3

The Sweep

IT TOOK BIG Ernie Cheatham four days to fight his way to the Phu Cam Canal. These were long and bloody, with a fierce clash at each of the significant municipal buildings along Le Loi Street, but once begun, the advance was unstoppable. It was the first notable American achievement since the city had been taken.

The successful treasury takedown set the pattern. Cheatham would first bombard the target building or complex with mortars—he called them his “sledgehammer.”31 Then came a gas cloud, tanks, Ontos, 106s, bazookas, and, finally, marines.

Lieutenant Hoang Anh De’s men would defend each place ferociously until the bombardment began, and would then slip back to form the next defensive line. The rubble produced by the shelling created lots of new places to hide.

The sweep’s big prizes fell one by one: the hospital, the prison, and the province headquarters, with smaller fights in the houses, schools, stores, garages, and courtyards along the way. Every step forward was costly. In the first two days, Cheatham’s three companies worked abreast, with Fox shifting to the south to take the left flank and Golf moving up into the center. When Lieutenant Smith’s company moved up it relieved Downs’s Fox Company, which had taken heavy casualties, and it was moved north to fight along the right side of Le Loi Street. Dense cloud cover still prevented aerial attacks, and the closeness of the enemy made the use of heavy artillery too risky, but the weapons Cheatham had brought along, and the tactics he perfected, were getting the job done.

The old football lineman knew a good blocker when he saw one, so that’s how he used the tanks. It was too dangerous to position men around them, so he sent them out alone and in front. The Ontos was more vulnerable to enemy fire, but it was smaller, was faster, and had more firepower. Cheatham kept it behind the tanks as each day’s advance began. The heavy fire directed at the tanks exposed the enemy’s firing positions. Cheatham would then calmly stand on the street alongside the Ontos—with his helmet on he was almost as tall as the vehicle’s top hatch—and point out targets for its six big guns. Then the vehicle would speed out in front of the tanks, use tracer rounds from its spotting rifle to zero in, and fire one or more of its guns. The vehicle would rock so far backward it looked as if it might tilt over, but then it settled back and sped in reverse to safety. It was a very useful weapon. Its six big guns knocked down even thick walls completely, or blew big holes in them. In time the enemy was seen to flee as soon as the Ontos’s spotting rifle was fired. Few waited for the blast to follow.32

After the treasury fell, the fighting was still slow and hard, but the marines did not encounter the same level of resistance. Despite the bonanza of guns and ammo seized in ARVN warehouses and abandoned posts, Lieutenant Hoang’s forces were running low. He did not mount counterattacks, nor did he try to flank Cheatham or break the busy flow of traffic between the front line and the MACV compound, the steady outbound flow of ammo and supplies, and the inbound flow of wounded and dead. The ammo shortage forced Hoang into a strictly defensive posture. He was losing men at a rate at least as fast as the marines’, but his strategy of hold and retreat was keeping his forces together. He knew that he could not stop the marines. He occasionally would send out probes to harass them at night, which kept him apprised of exactly where they were before each day’s advance. The worst part of the attacks was the mortar bombardments and the tear gas. Some of Hoang’s men were exposed to so much gas they were blinded and vomited blood.

He had orders to keep fighting. His superiors wanted to make a statement. The Americans had greater firepower, and could rapidly assemble in greater numbers, but his superiors wanted to show that they were capable of meeting the challenge head-on. The oft-expressed disdain of American soldiers for an enemy that refused to stand and fight was felt by the enemy, too. Hit-and-run tactics took a toll on their own morale. Here in Hue they would show once and for all, to themselves and the world, that they were willing and able to slug it out with Americans.33 As his front line fought each day, behind them their comrades figured out how to best defend the next line, establishing firing positions that took advantage of the layout of the block, rigging new booby traps, digging new foxholes and trenches, setting up on rooftops and at high windows. Increasingly they relied on snipers to slow the marines’ advance.

When Cheatham’s command center moved, Major Salvati made it a priority to find a new bottle of good Scotch, Cheatham’s preferred drink. Most of the nicer abandoned homes in southern Hue had generous liquor cabinets. The only obstacles were dogs. Many families had left their pets behind, which would snarl ferociously at him. He shot them.

Night was a time to regroup, resupply, plan for the next day, and perhaps grab a few minutes of sleep. The predictable battle rhythm produced what Captain Christmas called a “gentleman’s war,” but there was nothing gentle about it.

