2

TFP

THE LAND NORTH of Hue was sandy and flat. Highway 1 ran parallel to the shoreline of the South China Sea, just ten miles east. To the west, in the distance, were the green hills and distant mountains of the Central Highlands where the Communists had their hidden camps. On both sides of the elevated road were rice paddies and cane fields, the flatness broken only by occasional berms, dikes, and small cemeteries and, at intervals, by villages surrounded by trees. The graveyards were newly decorated for Tet.

Charles Krohn, an officer in one of Tolson’s battalions, would describe Camp Evans, fifteen miles northwest of Hue, as “a dump—treeless, muddy, and just plain ugly.”19 It was also big and noisy, a hub, with choppers coming and going at all hours, radios barking and whining, generators hammering, and trucks and Jeeps moving men and supplies. Most of the time you had to shout to be heard.

This was the new home to lead portions of Tolson’s division, roughly fifteen thousand men. The marines had mostly moved out and the air cavalry had moved in. The division consisted of three brigades, each made up of three battalions, which each consisted of four companies of about one hundred and twenty men each.20 Two of Tolson’s battalions would be thrown into the battle of Hue: the Second of the Twelfth Cavalry (2/12), commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Dick Sweet; and the Fifth of the Seventh Cavalry (5/7), commanded by Lieutenant Colonel James Vaught.21 The third battalion was held back to defend Camp Evans. All three had arrived that week and were busy painting their bright yellow and black horsehead emblem on everything. Over the holiday truce, they had anticipated a few quiet days to dig in and organize. Instead, there had been a rude greeting.

“We got mortared last night,” wrote the lovelorn Andy Westin to his wife, Mimi, back in Ypsilanti. Westin’s mortar platoon was part of Vaught’s battalion.

About 40 rounds. They did it just when the early morning fog set in and our choppers couldn’t see the guns firing. About 40 people got hurt. The rounds landed on the other end of the LZ. It’s a long way from me. I had a good hole last night, but today my RTO and I sandbagged it, deepened it, and strengthened it. Tomorrow we’ll put a very thick roof on it. I call it “Chicken’s Paradise.”

The lieutenant, who was still decorating his letters home with line drawings of himself sporting ever larger antlers, was very excited that Mimi had sent him a Playboy magazine. He and the other men of Charlie Company were put in charge of guarding a “water point,” a place where water was sucked from a nearby stream, run through filters to remove bacteria and bugs, and then delivered to makeshift shower stalls. They took turns enjoying their first shower in months. Westin figured there were worse places to settle for a while.

Word of the big fight in Hue had ruined those plans. General Tolson wrote out new orders for his third brigade on a small piece of his personal notepaper:

1. Seal off city on west & north with right flank based on the Song Huong River [cq].22

2. Destroy enemy forces attempting to either reinforce or escape from Hue Citadel.

Westin wrote Mimi:

On the news tonight you’ll probably hear about a big fight in Hue. Well, if it gets any bigger we’ll be there, too. Our company is all saddled up and ready to go. We’ve got armored vests and gas masks, and a lot of ammo. I’m carrying 400 rounds + 2 mortar rounds. We’re really loaded for bear. I’d just as soon not go. I’m a lover, not a fighter.

That afternoon they had traveled to PK-17, which got its name from the kilometer marker on Highway 1. Tolson had scrapped an air assault any closer to the fortress after one of his Cobra helicopters had been shot down on a reconnaissance mission outside the northern wall on Friday and its crew had barely escaped with their lives.23 Besides, his refueling and maintenance crews hadn’t made it to Camp Evans yet, so he couldn’t keep helicopters in the air for very long. His men would move to the city on foot. Sweet’s battalion would lead the way.

Colonel Dick Sweet was an army lifer, a Korean War veteran, a man of considerable charm who nevertheless was regarded by some as an arrogant runt, a classic “little Napoleon” type, short and fit, experienced, tactically sound, and brimming with confidence. When he had taken command just weeks earlier, he’d asked his company captains what they would like to do in the future. Captain Bob Helvey, as was his way, came right to the point.

“I’d like to have your job, sir,” he said.

Some commanders might have been rattled by that, or at least taken aback, but Sweet just smiled.

“Okay,” he told Helvey. “I’ve got what I needed to know.”

