5

Snuffies and the Most Macho
Woman in the World

GENE ROBERTS GOT out of Hue on the last chopper Thursday evening, February 1, at dusk. There were wounded marines on the floor, and body bags stacked against the walls. He sat on the dead, holding up bottles in each hand with tubes attached to the still living on stretchers at his feet.

Word was seeping out about Hue, but only inadequately. On Friday morning, the Washington Post would have a story compiled from news dispatches that reported a stubborn force of one thousand Viet Cong in the city, flying their flag. It was not a report from the scene, and the number of enemy forces was far too low, but it accurately reported that nearly all of the city had been taken. It also suggested that there was little chance that the enemy could hang on to any of it.29

Roberts’s report would be the first from the scene, and the first to capture the magnitude of what had happened. It ran on page 1 of the New York Times on Saturday.

ENEMY MAINTAINS TIGHT GRIP ON HUE

Force Put at 5 Battalions—U.S. Marines
Hold Two Square Blocks of City

HUE, South Vietnam, Feb. 2nd—Enemy battalions weathered repeated attacks by Marine tanks and South Vietnamese aircraft today to maintain a tight grip on the ancient city of Hue.

At nightfall, the Marines held only two square blocks of the smoking city. And seven South Vietnamese Army battalions struggled unsuccessfully to push North Vietnamese and Vietcong troops from the Citadel—a 19th-century fortress built to shield the nation’s historic imperial palace.

The strength of the enemy resistance caught the South Vietnamese by surprise. As late as yesterday, Vietnamese commanders in the area were saying that the enemy troops in Hue were weak and ill supplied and would fall with the first major allied push.

But today the assessment has changed. “Enemy forces in the ancient Citadel are believed to number five battalions,” the regional Vietnamese command said in a late communiqué that gave the Hue battle more attention than any other engagement under way in the country.30

Firsthand reporting lent weight to his account. Relying on official sources, Roberts reported that the enemy presence was “five battalions,” roughly two thousand men. It was off by a factor of five, but closer to the truth than anything previous. He captured the growing sense of desperation: “Parents hold their children tightly by the hand, and move sideways with their backs pressed against buildings. When they reach an open space—an intersection or a gap between houses—they run quickly and flatten themselves against the first wall they reach.” He made it clear that the battle was far from over: “With the enemy in strong positions, the marines and the South Vietnamese face the prospect of lengthy house-to-house fighting. In several parts of Hue, the line between the allies and the enemy is a narrow one—a situation that could make virtually all of the fighting bitter. The situation was dramatized yesterday when a lean marine sergeant stood by a brick column near an intersection”—this had been the man directing Roberts and Downs’s marines as they came off the chopper—“waving his arms like a traffic officer and ordering his men to move behind a low concrete wall. ‘Friendlies on the left,’ he told each passing marine. ‘Enemies on the right.’”

The surprise achieved in Hue was complete. It was not a case of simply being caught off guard. It was so unexpected it triggered not just alarm, but disbelief—deadly disbelief. Ordering Meadows to storm the Thuong Tu Gate or Downs to take the prison was just the beginning. Many young Americans would die or be severely maimed over the weeks it took for the truth to sink in.

It was not that no one saw. On the first day of Tet, Walt Rostow had sent LBJ a note attached to a startlingly accurate CIA report. The note read: “Mr. President, This is a bad report about Hue. We will check it with Westy when he gets on the phone.”

The attached report read (emphasis added):

1. The friendly position in the city has apparently deteriorated seriously during 31 January.

2. According to a US official who made a flight over the area late on the afternoon of 31 January and received information relayed from US military officials in Hue, the city appears to be largely under the control of the communists.

3. During the flight, the official reported that a major market place on the north side of the Song Huong River in flames, with other smaller fires burning on the south side of the river. A firefight was in progress along the river road on the south side. Ground fire was also coming up from the vicinity of the air strip inside the Citadel area.