Some of the grunts had felt good about fighting in the city at first. They were sick of the bugs and the heat and the dirt and the leeches that plagued them in the bush and rice paddies. City fighting seemed a welcome change . . . until they had been in Hue for a few days. In the field, when you located an enemy position, you would flank it; you would send a squad to the left and another to the right. The center would open fire on the target as the flanking squads attacked from both sides. If you tried that in Hue, in an open courtyard or a city street, the men approaching from both sides would be shot down.

When they had trained to assault a building in their infantry course at Camp Lejeune or Camp Pendleton, they had practiced against a simple one-story plywood structure. They were taught to attack from top to bottom, to come in from the roof. Here this was impossible. The buildings were too high to easily access the roofs, and you couldn’t get close to them without being exposed to torrents of fire. Buildings had to be cleared from the ground floor up. Any obvious point of entry was suicide. The doors and windows had been pre-zeroed by nearby gun and rocket positions. This the marines had discovered the hard way. You had to avoid doors and windows. You used a bazooka to blow a hole in the wall and went in through that. Then you cleared the ground floor, room by room, and worked your way upstairs. It was hard on the decor. When you kicked a door open a rifle barrel would immediately be stuck against the frame to keep anyone inside from slamming it back shut. A grenade was tossed in, and after it exploded you went in spraying rounds—usually two grunts, three if it was a big room. The first man in shot center-left, the second shot center-right, and the third punched rounds up through the ceiling in case there were enemy soldiers in the room above. Sometimes they would find a dead enemy soldier in an upstairs room who was full of holes, hit fifteen to twenty times. But that was rare. The enemy nearly always escaped, even from the upper floors. Sometimes they would find blood trails that led to a window. Once the place was cleared you usually had a few minutes to catch your breath, which gave you time to explore.

They never knew what they would find. Booby traps were a concern. Charlie was ingenious. The enemy would place an American hand grenade—they seemed to have an ample supply of these—in a can, pull the pin on it, and release the spoon so that it was held in place by the inside of the can. It was then balanced on top of a door. When the door was opened the can would fall and the grenade would spill out and explode. When the marines found a body they would look for ID cards and, if the dead soldier had a pack, they would send it back to the command post. Fear of traps generated strict orders against moving bodies or searching equipment further. Grunts, who tended to be souvenir hounds, sometimes learned the hard way to obey these orders, but they learned.

Danger did not deter the most avid hunters. Hastings Rigolette was so eager to collect trophies that he sometimes had to be restrained from running out to downed enemy soldiers under fire. In one house he found two beautiful elephant tusks and a bureau he thought was gorgeous. Rigolette came from a family that appreciated beautiful things; his father was a jeweler and model maker. In Phu Bai he had a duffel bag full of things he was planning to take home. He coveted the tusks and bureau, but they were much too big to carry off. So he searched the drawers. He found a very nice heavy blue work shirt that fitted. He put it on right away. It got chilly at night in Hue, and he had only a damp, soiled T-shirt under his flak jacket. He was wearing the work shirt a few days later when he got shredded by thirty-three pieces of shrapnel, and he would still have it almost a half century later, although he had grown wider and it no longer fitted comfortably. Still, he put it on sometimes to see if the holes still lined up with his scars.

Some things found in the houses stayed with marines in other ways. Eden Jimenez was clearing rooms, tossing in grenades, waiting for the blast, then racing inside shooting for all he was worth. He entered one room this way that was empty except for a tall old wardrobe, which he had filled with holes. He opened it gingerly, and inside found a young woman, whom he had mortally wounded, who was holding a baby and a rifle. One of Jimenez’s rounds had pierced her throat. She was bleeding and choking to death, and soon died, still holding the baby, which was miraculously unscathed. He handed the child off and it was passed to the rear. When he was on old man, living in Odessa, Texas, he still wondered almost every day about that woman and child. Why was she holding a rifle? Did she think that was going to protect her? Did she think that no one would look inside the wardrobe? Who was she? How would he have felt if he had killed the baby, too? What ever happened to it? Should he have looked before shooting into the wardrobe? These things turned over and over in his mind and gave him a sick feeling.

Bill Ehrhart was clearing a room when he noticed legs sticking out from under a table. He leaned over for a look and found a young couple, or perhaps a brother and sister, who had clearly pulled the table away from the window and crawled under it to take cover. They had been dead a while. Their faces were so bloated that they were no longer even recognizable as human.