Helvey wasn’t quite sure what his new commander meant by that, but he clearly wasn’t bothered. In war, after all, it was only prudent to assume your subordinates might have to step up and do your job at any time, so Helvey’s bald ambition was both frank and even appropriate. Sweet was untroubled by an ambitious junior officer. In short order Helvey saw why. The “arrogant runt” of a colonel knew what he was doing.

From all his time in the field Sweet had a ruddy complexion. He talked fast and a lot, and he was unfailingly decent—at night he could be heard in his quarters dictating loving messages to his wife and children on the audiocassettes he mailed home. But he could, at times, be stern, even a stickler. One day he sent Captain Krohn, his intel officer, on a walking tour of the base to make sure his men were obeying an order against rolling up their sleeves—covering the arms helped cut down on mosquito bites, and hence, malaria. When Krohn suggested that enforcing long sleeves when the temperature and humidity were off the charts might be regarded by the men as chickenshit, Sweet told him that if they refused to obey such a simple order on base, how could they be relied on in combat? If you disappointed him, you heard about it sharply, face-to-face. But Sweet could also be funny, as when he launched into his dead-on impression of Tolson, whom he did not like, mimicking the general’s high voice with a ridiculous squeak and his antic manner by waving his arms. With startling irreverence (and reflecting the army’s casual institutional racism), Sweet called Tolson “the dumbest white man in the army.” He also talked openly about things other officers didn’t. He was frank about masturbation, for instance, which he saw as a necessary outlet. He called it “thumping the dummy.”

Sweet’s junior officers shared his disdain for Tolson, which increased their affection for him. He solicited their ideas and freely shared his own. He thought the Vietnam War, for instance, had evolved beyond the tactics favored by Westy and the rest of the MACV. The highly touted airmobile tactics of their division, inserting small infantry units into hot spots with helicopters, was already outmoded, he said. It was well suited to fighting small fast-moving Viet Cong units by beating them at their own game. The US Army could move men and deliver devastating firepower more rapidly than any other force in the world. The adrenaline rush of swooping down to a hot LZ, guns blazing—Helvey would call it “living on the razor’s edge, ten feet off the ground”—was what made life in a cavalry unit exciting. But no matter how effective and cool the tactic was, Sweet had begun to see long before Tet that the enemy was moving toward more conventional land warfare, maneuvering large armies in the field. The revolution, he told his officers, was entering a new phase, a more generalized offensive. More and more regular NVA units were making their way south, and they were experts at large-scale land battles.

Colonel Sweet was determined to be just as good. His predecessor had been killed only weeks earlier when the helicopter from which he had been commanding was shot down. Sweet preferred to lead with his feet on the ground, alongside his men, the old-fashioned way, the way he had led his platoon in Korea. That way he was seeing the same things his adversaries saw, from the same perspective. And battles were about more than maneuvers and position; they were also about men. A leader needed to know how his men were feeling, what they were thinking. You couldn’t look a man in the eye from five hundred feet.

On this mission he anticipated no more than possible light action and a long walk, but he was wary. There had been reports of large numbers of NVA in the area. They had been dismissed as implausible but he kept them in mind. If the reports were true, Sweet believed his battalion was more than capable of defeating whatever popped up in its path. And the need to get to Hue was urgent. The biggest concern Sweet had discussed with his staff was how to avoid friendly fire once they got to the city.

Room on the choppers was tight, so he ordered that packs be left behind at Camp Evans—ponchos, sweaters, dry socks, blankets, air mattresses, entrenching tools, food, etc. It was a decision he regretted right away, because when they got to PK-17 he realized that keeping his large force concentrated on the small base would make them too vulnerable to mortar attack, so they camped a short march away, outside the base. His men spent a wet and very cold night exposed to the elements—the temperature dropped into the forties. One soldier cut a hole in a rice sack and wore it. Others stuffed newspapers and rice straw under their flak jackets, a remedy that came at a price because it itched like hell. Men huddled two to a foxhole and held each other to stay warm. A mortar battery at the ARVN base exploded a white phosphorus shell over their position during the night, and one of the men, Manuel Silva, got a chunk of the burning substance on his nose. He screamed as he tried to rub it off, and was so badly burned he had to be evacuated by chopper before dawn.24 They set off on Saturday morning carrying only their weapons and ammo, spreading out across the fields in the cool fog. Sweet kept them off the road, figuring that as it was the most likely approach to Hue the enemy might have mined it or prepared an ambush. Overnight there had been an air attack on an enemy force between them and Hue, and it was reported that ­thirty-­seven were killed. So the enemy was around.