4. The official was able to raise several local elements by radio and was told that a provincial reconnaissance headquarters inside the city had been overrun, and that many VC were present throughout the area. The official was unable to make contact with the MACV headquarters, or the CORDS headquarters. He observed an ARVN battalion approaching Hue from the northwest, firing artillery to clear the way.

5. A message from the C-2 advisor’s office in the MACV compound at Hue, received at I-Corps Headquarters in Da Nang, stated that the MACV compound and the 1st Division Headquarters in the Citadel at Hue were the only “known” places still holding out against the VC. Reportedly a marine company had tried to cross the highway bridge from the south into the northern sector of the city, but had been driven back with heavy casualties.31

6. There is no other information currently available here to confirm the above report.32

This completely accurate summary, which Westy surely had seen, was apparently dismissed as false. The general continued to maintain publicly and privately that the enemy presence in Hue was minor and completely manageable. In a cable to Washington that same Wednesday, January 31, he reported wrongly that there were only three companies of enemy soldiers (about five hundred to six hundred men) in the city.33 Later that same day he reported: “The northeast and southwest portions of the Citadel of Hue continue to remain partially occupied with heavy contact reported.” In fact, the “northeast,” Mang Ca, was the only part of the Citadel not occupied by the enemy. Westy seemed to have, at best, only a sketchy idea of what was going on, despite this agency field report. Typically, such assessments were sent directly to Washington and to Westmoreland, and the commander was known to be unhappy that they were not sent to him alone. He resented analyses that undercut the story he was selling, and would have been unlikely to share them.34

In these first two days of Tet, the general continued to stress that the real attack was coming at Khe Sanh.

“I am in constant contact with developments around Khe Sanh,” he cabled. “The enemy has major forces in the area which he has not yet committed.” And: “Expect enemy initiation of large scale offensive action in the Khe Sanh–DMZ area in the near future.” For LBJ’s general, the anticipated battle for the isolated marine camp had become such a fixed idea that the actual struggle taking place in Hue, in Saigon, and in dozens of other cities throughout South Vietnam was a sideshow. Ten days into the struggle, in a cable to the Joint Chiefs, he dismissed the idea that his obsession with Khe Sanh was a mistake: “While it is possible that the enemy build-up in the Khe Sanh–DMZ area is a diversion, I consider the possibility remote. He [the enemy] has put too much effort in the build-up to support the diversion theory.”35 Meanwhile Westmoreland seemed almost oblivious to the largest single battle of the Tet Offensive, if not of the entire war, under way in Hue. His forces there were badly outnumbered, struggling, and dying.

The truth became harder to ignore in Phu Bai with every new wave of dead and wounded. They came on the irregular chopper flights, whenever the poor visibility enabled pilots to dip into and out of Doc Lao Park, or they came in bleeding heaps on returning trucks. Doctors set up triage centers on the tarmac and just inside the front gate.

Thursday afternoon, General LaHue handed authority for the fight in Hue to a regimental commander, Colonel Stanley Hughes, and promised him more men and arms. It would be two days before Hughes would arrive at the MACV compound. By then, the enclosure would be jammed with nearly fifteen hundred men. Arriving with Hughes would be Lieutenant Colonel Ernie Cheatham, whose Golf and Fox Companies were already there. He would soon have a third, Hotel Company. Their mission would be sweeping the enemy from southern Hue.

But that was still days away.

Roberts started trying to get back as soon as his story went out Thursday night, but by now there was competition. Previous to his story, it had just been Hanoi trumpeting its major victory over the puppet regime, but outlandish claims from that source were commonplace. When the New York Times confirmed the truth about Hue on its front page, word was definitely out: trapped marines . . . smoking city . . . five battalions of enemy troops. A huge fight was shaping up inside the old fortress. Suddenly nearly every reporter in the country was trying to get to Hue.