The marines were always learning. The 106 crews found they could collapse a house with a single shot by placing the round directly over the front door, where it would shatter the structure’s main supports. Men providing covering fire learned that it was smarter to aim at window frames than to shoot through the windows. A round that passed through a window—none had glass in them anymore—would hit against a back wall, but those that clipped the edges sent bits of stone and metal flying in all directions. Sometimes the impact would alter the bullet’s trajectory, and it would hit someone hiding off to the side or below the bottom of the frame. Hard as it was, Captain Downs learned to postpone retrieving fallen men from the street until he had taken the opposite house or yard. When they attacked a building, they learned to cover all predictable points of exit before beginning their assault. Marines would compete for dibs to display their marksmanship. On the first day of the sweep, Alpha Company’s Josef Burghardt had calmly knocked down four enemy soldiers with four shots as they fled the west building in the Jeanne d’Arc School complex.34

Not often, but every once in a while, they got the drop on the enemy. Lieutenant Michael McNeil’s men took eight prisoners in one building. Most dropped their weapons and threw their hands up when they were cornered. One did not go as easily. He was a sniper in an NVA uniform who had two rifles—Soviet SKS and an American M-1—and eight grenades. With McNeil pointing a Thompson submachine gun in his face, the sniper lunged at a marine and tried to pull a grenade off his ammo belt. He was wrestled to the ground and his hands were tied behind his back. The prisoner fought all the way as several marines carried him down the steps.35 They would have admired such fight in one of their own, but dismissed the enemy’s as fanaticism.

“It has been a real bear,” Colonel Hughes told Roberts on Monday, February 5. “But we are making progress.”

The Timesman’s story that day said that the marines had made the most progress yet. The wedge-shaped section of the city they now controlled covered less than one square mile. He reported that thirty had been killed and more than two hundred wounded, twenty-four more that day.36

Marines were now spread out down Le Loi Street. One group bivouacked in a museum. When Roberts stopped in they were playing at swordfighting with ancient ornate pikes that were part of the collection, and were knocking over vases and other items from its displays. Those who took back the radio station spun records. There were 45-rpm discs with two tracks, often by different artists, on each side. Over the eerily lit urban landscape floated choruses of the Righteous Brothers’ “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’” and the Beatles’ hopeful “All You Need Is Love.”

Evacuations and supplies now depended exclusively on the boat ramp and LZ. An attempt to set up a pontoon bridge to replace the downed An Cuu Bridge at the triangle’s southern tip had been driven back, so the road to Phu Bai remained cut. Three marine officers, Major O. K. Steele and Lieutenants Allen Courtney and Peter Pace, swam across the Phu Cam Canal on Wednesday night with seventy-five much-needed replacements. Steele had arrived to replace Salvati, Courtney was joining Ray Smith’s Alpha Company, and Pace joined Golf Company.

Both sides struggled with the throngs of displaced civilians. The blocks between the treasury and the canal were densely populated. When Cheatham had told reporter John Laurence that he considered anyone before him to be “Charlie,” he had neglected to consider this. Many civilians were right in his path, and his regular pounding with mortars had turned hiding into Russian roulette. A direct hit on a house or shelter with civilians inside was catastrophic. So as the line of fighting moved toward them, people calculated the risk. When the danger of staying undercover was judged greater than running, they ran. Civilians seized any opening to race across a contested street, even when they weren’t sure which way would lead to safety. Hoang found them useful sometimes. Their presence would sometimes slow and confuse the marines.

With the marines advancing in an orderly way, the fighting had at last assumed a recognizable pattern. Refugees figured out that the safest place in the city was anywhere behind the marines, but getting there was extremely hazardous. While American policy was to protect and help civilians, in the heat of a fight many grunts, tired and angry and frightened, saw any Vietnamese as a potential threat. The refugees came running toward the American lines in abject terror, clinging to each other, carrying crying babies. Stories spread among the marines of civilians dropping grenades as they flowed past, which made them suspect everyone Vietnamese, and less likely to hold their fire when surprised. They had seen plenty of enemy fighters dressed in civilian clothes—indeed, many of the fighters had been freed from the prison just days earlier. Telling the difference between an innocent and a combatant in a few tense seconds wasn’t easy, and the wrong choice was often fatal. Images captured by the photographers documenting the fight showed dead civilians, or apparent civilians, in almost every frame.

On Monday night, as Hotel Company was securing its perimeter, Christmas got a radio call from Lieutenant Ken Kromer, his forward platoon leader.

“Sir, we have five or six civilians across the street who want to pass through our lines,” Kromer said. He wanted permission to send a squad across the street to escort them.

Christmas knew that his men were visible to enemy troops across the street, but a platoon from Golf Company was on their right flank and could provide covering fire if needed. How long could it take to get five or six people across? Just then the platoon leader called back to say that there were actually closer to twenty-five civilians.

“Fine, let’s get them back,” Christmas told him.

