what was left of his battered Golf Company were ordered to launch another attack on Thursday morning. They were to proceed seven blocks west and join the fight for the prison. It was an impossible order. Seven blocks? No one yet had been able to move more than one or two!

It was nearly miraculous that the Front had failed to take the communications center, where the air force personnel were trapped. The equipment enabled secure links between Mang Ca, the compound, and Phu Bai. Unfortunately, the flow of information was going mostly from top down instead of bottom up. Efficient and secure coms like these made Vietnam the first war in which distant commanders could intervene in a battle as it happened—not always a good thing. General LaHue and his staff at Phu Bai were looking at maps and deciding what was important and possible with no feel for the level of difficulty. All efforts at the compound to convey the uncertainty of its position were overwhelmed by the steady stream of urgent commands.

Gravel protested the order to send Golf back out, again to no avail. So Meadows and his men went. The two tanks they took were so thoroughly raked with fire just past the gate that the antennas and all the gear stowed on the outside of the vehicles were shot away. In the furious exchange, a small crowd of terrified civilians ran into the street, all of whom raced for the safest place in sight, which was the compound. They were the first of what would become a flood in the coming days.

Golf pressed on. It managed to take several of the buildings directly across the street, and then waged a pitched three-hour firefight across the street north to enter Hue University. Meadows lost still more of his men taking the building, a block-long, two-story structure that enclosed a large courtyard. Occupying the university gave the marines better command of the big intersection at the foot of the Truong Tien Bridge. This made traffic back and forth to the LZ and boat ramp a little less hazardous. One by one, the grunts cleared the many classrooms and offices, looking for remaining Front fighters and booby traps. The building was secure by Thursday night. It rapidly filled with civilians. The enemy had fallen back, but the marines did not yet know how far. Of the 160 marines Meadows had brought with him the day before, fewer than 100 remained. The small American foothold in southern Hue had expanded by one block.

Those up the chain could no longer have been ignorant of what was going on in Hue, but disbelief had progressed to denial. Despite Meadows’s experience, Captain Downs’s Fox Company was ordered on a fool’s errand immediately on arrival at the compound. Downs was told only that there was sporadic shooting in the city from stubborn snipers in the blocks around the compound. Fox’s job was to rescue Americans holding out at the coms center, treacherous blocks away. An air force sergeant who had been based there offered to guide them, so Downs attached him to his second platoon, which was led by Lieutenant Rich Horner.

Horner was considered by his men to be too brainy to be a real marine officer. He was from Illinois, and after earning an engineering degree at Bradley University in Peoria, he had gotten a job in California for North American Aviation, working for the moon program. He had literally been a rocket scientist. The job came with a military deferment, but Horner, feeling a patriotic tug and a need for more excitement in his life, had entered the marines. He knew this would be likely to land him in Vietnam. His credentials sometimes worked against him in leading grunts, many of whom considered book learning an impediment to common sense. He was just twenty-six, but deep lines in his cheeks gave him a grave, professorial appearance, which added to the perception of him as more of a thinker than a man of action. This impression was sealed when he had misread a map early in his tenure with Fox, and led his platoon a long way off course. It also earned him the nickname Wrong Way Go Far. It all hinted, unfairly, at ineptitude.

Luckier men had nicknames that grew right out of their actual names. Horner’s friend, for instance, leader of Fox’s third platoon, Lieutenant Don Hausrath, was “Rat” from day one. A stocky, jovial fireplug from California, four years younger, he embraced it, scrawling Rat on the front of his helmet on his first day in Vietnam. Rat was a good name for a street fighter.

Horner’s nickname was not emblazoned on his helmet. He was well liked by his men, but they were not shy about questioning his orders. As his platoon formed up for this excursion into the streets of Hue, the air force sergeant told Corporal Chris Brown, who was one of Horner’s squad leaders: “You know, I have seen other people try to get down that street all day and they have been getting the shit kicked out of them. What makes you think we are going to do any better?”

Brown shrugged.

“It’s orders.”

But the more Brown thought about it, the more he thought it was a pretty good question. He took it to Horner.