After three years of escalating American effort, covering Vietnam had become a scrum, with competing news organizations from all over the world. Veteran war correspondents fought to break news and capture the action alongside amateurs, most of them young, some of them quite talented, and many ambitious and fearless, if not foolhardy. By Friday morning, February 2, their growing numbers at I Corps Press Center in Da Nang were getting on the marines’ nerves. Whenever a chopper landed with more casualties, a mob of journalists wanted to board it for the return flight. They queued on the tarmac alongside doctors doing triage. The marine colonel in charge at the press center got fed up. He blew a whistle and chided reporters: “Shape the fuck up!”36

In the scrum was Sam Bingham, a freelance photographer who had recently graduated from Yale. He had paid his way to Vietnam in order to see for himself what was going on. When a chopper landed, he started capturing images of the wounded men being off-loaded until the colonel grabbed his camera and chewed him out for “taking pictures while men were dying.” Bingham helped carry stretchers until the helicopter was empty. The more seasoned journalists were not as obliging. They felt they had a right and responsibility to record what was happening. Some responded to the colonel’s anger with expletives of their own, and raised middle fingers.

Roberts spent that night in the battalion aid station, and in the morning reported back to the tarmac. The colonel was now so worked up that he announced, henceforth, no reporter was going anywhere in I Corps (which stretched from the DMZ to well south of Da Nang) without a marine escort. Roberts started to protest. There were rules about such things. He was warming to his argument when a very mature-looking master sergeant tapped him on the shoulder. Roberts turned, expecting trouble, but the sergeant advised, “Don’t object. Just pick me as your escort.”

So Roberts did. When they had a chance to talk, the sergeant introduced himself as John R. King, “night manager and editor of the Bergen Record.” He was a veteran of both World War II and Korea who had volunteered for a program that sent retired marine noncoms to Vietnam for one year. King fixed Roberts up with a truck convoy that was leaving for Hue shortly. It would be picking up Lieutenant Rogers, his Golf Company platoon, and assorted volunteers at Phu Bai. By the time the four-truck convoy departed, it was jammed with journalists. Bingham, who had been given his camera back, was aboard, along with a cheerfully boastful French photojournalist named Catherine Leroy, who would astonish everyone.

Leroy had the seat next to his. She was a scrawny young woman—she weighed just eighty-five pounds—who stood barely five feet tall, with bright if frequently dirty blond hair she wore braided into a thick ponytail. She had arrived in Saigon two years earlier with no experience and a single Leica. She talked fast and moved fast. Pleased to find herself beside an American who spoke French, she chattered amiably. If Bingham felt jittery about racing toward a battle, Leroy seemed delighted. She regaled him with war stories and close calls and pulled up her trousers to show off the shrapnel scars on her legs. Bingham thought she was the most macho woman he had ever met. The marines just saw a blond female in fatigues and combat boots, with cameras draped around her neck and a cute French accent. She was accompanied by Francois Mazure, a blue-eyed, bearded reporter for Agence France-Presse.

On the same convoy were two marine “snuffies,” or combat correspondents, Steve Berntson and Dale Dye. Both were marine sergeants with unusual jobs. They were “military journalists,” or, rather, public relations reporters in the field charged with writing stories about their fellow marines. They were assigned to the Information Services Office (ISO) and covered the war the same way as civilian journalists but with a mandate to stress the positive. They had a license to go anywhere and do anything that could be turned into a story, so they were far more widely traveled than most marines, and they had a great deal more independence. Like the journalists, whom they came to know well, they traveled around the country looking for hot spots, but unlike their civilian counterparts, they didn’t just drop in and then leave. They attached themselves to units, picked up a rifle, stayed with them, and often fought beside them. This earned them both respect and better access. Marines in the field were usually happy to oblige reporters anyway. It was nice to think about getting your picture or name in the news back home. Maybe their families would see it. But they tended to regard the civilian correspondents as dilettantes, or war tourists, who dropped in to sample the deadly excitement of combat, didn’t help, and exited on the first chopper out.37 And some of the men were growing skeptical of reporters’ motives, particularly those of the foreign reporters. Marines noted the growing tendency to paint Americans as losers and bad guys in this conflict. Snuffies didn’t bug out, and they didn’t write shit about you, either.