A few minutes later Kromer called to say that as soon as the squad had started across they had come under fire—none were hit—and that “several hundred” civilians had come running through their lines. This prompted immediate fears that there might be enemy fighters among them. On this occasion the escapees included five Americans who had been in hiding. Brought to the captain, they were pleased to explain the number and location of enemy forces his men would face the next day.

At the university, bodies were wrapped in blankets or sheets and interred in shallow graves. The living, like Jim Bullington’s fiancée Tuy-Cam and her family, remained confined to cramped spaces inside and in the courtyard alongside Cheatham’s mortar battery. Water and food were scarce, and there were no toilets or latrines. Conditions were shockingly bad. People worked to make the best of it. Lines were strung from tree to tree to hang laundry for families who found enough water to clean their clothes. For most, leaving was not an option. Their homes had been destroyed and it was too dangerous to venture out. Some civilians nevertheless braved the streets to make furtive nighttime visits to the ruins of their homes to scavenge for food, clothing, and supplies. Some died in the effort. Wood from destroyed buildings was used to keep cooking fires burning. Stray ducks were prized catches; served with rice, one would provide meals for an entire family for two days. Hunger spread. The marines were kept supplied with C rations, but the supply wasn’t big enough to feed all the civilians, who grew increasingly desperate.

One evening Bill Ehrhart and his buddies were approached by a fellow marine with a proposition: “Anybody wanna get laid tonight?”

A woman trapped with the other refugees at the university had offered to have sex with anyone who would pay for it with a C-ration meal. There was no shortage of takers. A mortar crew by the river had agreed to let them use their gun pit. Only one of the men in Ehrhart’s squad opted out.

He went along. He was eighteen. Two years earlier he had been an honor student at his high school in Perkasie, Pennsylvania, and had written an editorial in the school newspaper about the war. At its conclusion, he wrote, “As long as the Vietcong or any other subversive influences exist, there can never be a free country in South Vietnam. This, then, is the cause for which so many Americans have lost their lives. To those of you who feel that these boys are dying for no good reason, we say this: ‘What more noble a cause can a man die for, than to die in defense of freedom?’” Ehrhart felt strongly enough about this noble cause that he enlisted. His idealism and his clear statement of principle had prompted the Perkasie News-Herald and Quakertown Free Press to print stories about him. He had been photographed with his recruiter and his girlfriend standing in front of his school.37 Now he lined up—to his lasting shame—for his turn taking advantage of a hungry, desperate Vietnamese woman, probably trying to feed her family. She did not appear to be a prostitute—the marines were familiar with those. She was nicely dressed, and seemed grimly resigned. She removed dark silk pants and lay on a piece of cardboard, grunting quietly as one by one the men placed down their C-ration package and then entered her.38

Some of the grunts hardly considered the Vietnamese human, much less deserving of sympathy. Corporal Jim Soukup, for instance, part of a 106 crew, had nothing but scorn for the whole country, which he would refer to as “that stinking blood-soaked shithole.” He had a slogan written on the back of his flak jacket, Try Your Luck, Charlie, and like everyone else was counting down the final weeks of his deployment. He referred to all Vietnamese as “dinks” and viewed every one as a potential threat.39 He and others were certain that among the throngs of refugees were Front fighters who had thrown down their weapons and joined the multitude. It was impossible to vet them all. Soukup’s was not an attitude conducive to rescuing trapped and frightened civilians. A radioman at Cheatham’s command post told marine correspondent Steve Berntson that he stopped one platoon from shooting two figures moving toward them on the street one night during a heavy rain. The radioman told them to hold their fire until he could check out the figures for himself. He found an old woman helping a very pregnant younger woman, in labor, down the street to safety. They were shown to a corpsman, who had seen births only in a training film, but never­theless helped deliver the woman’s baby, a girl.

The radioman asked Berntson, “What if I had told them to fire?”

As the sweep proceeded, Christmas climbed into the attics of houses to direct the mortar battery. On the first days the mortars in the courtyard had to fire rounds almost straight up because the enemy was just across the street. As the distance between Hue University and the front line grew, the angle of the tubes lowered, but it was still difficult to aim precisely. To avoid dropping mortars on his own men, Christmas looked for good vantage points to help direct them. When he couldn’t find one, he had to aim by ear. Once he recognized the enemy’s pattern, holding the line and then quickly falling back two blocks, he would try to aim the mortars to shell them on their way out.