The gray sky hung so low they could see only about half the width of a rice paddy in all directions. Sweet had decided to move his men along the west side of the highway. They were heading off without their usual artillery and air support—ideally, a march like this would be preceded by aerial gunships and a moving wall of explosions. The weather had delayed delivery of the division’s gun batteries to Camp Evans, and many of the choppers were without fuel.

The battalion spread out in a diamond formation, with one company at each corner, nearly four hundred men covering a wide swath of soggy rice paddies, their boots making sucking noises as they pulled them from the mud. Wearing their vests and draped with ammo they looked bigger, but most of the men were nothing but scrawny teenagers. Basic training, infantry drills, and the rigors of camping and patrolling had so reduced most of them that their mothers would have been dismayed. They wore battered green helmets and faded pale green flak jackets. In addition to their ammunition belts, from which many strung a sock stuffed with C rations, most carried bandoliers stuffed with extra rifle ammo and hung with grenades. They walked at a good pace with their rifles held forward and ready. For a little guy like Theodore Wallace, who had grown up in Harlem, it was hard to keep up. His sergeant dropped back alongside him.

“You know, Wallace, the enemy snipers, they shoot the stragglers.”

Wallace gained speed, scared now, passing soldiers on the left and the right until one asked, “Man, where do you think you’re going?”

“I got to catch up with the company,” Wallace said.

“Hell, I’m the point man,” the soldier told him. “The company is back there.”

Carl DiLeo, a tall skinny kid of eighteen from Trenton, New Jersey, was in a mortar platoon. He carried a forty-pound base plate strapped to his back, which made him walk stooped. He had been kicked out of high school as a senior less than a year earlier. He was from a rough neighborhood where the Italians carried on a rolling rumble with the blacks who lived just a few blocks away, each side determined to prove how tough they were. DiLeo had a thick crop of dark hair and sunglasses he wore even on gray days, or especially when he saw a camera.

Squad leader David Dentinger, slogging forward, wasn’t worried about seeing action on this walk. There were too many of them for the enemy to challenge. The gooks were all about hit-and-run; you never encountered them in force. He was pleased to see Sweet walking with them. Dentinger was cynical about officers. He figured that if Sweet and his staff were coming along, then the walk was certainly safe.25

Sweet had mapped a route that went through small wooded areas and villages, avoiding open ground as much as possible. They walked straight through one village—just a collection of straw huts—that had small North Vietnamese flags everywhere. The villagers had been there moments before—smoke rose from abandoned cooking fires—and as the soldiers moved forward out to the fields they saw some running away. Two of the women shouted back a warning: “Beaucoup VC! Beaucoup VC!” In the distance they could make out the villages of Que Chu and La Chu, which they had been warned might harbor some enemy. Sweet altered their course to swing around. He had his radioman request a smoke round from the brigade’s artillery battery at Camp Evans. The smoke would mark the target if they had to order high-explosive rounds. He was told that guns were not yet in place.

What neither Sweet nor Tolson knew was that La Chu was the command center for the National Liberation Front’s entire operation in Hue. It was protected by a full regiment of NVA, close to five thousand men.26 Sweet would have needed a much wider detour to avoid a force of that size. The battalion was walking into trouble.

The overcast turned to a driving rain. In the far distance they could see a dim glow and rising black smoke from Hue. The men were locked into the rhythm of their march, into a kind of half sleep, half wakefulness familiar to infantrymen. Your feet moved on their own, while your mind wandered or even dozed. Krohn snapped at one of his men, a private with bushy red hair, for whistling the tune “(What a Day for a) Daydream.” He was not in the mood.

The marching men woke up fast when they heard sniper fire from a line of woods ahead. The point man for one of the platoons was shot in the head and killed instantly. The sniper killed two more men before he was seen to leap from a foxhole and run away. He moved too fast for anyone to get a bead on him.27 As they pressed forward the volume of fire increased. To Wallace it sounded like bees buzzing around him. He started to swat at them, and then noticed that all of his buddies were flat in the mud. He hit the deck. Soon the lead company reported seeing enemy movement in the woods, and then the shooting rapidly intensified. It was startlingly precise. The enemy had waited until the battalion was well within range and then began laying down interlocking grazing fire, low and deadly. Sweet and his command group dashed for the cover of a nearby clump of trees. There wasn’t much else to hide behind. Most of the men just flattened themselves on the ground in the field. The rounds passed overhead with a chilling zip! Those in the most exposed places had to keep so low that their faces were in the mud. Juan Gonzales was one of the few men with a radio strapped to his back, and this made him an inviting target. Rounds smacked into the water just a few feet from his face. A sergeant next to him said, “Get rid of it!” Gonzales wriggled free, and they crawled toward a small graveyard, where they curled behind headstones.