Dye had a drawing of the Mad magazine icon Alfred E. Neuman on the back of his flak jacket, above which he had written the goofy character’s slogan: “What, me worry?” Berntson had two things written on his flak jacket, his name and his nickname: Storyteller. Some combat correspondents had Snuffy Smith, the hillbilly comic book character, drawn on theirs—the name “snuffy” often was attached to junior enlisted men. Because they traveled and wrote continually, within the ranks some became well known and even esteemed. They saw the war closer than any civilian correspondent. Some of them, Berntson included, had been wounded and even decorated. Their stories were published in the marine newspaper Sea Tiger, and often in Stars and Stripes, the independent newspaper devoted to covering the US military.

Berntson looked for sad and funny stories, too. He wrote one about a particularly beloved gunny, Nathaniel Weathers, who had been killed outright when a mortar shell landed on him as he was out checking com lines in Quang Tri. A more lighthearted effort concerned a marine at Phong Dien who got caught in a mortar barrage while he was taking a shit on a honey bucket—a big metal barrel half-filled with diesel fuel that had a board with a hole in it laid across the top. He was blown right off the drum, and landed drenched with its contents. The corpsmen insisted he be hosed off before they would treat him. There were also terrible stories, ones he did not write, like the night a squad leader he knew tripped a booby trap that sliced open his stomach. The man’s innards spilled out of him, and shortly before he died he was frantically trying to gather them back, calling to Berntson: “Help me get these in! Help me get these in!”

The snuffies’ stories were regularly handed out to civilian correspondents, who sometimes reshaped them and put them on the wire, which meant they sometimes showed up in little newspapers throughout the United States. Mention a marine’s hometown—something Berntson was always careful to do—and there was a good chance it would end up in his local paper. There were usually no bylines on these stories, but the marines remembered who wrote them. Berntson would be hailed by a grunt in the bush who said, in so many words: Hey, Storyteller, you lying sack of shit. You know all that bullshit you wrote about me? You know what? My mom clipped it and sent it to me! They think I’m a hero at home now and maybe they’ll buy me a beer when I get back! That felt better than a byline. Commanders heading off on a hairy patrol would say, “Get Storyteller. We’re going out on a romp.”

Berntson had started out writing stories as a high school sophomore in Park River, North Dakota, getting paid a nickel per column inch by the Walsh County Press. When he didn’t head to college right after high school graduation, he found himself confronted by the draft board. He enlisted in the marines to take advantage of their two-year option. He was trained as a machine gunner, but after completing the course and discovering he didn’t like it—the work was dirty and the guns were heavy and loud—he raised his hand and asked how he could opt out. He was referred to a reenlistment officer. Turned out if you wanted to be anything more than a gun humper, you had to sign up for two more years. What sort of work did he want to do? Berntson said he knew how to take pictures and write stories. He was told there was no such military occupation specialty in the US Marine Corps. He knew this was not true, because every base had its own newspaper and he had read these papers. He persisted. With a spanking new four-year commitment, he found himself helping to put out the base newspaper in El Toro Marine Air Station in Irvine, California. What he really wanted was Vietnam. He read the stories from there, and they were a lot more interesting than his, which were all too often composed as glorified captions around posed pictures of glad-handing generals. He had visions of writing gripping accounts of battles and sweeping troop movements, but when he finally managed to get to the war, he found that the work was about finding the little private first class with the big rifle who did something unusual—and making sure you spelled his name right and put in the name of his hometown.

Berntson carried a little standard-issue green notebook. On the inside flap he had written his name and, proudly: CORRESPONDENT, VIETNAM 67–68. Under that he wrote the number of his ISO unit, and next to it: ISO, FIRST TO GO! LAST TO KNOW! On the opposite page he recorded the serial numbers of the two cameras he was issued, an Asahi and a Canon, and the serial number of his service pistol. By February 1968, he had been in Vietnam for eight months, and he’d learned to hear the difference between the sound of an explosion that said: Get down right now! and the kind that said: No worries, keep walking. He was afraid a lot, but it had become a discerning fear.