Part of the job of preparing for each day’s advance was to position the all-important 106s. A four-man gun crew led by Soukup took two vehicles off the street, an orange Chevy pickup and a black sedan. When they found a suitable firing position for the gun, they would drive it there in the car, followed by the pickup, which carried two of Soukup’s team. They would then wrestle the gun out and carry it to the spot, setting it up on its heavy tripod. If they had no prearranged spot, they’d set it up on its stand in the back of the pickup and use it as a mobile firing platform, with one man driving the sedan. When they weren’t using the vehicles for this purpose, they used them to collect the wounded and carry them to the rear.

It was dangerous work, because once the 106 was fired, its location was known to the enemy. One day all four men assigned to the gun were hit. Two rockets landed on their firing position. One was killed instantly; the blast took off most of his head. The three others were wounded and evacuated.40

Individual marines never had a clear picture of what was going on, just that they kept moving from building to building, from point to point. Often they could not even tell if they were advancing or retreating. They took a building, cleared it, moved in a fire team to hold it, and then moved on to do it all over again. They kept getting shot at, they kept shooting back, and the men around them kept falling. Eddie Neas, a nineteen-year-old corporal from Brooklyn with Lieutenant Smith’s company, just attached himself to his platoon sergeant, sure-shot Burghardt, and followed him everywhere. Neas was nicknamed “Alfie,” because guys thought he looked like Mad magazine’s Alfred E. Neuman. He didn’t think he did, but the name stuck. He wrote it on his helmet. Two of his friends had been killed, one shot through the head, and a third who he thought was dead would later turn out to have survived. Neas’s biggest fear was having to engage in hand-to-hand combat. He was small and did not like the idea of having to fight someone to the death, stabbing with his bayonet, so, determined to do all his fighting with his rifle, he loaded himself down with twenty-­eight magazines of ammo. He considered himself a marksman. When there was a lull in the shooting he practiced. On the day his platoon helped take the high school he had shot two chickens. One he got on the first try. The second one took two. He had seen horrible things. He had seen a dead NVA soldier with hugely swollen testicles whose eyeballs were hanging from their sockets. He had seen rats and dogs chewing on corpses in the street. He started shooting at every dog he saw. When he got a chance to close his eyes he slept with one hand closed around his rifle. He found lots of good things in the houses they occupied—liquor, radios, books, TVs—but there was no sense trying to carry anything off, as weighted down as he was. He lugged himself and his rifle and all his ammo wherever he was told to go, keeping low when he passed a window, running zigzag across open spaces, always looking for things to shoot.

Some marines seemed to thrill at the danger. Paul Tinson, a popular black sergeant who had taken over Lieutenant “Wrong Way Go Far” Horner’s platoon after Horner was wounded in Fox Company’s first day of fighting, dubbed his platoon “Tinson’s Terrors.” They all shaved their heads into Mohawk haircuts. With some men there was a competition to take risks.

All three of Cheatham’s young captains, Downs, Christmas, and Meadows, stayed close to the fighting, but far enough behind to maintain control. It was a confusing battle space. With so many armed, frightened, pumped-up men moving in a relatively small area, sometimes inside a single building, there was always worry that two marine squads would happen upon each other and start shooting. Somebody had to stay back and work to keep order, staying in touch with the adjacent companies in order to coordinate movement. Visibility was poor and communications were iffy. They had military-grade maps of Hue, but the standard scale in Vietnam was 1:50,000 (one centimeter on the map equaled 50,000 centimeters), which was nowhere near detailed enough for close-in urban combat. Cheatham started the battle with a tourist map from a gas station. After a few days some of the commanders got 1:12,500 scale maps. These had a very helpful numbered index of the main buildings, but when they got down to it, in the confusion of a gunfight, explaining exactly where they were was hard.

“Hey, I’m in the pink building,” Christmas would say.

“That’s fine, I’m over here in a green building,” Downs would answer.

Meadows would come on the radio with, “Good! I’m in the brown building!”

Cheatham would growl into their radios, “Where the hell are the green, pink, and brown buildings? Be advised, all the buildings on my map are black.”41

There was competition among the three to keep up with one another, and they joked about which was Cheatham’s favorite.42 When they took the hospital on Monday, the fifth, a complex that took up a very large city block, Christmas’s company was dealt the contagion ward, which, they agreed, settled which was the colonel’s least favorite.

Downs was summoned by Tinson’s platoon to a nearby building, where he found two Vietnamese men spread eagle against the wall.

“Sir, this guy says he’s the mayor of Hue,” said Tinson.

The man turned out to be Lieutenant Colonel Pham Van Khoa, who actually was both the Mayor of Hue and the Thua Thien Province chief. He and his bodyguards had been hiding in the building’s attic for days.

