3
Big Ernie
THE NIGHT BEFORE leaving for Hue, Ernie Cheatham had a rare opportunity for a combat commander. He had time to think. He had bulled his way into headquarters at Phu Bai on Friday afternoon, February 2, and gotten his battalion back. General LaHue told him to move up to the city on Saturday, which meant he had a long afternoon and evening to figure out what was going on, and how he intended to proceed.
What he learned just made him angrier. LaHue had been feeding marines—some of them his marines—into Hue piecemeal for three days: first Gordon Batcheller’s Alpha 1/1; then three of Cheatham’s, Fox (Mike Downs), Golf (Chuck Meadows), and Hotel (Ron Christmas). He’d been hurling them repeatedly at an enemy whose strength and disposition were still unknown. And they were getting cut to pieces. Dozens of Cheatham’s men were dead or in the battalion aid station, some of them dying, and more were arriving every few hours. Task Force X-Ray had been insisting that there was nothing more threatening in Hue than a handful of snipers. Now it was said that several enemy companies might be there—about four hundred men.
“I want you to attack through the city and clean the NVA out, and if you’re looking for any more [intelligence], you aren’t going to get it!” he was told flatly by Colonel Stan Hughes, commander of the First Marine Regiment, who would be going with Cheatham into the city the next day to assume overall command from the disappointing Gravel. “Just get up there and get going, and I’ll support you in any way I can. You do it any way you want to, and if you get any heat from above, I’ll take care of that.”31
Under the circumstances, Cheatham thought it wise to assume that the enemy was present in large numbers, well supplied and dug in. He did not know exactly how many, or what kind of arms they had, or even what their intentions were. He knew only one thing for sure—where the fight would take place. So he set out to prepare himself for that.32
Neither he nor his marines had ever fought in a city, nor had they been trained for it. The last time the Corps fought a big urban battle had been in Seoul in 1950, a grinding fight that had lasted for almost a month and killed more than four hundred and fifty marines.33 Cheatham knew there were several footlockers filled with field manuals that traveled around with the Fifth Marines, so he searched them out. Inside he found two pertinent booklets, Combat in Built-Up Areas and An Assault on a Fortified Position. He gave himself a crash course. The basic idea seemed to be staying off the streets. Walls and buildings were both your enemy and your friend. It was the kind of environment where you could be in mortal danger in one spot and two feet away you were safe. The way to proceed was to secure a starting position, and when you moved, you moved through walls, not around or over them. You blasted your way forward, blowing holes in anything that stood in your way. When you encountered the enemy in a building or bunker, you flattened it or gassed it or burned it. Then you sent your riflemen in to clean up. He knew there were tanks in Hue, and that Christmas had taken two Ontos with him, but that wouldn’t be enough for the job. So he set off in search of the right weaponry. He enlisted his executive officer John Salvati, now Major Salvati, to collect all of the bazookas in Phu Bai’s armory, not the lightweight, disposable rocket launchers the marine infantry now carried, but longer, heavier Korean War–era metal tubes that fired a big, nine-pound rocket with a shaped charge that could blow right through some walls or a tank if it hit at the right spot in the rear. He also ordered up every 106 recoilless rifle in the battalion armory. Cheatham wanted all he could get, and Salvati found six. They were the same as the six mounted on the Ontos, rifles as big and heavy as cannons—lifting one took several strong men. The 106 fired an explosive round that weighed nearly twenty pounds, and it delivered a ferocious back blast. Cheatham rounded up small flatbed vehicles called mules to carry them. These were about the size of a golf cart, fast and maneuverable, and just big enough for the 106s. Both the bazookas and the 106s were old weapons, tried and true, but too heavy to ordinarily be of much use in Vietnam. Men patrolling in rice paddies or in jungles rarely encountered armor or heavily fortified positions, and patrolling mostly on foot they preferred the more lightweight, disposable LAWs (light antitank weapons), or hand grenades. So there were plenty of the heavier weapons in storage. Cheatham also instructed Salvati to round up gas grenades, gas masks, flamethrowers, and as much C4 explosive as he could find.34 It would take a while, so Salvati stayed behind at Phu Bai for one more day.
This newest relief convoy wasn’t ready to leave until well after noon. It was a big one. The ranking officer aboard was Hughes, most of whose regiment had not yet arrived at Phu Bai when the offensive began. When his executive officer had found him days earlier sitting in a small tent with a cot, he asked where Hughes’s command post was.
“This is it,” Hughes said.35
He had only part of one battalion. Another part, Alpha Company 1/1, had been badly mauled on the first day of the battle. Hughes would bring up a second company, Bravo, the next day. When he got to Hue he would assume formal command at the compound, but it was Cheatham and his three companies who would initially handle most of the fighting.