“Nobody had been able to do it, Lieutenant,” the corporal said. “What makes you think we can?”

“Listen, Brown, that is our order,” said Horner. “That’s what we’ve been told to do and we are going to do it.”

His platoon took the lead. They moved in classic formation, two squads on either side of the street, and one held in reserve. Brown’s took the right side and was led out by Lou Gasbarrini, who always insisted on walking point. He was followed by Charlie Campbell, and then Brown and the rest of his squad. Behind them was the reserve platoon and command post: Horner, his radioman, and the air force sergeant. The rear contingent included two photographers, including UPI photographer Sawada,24 AP reporter John Lengel, and the platoon’s two corpsmen. They marched out into the misty rain and made it without incident to the corner of Tran Cao Van Street, where they relieved Golf Company. There they turned right and started walking down Tran Cao Van, a street with one- and two-story structures on both sides set back from the curbs. On the right side was a wide brick sidewalk with big trees planted in a row, and telephone poles with wires that sagged down to roof level. There were stone walls before many of the houses. On the left were a curb and grass and low stone walls before a long row of large, impressive homes.

The shooting started about thirty feet down. The enemy had clearly waited until the entire platoon was around the corner, cut off from the compound’s machine-gun tower and defensive bunkers. Gasbarrini went down first, and lay motionless on the street. Campbell leaped over a stone wall and took cover behind it. Brown hid behind one of the trees. Behind them, the air force sergeant alongside Horner was hit, and fell. Responding to frantic calls for help, Doc Goose, navy corpsman James Gosselin, went racing up the street. He ran past Brown toward the downed point man, but then he, too, was shot. He fell hard against the base of a stone wall in the limp way dead men fell. His helmet rolled off to the sidewalk. Behind him came William Henschel, a bright private from Ohio who was a member of Brown’s squad and had volunteered to carry a corpsman’s bag when the platoon found itself shorthanded. Henschel had apprenticed himself to Doc Goose and had been learning all he could in the previous weeks. He made it a few feet past Gosselin before he, too, went down, shot in the head. Then Brown’s radioman, Stan Murdock, went down. He was clearly dead.

Brown went looking for cover. He zigzagged up the sidewalk and a tracer round hit his helmet, sending it flying. He jumped over the same wall Campbell had gone over, and thought for a moment he himself might be dead. But there wasn’t even a mark on his head. The two of them crouched behind the wall for hours, Brown peeking his head up to see what was happening on the street.

“Hey, don’t do that,” said Campbell.

“What?”

“Don’t put your head up like that. They are on to it.”

Above the ear-rattling sound of shooting, Brown called to Gasbarrini.

“Yeah,” he shouted back. “I’m okay. I’m hit in the arm. I’m playing dead.”

Behind them was another, higher wall, and it occurred to Brown that the right way for them to have moved would have been off the street, not down the middle. His friend Cristobal Figueroa-Perez was doing it the right way, making his way forward, jumping walls, crawling, peeking over, and then advancing, until he, too, was shot in the head.

Horner immediately gave up trying to advance, but there seemed also to be no way back. He had dead and wounded on the street, and men hiding behind whatever cover they could find. They stayed put—for hours. Captain Downs was abreast of him, but behind a wall. He could not see what was in front of the platoon. He kept urging Horner to advance. The lieutenant shouted that there was no way. He could see that the enemy had well-hidden firing positions throughout the neighborhood, near and far, in buildings, in bunkers, behind stone walls, and, most effectively, on rooftops and at upper windows in the taller buildings. He had tried maneuvering his men to find a different way, breaking into the houses and hopping walls and trying to advance by staying behind them, but every move, like Figueroa-Perez’s, just resulted in more casualties. Horner felt none of them were going to get off the street alive.

Then two tanks rolled up behind them. There was some discussion of how to use them to continue moving forward, but Downs knew this would not work. The tanks by themselves were too vulnerable, and moving men up around them would just get more men shot.