The Tet Offensive had started just after he arrived at Phu Bai, and true to the slogan in his notebook, even after two days he had no idea what was going on. He had gone to the supply tent, where his friend Roger Doss was the sergeant, and Doss had found him a bunk in the back among all the boxes. He filed a few stories, took a long hot shower, ate some hot food, and drank as much gin as he could stand. He was wandering around the camp on Thursday, hungover, when he noticed things had gotten tense. He saw some marines climbing onto a truck convoy just in from Da Nang, and was told they were heading up to Hue. There was some major sniper fire up there and they needed support. He didn’t think anything of it, and spent another night in the supply tent.

The next morning someone stuck his head into the tent and said they were looking for volunteers to fight in Hue. Berntson thought, What the hell? He had been to the city once before, with Dye. They had a friend there who had worked at the air force coms office, and they’d had a nice dinner at a restaurant down by the Huong River. He could use a little taste of civilization. Maybe his buddy was still there. He grabbed his gear and climbed onto the truck, where he ran into Dye.

They stopped at a village to pick up two dozen ARVN rangers. The French reporters, Leroy and Mazure, stepped out and greeted the civilians with a hearty “Bonjour!” They were eager to make it clear they weren’t Americans. The shooting picked up as they moved into the city, but they arrived at the compound intact and with no one wounded. They had been shot at in a few places, and the marines had fired back aggressively.

Roberts just kept his head down. They sped over the An Cuu Bridge, which, miraculously, the Front had not yet dropped. Past it he could see very little through the wooden slats of the truck, and couldn’t tell whether the gunfire was incoming or outgoing. He felt the vehicle pull to a stop, and marines rolled out to assume firing positions. He thought it was just another delay on the road—he had never been driven from Phu Bai to Hue before, so he wasn’t sure how long it would take—but as he got out he realized they were back at the compound. He started asking around for Fox Company, the group he had flown in with the day before. He was told that most of them had been shot up and evacuated, which was an exaggeration.

Berntson was shocked by what he saw when he arrived. He knew serious danger when he saw it. There were dead enemy soldiers bloating on the street outside. Inside there were stacks of dead Americans with tarps over their heads; the supply of body bags had run out. The whole place looked shot up and battered. It was now jammed with marines, and more would be coming in a few hours—Hotel Company, led by Captain Ron Christmas. Golf still had about one hundred men, and Fox had over two hundred. With Hotel, there would be three companies from the 2/5 marines in addition to the remnants of Batcheller’s Alpha 1/1, now being commanded by Gunny Canley. Then there was Colonel Adkisson’s army contingent and all the marine advisers who had come to spend the holidays.

Tense and urgent efforts were being made to organize all these men. Outside the walls there was still shooting. From the rooftops, where the marines now had sandbagged firing positions, they were still popping off at targets nearby. The men up there had relaxed into the new state of constant battle. They had a big cooler of soft drinks and were listening to the radio, which was about to broadcast a month-old tape of the Senior Bowl, the annual college football All-Star game. They would chat with one another, cheer at something on the radio, and then take aim and shoot.

Other than the crowded conditions and this odd new normalcy, Roberts saw that little about the position had improved over the last two days. The marines were still surrounded and owned very little of the immediate neighborhood. The trucks that brought them turned right around and headed back to Phu Bai to pick up Hotel Company. The marines and ARVN rangers who had just arrived were quickly spread out. With so many concentrated inside the increasingly crowded compound, a well-placed mortar could cause catastrophic losses. So men were sorted and assigned positions on the perimeter.

Bingham no sooner stepped off his truck than he fell in with a group of marines heading out the front gate. They were carrying scaling ladders and hooks. Whatever they were about to do looked interesting, so he followed. He took shelter with them in a trench on the south bank of the Huong, where they were waiting for tanks to roll up and provide covering fire.