The hospital, prison, and the province headquarters were the last big buildings to be taken on the sweep. Downs’s company lost twelve men the next day, attacking additional hospital buildings south of the prison walls. Among them was Tinson. Six others were wounded.

Berntson, the “Storyteller,” walked through the hospital after it had been fully secured. The halls and rooms reeked of death. He had given up writing stories for the time being. Since he was not attached to any of the combat units, he could have gone back to Phu Bai if he wished. But he felt compelled to fight. For the first few days he had helped carry the wounded and deliver ammunition, but then had walked back to the compound and picked up a rifle and ammo. Just as he was moved by the bravery of the enemy, he admired the courage of his fellow marines. Several days into the battle it was hard to find one who had not been wounded. Many just patched themselves up and kept going. Only the most severe cases were evacuated.

From inside the hospital, Captain Meadows of Golf Company gazed down in wonder at the prison walls a block over. On the first day of the battle, after his men had been cut to pieces attempting a foolhardy attack across the bridge on the Citadel, he had been ordered to take those he had left to assault the prison. It had taken Cheatham three reinforced companies, including Meadows’s, and three days of intense combat to get that far. The original order had been insane.

The last objective on the advance down Le Loi Street was the province headquarters building. The Alliance flag still flew over it. The complex was surrounded by a stone wall and a fence, which enclosed a big courtyard. The main stone building had two tall stories and was L-shaped, angling around the courtyard that faced north, toward the river. Behind it was a Catholic school, another large, solid structure. Both buildings were heavily fortified, with machine-gun positions in every window on both floors and another on the capitol building’s porch, which could sweep the entire front courtyard. The first group of Christmas’s men who tried to cross it from the outer wall to the main building found themselves fired upon from all directions, even from behind—from spider holes along the inside of the courtyard wall.

The Americans fell back. Christmas was plotting Hotel Company’s next move when an errant truck filled with replacements blundered past his position and into a driveway before the main building. The enemy soldiers inside slammed the truck with machine-gun fire, and the driver, when he realized his mistake, threw the truck into reverse and backed to safety. But in his haste he left two wounded marines on the street. One managed to scoot on his back to a hedge, despite a severe chest wound, and was pulled to safety, but the other lay in the open.

Walter Kaczmarek, a private who was called “Chief,” was ordered to go get him. Terrified but obedient, he started out by crawling on his stomach, but stopped when a bullet sent a chip of brick into his face, under his left eye. He crawled back, bleeding, but the chip was pulled out and the wound was little more than a scratch. He was deeply disappointed. This meant he’d have to go back out. And so he did, crawling behind a metal door, only to have a round puncture it. The bullet passed close enough to his hand, which had been resting on the door. It stung him badly, but, once again, he looked down and saw no blood. He was hurt but not wounded. He moved along the hedge to a point as close to the downed marine as he could get, set his weapon down, stripped off his ammo belts, and made a mad dash out, throwing himself down beside him. For a moment, the shooting stopped.

The wounded man said he had been shot in the chest. Every time he moved, the shooting started up again. Kaczmarek tried to calm him and then yanked his arm to pull him toward the hedge—this evoked a howl of pain from the wounded man. Kaczmarek let go and dived again for cover. He was amazed that he had not been hit, and decided that under no circumstances was he going to step out into the open again. He had pulled the wounded marine close enough so that he could reach out from the hedge and grab the collar of his flak jacket. He counted to three, jumped up, and pulled the man to cover. When he tore open the man’s jacket, looking for a bullet hole, he found none. He was so angry that he was ready to strike the man, until a medic, taking over, quickly diagnosed a shattered collarbone—which explained the agony when Kaczmarek had pulled on his arm. The round had been deflected by his flak jacket, but the impact had done painful damage.43

Christmas tried an Ontos—the men had taken to calling it the “Frankenmobile.” It came rolling up Le Loi Street toward the front gate. The idea was to blast a hole in the front of the building away from the heavily defended front door. But as it prepared to fire, the vehicle was hit squarely in the front by a rocket. It started smoking. It was still in gear but no longer being steered, so it ran up against the complex’s outer wall and got stuck. The treads kept turning in place. The back hatch opened and the gunner and driver dragged themselves out, faces black with smoke and grime, both bleeding from the ears and nose. A corpsman and several marines braved the fire to pull them to cover. The Ontos just kept churning, jammed against the wall, its treads grinding away, its motor running, an annoying symbol of futility. Finally one of the marines ran to it, climbed inside, and turned it off.