And “the Chariot” was coming in heavy. Returning with him were the Golf Company platoon led by Lieutenant Bill Rogers, the emissary Captain Meadows had dispatched to Phu Bai the night before, and the arsenal of heavy weapons Cheatham had assembled. The six mules, each carrying one of the big 106s, were loaded on lowboy cargo trucks with two more Dusters. The trucks carried lots of ammo, the bazookas, gas masks, and other supplies. At the tail end of the convoy were trucks filled with more volunteers, marines who had relatively safe rear jobs and wanted in on the action.
In the lead truck with Hughes were Alvin Webb, a UPI reporter; and John Laurence, a CBS reporter, with his cameraman Keith Kay, who crouched on the metal bed balancing his big camera and filming Hughes. The marines around them were pleased to have the chance to be in a news report, particularly when they learned that Laurence reported to Walter Cronkite. They also wondered why the network was so interested in this thing in Hue.
“You guys know something we don’t?” one asked.
“Yeah, what’s going on in Hue?” asked another.
“You know as much as we do,” Kay told them.
The marines were amazed that these journalists would head into the battle with them unarmed, and on purpose.36
For once the trip north was uneventful. At one point a great volume of fire erupted toward the back end of the convoy, but Cheatham realized it was all coming from the undisciplined troops in the rear trucks. He ordered his driver to speed up, and as the trailing trucks struggled to keep pace the firing fell off. The convoy pulled into the MACV compound at about one in the afternoon.
Gravel got so worked up describing the situation that Cheatham told him, flatly, to get a grip on himself. The beleaguered colonel stayed on as leader of a considerably reduced battalion,37 which would be further reinforced in the coming days. Hughes ordered him to coordinate with Cheatham, protect the LZ and boat ramp, and continue trying to push out of the compound south along Highway 1 to protect future convoys and to expand the area of the city under American control.
Lieutenant Ray Smith sent a platoon of his Alpha Company west on another mission to rescue the trapped air force coms team, which was still hiding and surrounded. It ran into the same wall of resistance as everyone else and turned back. Two marines were killed and four more wounded. After four days of fighting, they were still being surprised by the stiffness of enemy resistance. Lieutenant Rick Donnelly, whose platoon spearheaded that effort, reported that the stadium alone was defended by a full battalion.
Cheatham set up his base of command at the university. They would push west from there, but they would need a steady flow of ammo and supplies from the compound, and a way to evacuate the wounded. Gravel told Bill Ehrhart, one of his battalion scouts, to find some vehicles. The private and a buddy took a Jeep from an air force officer at gunpoint—sliding a shell into a shotgun for effect. To that they added two ARVN Jeeps, a Volkswagen minibus, a Peugeot, and a Vespa scooter, which was useless for transport but fun to ride. This peculiar fleet, along with the mules, would become a key part of the counterattack in the coming days.
At the university, Cheatham was reunited with his three company captains. The view from the westernmost side on the second floor overlooked the critical stretch of enemy-occupied government buildings along Le Loi Street all the way to the Phu Cam Canal.
Through the gray drizzle Cheatham could see most of it, a swath eleven blocks long and eight blocks deep. The Huong River was to his right. The first objective was directly across the street, the tan-stone treasury building. It had two tall floors and was surrounded by a low masonry wall and an iron fence. With its big steel doors in front, it looked as sturdy as a bank vault. Its tall windows—the ones on the upper floor framed with gentle arches—made perfect firing positions, as did small openings in the wide cornice of ornate masonry under the roofline. Close enough to hit with a stone, it would be the first big challenge. The Front had strongly fortified it, and Cheatham could not push farther west without taking it. Doing so would be a test of the tactics he had planned.
Across the street from the treasury, just south, was the post office building, another large stone structure. Every block behind these two had buildings nearly as imposing, most notably the prison and the province headquarters. All were flying Communist flags, and every one was going to be tough. They were all on the south side of Le Loi Street, and the north side was just the promenade and the Huong River, so that meant Cheatham’s right flank would be relatively secure—they were safely distant from the enemy guns across on the north bank. He would sweep west in three company-size columns, with Christmas on the right flank, Downs up the middle, and Smith’s Alpha Company on the left flank, taking the smaller buildings in the blocks immediately south. Meadows’s Golf Company, which had been so badly mauled trying to fight across the bridge, would be held back in reserve.
The classrooms on both floors of the university looked as if a violent storm had come through. Windows were shattered, desks overturned and jumbled, textbooks and papers scattered. Marines had defaced the walls with graffiti.
“Fuck Communism!”
“Class Dismissed.”38
Cheatham picked one as his command center, and his captains took seats before him like students. They began to work out the details, how they would use the tanks, the mules, the 106s, the mortars, and the bazookas. None of them had ever done anything like this.