Waiting there, Bingham was surprised to find a book, in French,38 written by the Austrian Stefan Zweig, an author who interested him. So he was bent over the book as the tanks started firing over their heads. With the crashing sounds came a big explosion—he would learn later that it was a mortar—and he saw blood, his blood, splash on the open page. He keeled over. A metal fragment had entered his eye at the bottom of the socket, passed through his cheek and jaw and neck—nicking his carotid artery—and landed in his throat. He felt hands grabbing him, stripping away his camera and clothing, and was thrown onto the back of a truck. He was bleeding profusely and couldn’t talk. He felt no pain. A bandage was wrapped tightly around his head to stanch the bleeding. He was conscious, but now he couldn’t see. He asked for a piece of paper and a pencil, and wrote down his name, his blood type, and “freelancer.”

He was jerked off the truck and placed on a stretcher.

“This guy is in bad shape,” someone said. “He can’t talk, but he can hear you. If he gets in any trouble he can wave his hand.”

Roberts, who had just lit a cigarette—he had not even taken off his backpack—saw Bingham being carried in. He was shocked. He had just met the photographer on the ride up. They had been there only a few minutes. He followed the stretcher, telling Bingham he was there, and the young man wrote out the name and address of his girlfriend and gave it to him. He did not want his parents to know he had been wounded, but he wanted the girl to know. Roberts took the note and promised to deliver the message.

Leroy and Mazure were missing. The two French journalists had slipped away during one of the convoy’s stops. They had changed from their fatigues and donned civilian clothes, rented a tandem bicycle, and pedaled into the city on their own. They did not wish to be perceived as military, and announced to everyone they met that they were “Phap bao chi bale!” French press from Paris!

People paid them no mind. The few they saw on the street hurried away and would not look at them. They were in a Communist-­controlled area, just a few blocks north of the Phu Cam Canal, and people were not eager to be seen with two Caucasians of any nationality. There were sounds of gunfire nearby. The two pedaled to a market and watched South Vietnamese planes drop bombs over the Citadel.

An old man directed them to the Church of the Most Holy Redeemer, an enormous white stone structure with a towering arched veranda and high conical spire. Inside they found thousands of civilians, mostly women, the elderly, and children, families who had been there for days, who were camped out in pews and in the aisles. People were hungry. Some were wounded. Babies were crying. Children shrieked whenever an explosion sounded nearby. There were wounded civilians on the floor behind the church’s main marble altar.

Among these refugees were Tran Thi Thu Van, the writer from Saigon, and her family, who had reached the place after their long day of walking on Wednesday. Tran watched the two French journalists with curiosity. To her, Leroy looked dazed, and her companion, Mazure, bearded and disheveled. He looked to Tran as though he had been living in the forest. The two were quickly surrounded by children and the curious, but when Leroy lifted her camera and started taking pictures, the crowd pulled back quickly.

“Press. Press,” said Mazure.

When Leroy turned the camera toward Tran and her family, her brother Thai stood up and turned his back.

“What a monkey,” he said to the others in Vietnamese. “To take pictures in this situation.”

Leroy didn’t understand this reaction. She smiled to try to counter some of the scowls directed her way. Minutes later there was shooting outside the church, and people started to panic.

“The Viet Cong are coming!” someone shouted.

There was anxious whispering in the crowded pews. If the liberation soldiers came in, they would think the two French reporters were American, and the refugees would all be killed.

“Get them out of here!” said one.

“Break the camera,” said another.

“Don’t let them be here with us,” one implored the priest.39

Mazure kept up his “Phap bao chi bale!” But he encountered only glowers. The church’s French-speaking priest explained to Leroy and Mazure that the people were afraid of being seen with any Westerners, even the French, because of how it might look to the liberation forces.

“We have refused to let in soldiers from either side,” the priest told them. “We have sent them away every time, telling them that this is a sanctuary for civilians.”40

He let them spend the night in his room.41