So that had failed. Christmas got on the radio and explained his predicament to Cheatham, who sent up a mule-mounted 106, and an E8 gas launcher, which enveloped the building in a cloud of tear gas. Instead of attacking from the front, the marines now eyed a small outbuilding to the side, from which they could approach the main building across a narrower portion of the courtyard. The 106 blasted a hole in the main building’s wall. Wind from the river quickly dispersed the gas, but that and the big gun enabled the lead group to make it from the outbuilding to the hole in the wall.

Leading the way in was Kaczmarek, who had been knocked unconscious briefly by the back blast from the 106 and was still unsteady. Wearing a gas mask and unable to see clearly, he entered headfirst, tripping over rubble in the doorway. The rest of the platoon piled in right on top of him. When he looked up he saw enemy soldiers retreating down a hallway to his left and firing back.

An intense indoor firefight ensued, with the marines battling on the ground floor toward the main entrance. The building rang with explosions and gunfire. Clearing of the building ensued, kicking doors, grenades, and gunfire. Outside, men poured fire into the spider holes. Berntson helped drag wounded marines out to the front portico.

A voice cried out, “First floor clear!”

The gunfight then moved upstairs. Lieutenant Hoang had been using the building as his headquarters. He and his staff cleared out.

As the grunts spread out into the building, they found once again that the enemy had melted away. Cheatham sent every available marine from his command post to help with the methodical search of the large building. By dusk it was theirs.

When the search was over, the men moved methodically down the row of spider holes. One by one they kicked them open and shot down into them. The dead fighters were then dragged limp to a growing line in the center of the courtyard. One of them managed to get his hands up before being shot. He was wounded, but not badly. Berntson provided a sock, which was used to blindfold him, and listened while he was interrogated—a CBS camera crew had an interpreter. The man protested that he was neither NVA nor VC. He had been a prisoner, he said, and when he was freed he had been given a rifle and ordered to fight. He said they put a soldier in the hole next to his, so if he had tried to escape he would have been shot. It was a good story. It might have been true.

Cheatham called a halt to the advance at that point. It was Tuesday night, February 6. Five blocks beyond the province headquarters were the canal and some apartment buildings that the enemy still held. But for the moment the battalion rested. Many of the grunts in his battalion had been fighting constantly for six days. The colonel’s orders had been threefold: (1) destroy as many of the enemy as possible; (2) keep your own casualties to a minimum; (3) spare as much of the city from destruction as is humanly possible. The battalion had done its best with the first two but had failed at the third. Behind them was a swath of ruin almost eight blocks wide.

“Some South Vietnamese are complaining about the damage to their buildings,” army lieutenant colonel Howard Moon told Roberts back at the compound, “but I have no sympathy—not after I’ve seen what happened to the marines. There have been times when the wounded and the dying have been coming in here every two or three minutes. The marines don’t know how to quit. If you can save a marine by destroying a house to get at Charlie, then I say destroy the house.”44

That had been the rule. Every house and building behind them had its windows blown out and doors torn off. Roofs had caved in. The contents of homes and offices were strewn everywhere. Huge chunks of masonry and stone were scattered in yards and streets. There were big holes in the walls around the structures and in the structures themselves. There were bodies and pieces of bodies, dead civilians and Front soldiers in varying degrees of decay. Hungry dogs roamed. The marines and the Front both removed their dead and wounded when they could—in this the marines had the advantage; they now controlled the ground they took. But dead civilians tended to stay on the streets and rot. There was one that had been killed riding a scooter. It had come to rest upright, and the corpse sat there unattended, day after day, slowly decomposing.

That night the first two Mike Boats45 from Da Nang slid into the boat ramp in Doc Lao Park, delivering a three-day supply of ammo and supplies. There was still a lot of fighting left in southern Hue, but the worst was over. ARVN forces were at a standstill inside the Citadel, holding the north wall and its four gates, but unable to make much progress into the crowded urban neighborhoods and the royal palace grounds to the south. The big flag flying across the river from Cheatham’s position was a reminder that the marines’ work had just begun.

Lieutenant Hoang’s force had not been destroyed. He had taken losses, but the strategy he’d adopted had preserved most of his men. With the province headquarters gone, he fell back to positions along the river. Cheatham would pivot southeast now and fight them along the canal. Hoang had no intention of withdrawing. They got help from city residents, who brought them food. Nuns at the Catholic churches took in their wounded. As far he was concerned, his men had a lot more fight in them.

Roberts’s story in the New York Times on Wednesday morning, February 7, summed up what had been accomplished in the first week:

Marines Advance in Hue

14 More Blocks Retaken

Hue, South Vietnam, Feb. 6—United States marines recaptured the provincial capital building today and added 14 more blocks to their growing foothold in this historical city . . .