Gonzales, a Texan, was an elite soldier, a member of Pathfinder Team 229. Members of his unit usually worked alone. Daring and talented orienteers, they moved stealthily behind enemy lines to scout for landing zones, and then, using the bulky radios they carried everywhere, they would talk the choppers to the right spot. Pathfinders did not belong to any unit in particular—they would be lent to those heading out on missions—so Gonzales and his buddies spent nearly all of their time in the field. Because they wore headsets to communicate on the run, they did not wear helmets. Instead they wore simple black caps that were an emblem of status. They were very proud of those black caps. It was considered bad form, even under intense fire, for a Pathfinder to replace his cap with a helmet. They also hated to be parted from their radios, their primary tool. Gonzales had shed his with great reluctance, and he would not leave without it.

DiLeo pressed himself to the ground and watched the command group nearby with concern. He was not the only one with eyes trained on the officers, waiting for some direction, some way out of this mess. Judging by their body language, the colonel and staff appeared upset and confused. There had plainly been some kind of intel fuckup. Hours passed. DiLeo saw Sweet talking animatedly on the radio, yet no air support came, and no artillery.

Then enemy mortars started to fall. The steady grazing ground fire continued. As more time passed, it became clear to the waiting men that unless they wanted to spend the day as target practice, at some point they were going to have to move.

They were not used to this. American infantry units in the field lived and died by artillery and air support. It was their trump card. There were two big ARVN guns at PK-17, but they were considered imprecise—and no one could speak Vietnamese well enough to guide the gunners. The low clouds made air attacks almost impossible. Sweet even tried calling down to Phu Bai to ask the marine battery there for help but was denied. Fixed-wing pilots were willing but could not get low enough to aim before screaming past. Chopper pilots couldn’t see anything until they were almost on the ground. They had to either drop down and get lucky or risk hovering within range of ground fire until they could figure out where the target was supposed to be. Still, Sweet did manage to coax two Hueys down. The men heard them as they approached and felt the first stab of hope. Then the aircraft were directly over them. With his pack out in the mud Gonzales wasn’t able to offer his expert guidance. It was frustrating. The aircraft were so low that he felt the heat of the rockets’ burners as they opened fire. One accidentally aimed at the wrong tree line, killing one and wounding four at Sweet’s position before it was pointed toward the more distant line of trees. But even as rockets fell and machine gunners in the Hueys’ open doors strafed the enemy position in the woods, it was clear that this would not be enough. The men were still pinned down.

Sweet spoke on the radio to Colonel Hugh Campbell, the brigade commander, explaining forcefully that any attempt to continue moving forward without sufficient artillery or air support would be ill-advised. For his part, Campbell was under intense pressure from Tolson to get his brigade into the fight at Hue. The general had wanted a second battalion inserted by helicopter southwest of the Citadel, but Campbell had fended off that order for the same reason Sweet was now pinned down—lack of artillery or air support. He had prevailed in that instance only because Sweet’s battalion was supposed to arrive shortly. The colonel was adamant that they deliver on that promise.

“You will attack now!” Campbell told Sweet. Then, using his call sign, he said abruptly, “Warmaster out!”28

There would be no further discussion. The men around Sweet heard him say, “Roger, out,” and knew what was coming. Captain Helvey thought, If it’s possible, we’ll do it. If it’s not possible the charge will be remembered for a long time and celebrated in the annals of the regiment. The time to move was now, while the Hueys were still overhead. Sweet ordered his men to prepare to charge the woods. Captain Krohn fought the urge to empty his bladder. He chambered rounds in both his rifle and his pistol. When the order came, he would stand and start running with everyone else.

“Move out,” Sweet ordered.

“Let’s go!” came the cry.