In the middle of the action, Downs answered a question from Lengel, the AP reporter. The captain had been in Hue for only hours, but he could already see what they were up against. “It’s going to be like this for every house, every block,” he said. “One man can keep a whole unit pinned down. We need air and artillery. We’ll get no place without it.”25

After a consultation with Gravel, it was decided to move the tanks up the street to provide cover, pick up the casualties, and withdraw. It took Horner a few minutes to get the tank commander on the radio, and then the vehicles moved up. As they did, Horner’s radio operator, David Collins, was shot through the neck and killed.

When the tanks came even with where Brown and Campbell were hiding behind the wall, one pulled over to the sidewalk and both marines got behind it. They picked up Henschel with his corpsman’s bag and put him on top of the tank. Brown thought the kid was dead, but soon learned otherwise. The tank lurched forward and Henschel bounced off to the street. When the vehicle abruptly reversed direction and ran over his foot, he screamed. A tourniquet was applied around his lower leg. Roberto DelaRivaVera, who had been walking point on the left side of the street, was farthest ahead. As the tanks advanced they started getting hit by rocket-propelled grenades. Unlike the smaller, lighter tanks used by the ARVN, the Pattons could take the pounding, but the rockets exploded as they bounced off, spraying the marines with shrapnel. Horner was hit and went down.

The flying shards of metal had shredded his left side, badly wounding his arm and his hand. He felt no pain—I must be high on adrenaline, he thought—but he was convinced it was time to get off Tran Cao Van Street. DelaRivaVera looked dead, and Horner, still functioning and feeling no pain, judged it wasn’t worth risking more men at that point to retrieve his body. Downs was on the verge of concurring, but then stopped himself. Leaving a fallen man behind violated a basic tenet of the Marine Corps. He directed the tanks to move up close enough for his men to step out and pull the body to cover, which proved unnecessary, because when the vehicle got close enough, DelaRivaVera hopped up and got behind it. Downs vowed he would never again hesitate to retrieve a fallen man.

Horner remained conscious until his platoon limped back to the compound. Then he passed out. His wounds would send him out of Hue. After the doctors patched him up, he spent the night alone in a room on a table. Now and then someone would stop in to check on him. He still felt no pain.26

Members of his platoon huddled on the floor of another room in the compound, smoking cigarettes, comparing memories of what had happened, and trying to make sense of it. Why the hell hadn’t they been sent out with the tanks in the first place? The men ran through what had happened to them and to each member of their platoon. They all agreed that Cristobal Figueroa-Perez looked bad. He probably was not going to make it.27

This was a particularly tough loss for Brown. He and Figueroa-Perez were close. Some weeks back, when they had gotten mail for the first time in weeks, Figueroa-Perez had a letter from his wife—the worst kind. She was leaving him. He had showed it to Brown, who was his squad leader. Most of the guys were too young to be married, but Brown was a little older—he was just twenty-one, but he felt older—and he had a wife at home, too. So they had bonded, even though the Puerto Rican’s limited English and Brown’s nonexistent Spanish made conversation difficult.

It didn’t take much explaining for Brown to know that the letter had dealt his friend a terrible blow. Brown had met his own wife, Madeline, in Brooklyn, New York. He was from Ohio and had enlisted in the marines in 1964 right after high school. He initially had been stationed as a security guard at the Brooklyn Naval Yard. Madeline was nineteen and from Brooklyn and working at a desk for a big insurance company in Manhattan, right on Fifty-Ninth and Madison. She felt she had the most glamorous life imaginable. At night she and her friends volunteered at a servicemen’s club in her neighborhood, and that was where she met Chris. There were bands that played the latest rock ’n’ roll hits, and the girls would usually dance together unless one of the men was bold enough to cut in. Brown was. And he was a good dancer. He had big eyes and thick eyebrows, and he wore his dark hair longer than most marines, swept down over his forehead. They had gotten engaged in December 1965 and were married a year later. Brown had just one more year on his enlistment when he got his orders for Vietnam. It was the worst. They wrote each other three or four times a week.

So Brown could feel his friend’s pain.