Their advances were the best in seven consecutive days of fighting . . . Before dusk [they] hauled down the Vietcong flag. The enemy flag continued to fly over the Imperial Palace and over a captured police observation post on a hill on the edge of the city.

According to some intelligence reports received by military advisors here, the Vietcong claim a great psychological victory in Hue. They had planned to hold this city for at least one week, they say, a mission that was accomplished today.

Enemy casualties have been high. Bodies of Vietcong and North Vietnamese soldiers can be seen at almost all the scores of buildings the marines have taken. Marine and South Vietnamese Army spokesmen now say that more than half of the 2,000 to 2,500 enemy soldiers have been killed.

Roberts was told, incorrectly, that the number of American casualties, army and marines, was fifty dead and two hundred and fifty wounded.46 He reported that there were now thousands of refugees at Hue University—“As many as 150 to a classroom.”

“It is difficult to walk in the university building without stepping on a child,” he wrote. “Outside, on the campus lawn, hundreds of refugees huddle under trees and cluster around one well, sometimes waiting an hour to lower a bucket or pot into the water. At the corner of one building this morning, a family stood in the drizzling rain, holding a funeral service.”

Images of the destruction and death in Hue were having a sobering impact in the United States. Columnist James Reston summed it up: “Here is the dilemma of our military strategy of victory. How do we win by military force without destroying what we are trying to save? The battle is so fierce and the situation so solemn that the impulse to rally round is very strong, but the mind boggles at the paradox of tearing apart what we have undertaken to defend.”47

These were questions above the pay grade of Berntson, the Storyteller, who sought out Christmas early Tuesday evening to interview him about the day’s events. The tall captain with the scar across his cheek had bloodshot eyes and seemed exhausted. He told Berntson the story of taking down the flag and raising the Stars and Stripes before the province headquarters. It was a good one. The marine correspondent found a hole behind the headquarters building with concrete on three sides and climbed into it with two other grunts. One of them pulled out a can of food, which they shared. Then he took out his tattered correspondent’s notebook and began scribbling down notes from the day, bits and pieces he wanted to remember for a story he would write later, quotes from the men involved, descriptions of the scene, names, numbers, details:

“Battle for Provincial Building. H 2/5 [Hotel Company] spearhead . . . support G2/5 [Golf Company] . . . attack on NVA stronghold in Hue . . . building taken—NVA flag lowered—US raised.”

The flag story is important, Berntson thought. Before the assault was over, Christmas had sent Frank Thomas, his gunnery sergeant, to find an American flag. He knew it was against the rules. This was a war on behalf of the Republic of Vietnam, and the correct flag to run up the pole at its province headquarters would have been Saigon’s yellow and red ensign. But Christmas’s men had bled and died all the way across southern Hue, not ARVN troops. They had looked up at that enemy flag the whole way. They had taken it down, and they wanted to show who had done it. The Stars and Stripes had earned its place.

Berntson continued jotting down Christmas’s words:

“‘Proudest moment of my life—to be given opp to do it’ . . . ‘main thought was getting the flag up—so it would fly and everyone could see that flag flying’ . . . Capt. Ron Christmas, 27, 2001 S.W. 36th Ave, Fort Lauderdale, FLA CO for 2/5 Hotel . . . ‘street fighting is dirtiest close in. Biggest problem is control—keeping all platoons in line—­communication also problem . . . platoons have done extremely well . . . flag. ‘inspiration thing I have ever seen in my ­lifetime—because it was a hard thing. That feeling of patriotism . . . all you could hear are cheers . . . really brings out America Spirit.’”

Hours later, Christmas was paid a visit by two officers, both majors, one army and the other marine. They had been sent by Colonel Hughes from the compound. They said the American flag would have to come down. The South Vietnamese flag was the appropriate one.

The men around Christmas were still loading up the wounded and dead.

“I don’t think my men are going to like that,” he said.

“That doesn’t make any difference,” said one. “You are violating protocol.”

“Well, I’ll tell you what,” said Christmas. “If you want to take the flag down, you guys go take it down. But I cannot be responsible for all of my men.”

Kaczmarek, who was sitting close enough to overhear the exchange, chose that moment to reposition his rifle. The majors left. The flag remained. Christmas had a gunny sergeant haul it down at sunset, and the next morning a bright yellow South Vietnamese flag flew in its place.

But watching Old Glory run up that afternoon was a sight none of the marines who witnessed it would ever regret, or forget.