Four hundred men rose and began running forward. There were too many for the enemy to shoot at once, but many were cut down as soon as they stood. There was no choice but to keep going. Some stopped to pull others up and drag or carry them. These were seasoned soldiers, and there was no panic. Gonzales fired his rifle in three-round bursts as he ran. Dentinger ran and prayed. DiLeo, with that heavy mortar plate on his back, felt as if he were running in slow motion. He assumed he’d get hit. He had spent nearly every day of his months in Vietnam in the field. He was pretty good at math and, given all the death and maiming he’d seen, he’d long ago figured that his chance of getting out of Nam alive, or without a serious wound, was near zero. Paralyzing fear had eroded to grim acceptance. Moments like this drove it home. This was the deal. He ran. He tried to zigzag and he collided with the man next to him. They went down heavily; DiLeo felt as if he’d been chop-blocked on a football field. He got up and resumed running. His immediate hope was that he would be killed cleanly and quickly.

When he and five others made the tree line they saw three big foxholes. These seemed empty, but in the first they discovered three NVA soldiers, who tried to surrender. They were shot dead. Two more leaped from the next hole and ran. They, too, were cut down. The third hole was abandoned. DiLeo flopped into it, exhausted. He was amazed to still be alive. The firing had momentarily stopped.

The gun position that had pinned them down now seemed insignificant. Eight enemy soldiers were dead and four others were prisoners. That was it. Nine of Sweet’s men were dead, forty-eight wounded. Gonzales jumped into an empty foxhole and found an arm and part of a brain. He threw them out and settled in deep.

They had advanced just two hundred yards, and were now stuck again. Private Wallace was with a man who’d been shot in his crotch. He’d had morphine for the physical pain but there was more to deal with.

“I should just walk out of here and let them blow me up,” he said.

“No, no,” said Wallace. “Your life is precious.”

“Ted, what am I going to do?” he asked. “I can’t go home like this.”

“Yes, you can. You’re still alive, and life is not just sex, okay? It’s only ten percent. People overrate it and make it so important to them, but you just have to learn how to have sex differently. You may be known as the oral man in your neighborhood!”

The man laughed, in spite of himself.

Wallace said, “You’ll be very popular.”

They immediately began to receive sniper fire from the next line of woods around La Chu. Once again they were pinned down and only slightly closer to the village. They exaggerated the number of enemy they’d killed in their radio report to Campbell, not wanting to admit how little they had accomplished at such cost. As James Vaught’s operations officer Charlie Baker would later put it, the enemy “had scarcely been scratched.”29

Much like the marines in Hue, they had been thrown against an immovable object. It was learning by trial and tragically bloody error. Saturday ended with all three allied forces surrounded and pinned down: the ARVN troops bottled up at Mang Ca, the marines in southern Hue, and now an army battalion in a copse of woods to the northwest.

Mortars continued to drop into Sweet’s new position. Dentinger saw one of his squad mates fall, hit in the shoulder. The platoon’s medic, a young Chinese-American soldier from Pasadena, California, Hoi Tin “Tony” Lau, ran out to help and was immediately shot dead. He collapsed over the wounded man, who pulled himself from under Lau’s body and crawled off the road. Dentinger and two of his team members located the sniper’s position in a foxhole ahead. As they crawled toward it, the sniper mysteriously stopped firing at them. They got close enough to hurl grenades at the hole, killing him. When they recovered his rifle they found a round jammed in the chamber.

Gonzales, who was unscathed, found that he didn’t feel angry about having had to make the charge, as some of the men did. He accepted risking his life. That was the job. He’d put himself here on purpose. The year before, trapped at a rear base and eager to see some action before his one-year tour ended, he’d bluffed his way into the Pathfinder unit. He’d threatened his battalion commander.

He’d said, “Do you know who Henry B. Gonzalez is?”—Henry Gonzalez was a famous Texas congressman, and, as the slight difference in spelling would suggest, no relation to Juan—“Well he’s my uncle, and if you don’t transfer me to a Pathfinder company I’m going to write him. I came to Vietnam to fight!”

He never knew if his commander had believed him, but it worked. Gonzales, in his bloody hole wearing his black cap, was exactly where he’d wanted to be.

But it wasn’t a good place. They owned a small stand of trees at the edge of a rice paddy, with a significant and well-dug-in enemy force to their front. To make matters worse, they realized soon after establishing a perimeter that the enemy had moved around behind them, closing off the direction from which they’d come.

“How are we goin’ to get outa this fucking place?” one of the men asked.

This Fucking Place. Their hard-won patch of woods on the outskirts of La Chu would from that point on be referred to as TFP.30