“You know,” he told Figueroa-Perez, “I’ll take you up to the chaplain.” He figured his friend could use some professional counseling. Once there, he had tried, without success, to talk the chaplain into giving Figueroa-Perez some R&R, just to pull himself together. Now it probably wouldn’t matter, except that the faithless Mrs. Figueroa-Perez would be receiving his death gratuity—about ten thousand dollars—which was galling.

All the marines had been both impressed and shocked by Sawada, the Japanese photographer. It seemed odd to them that there were reporters and cameramen calmly at work in the middle of such mayhem.28 It made them feel all the more that they had stumbled into something big.

Mike Morrow, the freelancer who had in fact stumbled into Hue, went out with another marine foray off the compound that day. They also had not gotten far, but in the middle of the shooting a young Caucasian man came darting up the middle of the street toward them. It was Steve Earhardt, one of the IVS team Morrow had been planning to visit, who had been hiding for two days. He told Morrow that Nelson and Johnson and the others had all been taken away. The reporter realized that if he had made it to Hue in time for the party, he would have been likely to share their fate. He flew back to Phu Bai the next day on one of the medevac choppers, but made plans to return. Morrow wasn’t an experienced reporter, but he knew a story when he saw one.

The grunts did not have the option of stepping back. On the compound floor that night, Brown was eventually alone with his own thoughts. He had spent his first day in Hue as scared as he had ever been. The fear had started when they were shot at on the chopper coming in, and had then just stayed at full throttle. He realized he had adapted to it. It surprised him. Fear, because it was everywhere and everyone felt it, receded in importance. It was still there, but when you realized there was nothing you could do about it, it ceased to matter. It just became your new reality. He kept going over the events on the street that afternoon. What could they have done differently? He remembered thinking, as Henschel went down, Okay, this is it. And when he had felt too scared to move, for some reason that’s when he moved. It was as if his brain and his body traveled in opposite directions at the same moment, the mind saying stay and the body saying run. The body ruled. And he had survived. It was luck but also instinct. What he felt now more than fear was frustration. How were you supposed to advance under conditions like these? Why were they being ordered to do this? People were getting killed and nobody seemed to know what was going on. He didn’t sleep that night. Half of the guys stayed up while the other half closed their eyes, but even when Brown closed his eyes his mind raced.

His commanding officer had much the same thoughts about the way they were being used. Captain Downs had been ordered that evening to saddle his men up for another try at the prison, which was still an impossible seven blocks distant. Even if he hadn’t known about Meadows’s experience, he had been out on the street with his men that afternoon, and he could read a map. The prison was adjacent to the province headquarters—the approach to the prison went through the site—and Gravel suggested that Downs take his men there and use it as a springboard for the attack. This, of course, ignored the near impossibility of getting to the province headquarters, which was five times farther than anyone had been able to move in southern Hue in the last two days. When Downs talked to some of the military advisers who were getting reports from their ARVN allies, he asked if anyone had consulted with those at the province headquarters about the plan. He was told there were now NVA machine gunners on the roof of that building, and on the flagpole outside flew a Viet Cong flag.

He told Gravel the order was crazy. Like the others, it had originated at Phu Bai, so the colonel felt obligated to obey it. Downs radioed his gunnery sergeant, Ed Van Valkenburgh, and told him to get the men ready.

But the more Downs considered the move, the more convinced he became that it was foolhardy. He sought out Gravel again, and requested permission to draft a formal message explaining the situation in detail and requesting that the order be rescinded. Gravel sent the message and in fairly quick order Task Force X-Ray backed down.

When Downs called his sergeant back and told him to have the men stand down, Van Valkenburgh was relieved. He told the captain: “I was afraid we were going back down the street we were on this afternoon.”

“Gunny,” said Downs, “where we were going tonight would have made this afternoon look like a walk in a park.”

Gravel was instructed to send back to Phu Bai the vehicles that had delivered Alpha and Golf Companies the previous day. The trucks were loaded with dead and wounded, and drove down Highway 1 with an escort of forty marines, with both Quad-fifties. Meadows sent along his most experienced platoon leader, Lieutenant Bill Rogers. If they made it, he told Rogers to meet personally with the Task Force X-Ray command staff and to tell them in the bluntest terms possible what the hell was going on in Hue.