6

Fuck Him,
He’s for the Other Side

THREE DAYS AFTER the marines took back the province headquarters, the last and most symbolic of the major structures along Le Loi Street, Gene Roberts left Hue, replaced by his colleague Charles Mohr. Roberts’s reporting had been the first and best from the front lines in the city, and he had stayed with the effort through the critical first eight days. Two days before his departure, Wednesday February 7, still dictating over the phone, he reported on substantial progress and also some of the ways marines were adapting to their urban battlefield.

Marine Squad Rides to Battle on Motorcycles

Enemy Driven Out
of a 70-Block Area
in Battle for Hue

Hue, South Vietnam, Feb. 7—Capt. Bacel Winstead of Hot Springs, Ark., gazed out on the debris-littered street of this embattled city today and shook his head in wonder.

“The American military is the damnedest military in the world,” said the captain, who is a United States Army adviser to South Vietnamese troops. “Just look out there.”

Down the street came a squad of marines zipping off to battle on red, blue and yellow Honda motorcycles they had “liberated” from recaptured middle-class homes.

Each marine had one hand on a handlebar and the other around an M-16 automatic rifle. Full field packs, complete with blanket rolls and entrenching tools, hung from their shoulders . . . With the motorcycles and battered civilian cars, the marines intend to recapture large areas of enemy-held territory.

They held about 70 city blocks tonight on the south side of the Huong River compared with about 30 blocks yesterday. This leaves a little more than a third of the southwest side of this city of 145,000 in enemy-hands.

On the north side of the river, where eight South Vietnamese battalions are fighting, the battle for Hue was going more slowly.

The story featured an Associated Press photo of a marine bent under an enormous pack, riding a small motorcycle. Roberts reported that the marines had now suffered two hundred and fifty casualties. Officially, they reported having killed a thousand enemy soldiers, but the number was the usual amped-up guesswork. The marines still in the fight, Roberts wrote, “are bearded, dirty and tired. Today a marine ‘liberated’ a case of pastel-colored pocket combs and passed them around to members of his platoon. ‘Damn!’ one of them said. ‘This is the first time I’ve combed my hair for weeks.’”56

The city was still socked in with gray clouds and misty rain, wet by day and cold at night. The low cloud ceiling and poor visibility still made air attacks infrequent, although South Vietnamese bombers managed to slip underneath and drop two dozen five-hundred-pounders on enemy positions inside the Citadel—positions that included thousands of civilians. Even though he now had more freedom to maneuver, Lieutenant Hoang was keeping to his strategy on the south side, holding his enemy “by the belt,” which made it all but impossible for artillery from Phu Bai to zero in on his forces.

Colonel Gravel’s battalion was reinforced by additional marines by boat—the marines in fresh fatigues and full backpacks Roberts had seen were part of this influx. On Saturday they would fight their way into the soccer stadium, the largest structure in the northwest corner of the triangle. This provided a second, better-protected LZ and another, bigger place to put the ever-growing crowds of needy refugees.

Roberts slipped out on Friday. Going by road was out of the question. The last convoy to attempt the drive from Phu Bai had been hit hard. Twenty marines had been killed, thirty-nine more wounded, and all of the vehicles had either been destroyed or turned back. The weather had slowed helicopter traffic to a trickle, and the few that made it quickly filled with severely wounded marines. So the reporter queued up with a crowd of evacuees before a Mike Boat when it berthed at the boat ramp.

The gray metal vessels were now making regular runs past the guns on both sides of the river. Each would ease up to the concrete slab that angled down into the water and lower its wide bow to unload. Behind the vessel was the great steelwork of Truong Tien Bridge, bent down sharply at the middle into the river, the city’s broken spine. The Front had finally managed to drop it on Wednesday, the seventh. At its far side green-uniformed Front soldiers could be seen manning bunkers and moving in the streets. They lobbed mortars across the water, trying to hit the boats. This and the occasional sniper rounds from buildings to the south made it daring to wait by the ramp. The incoming marines disembarked at a run, crouching. They were directed toward designated reception points across Le Loi Street. Off-loading of supplies then commenced, one hundred and fifty tons of ammo on pallets, along with stacked boxes of C rations, medical supplies, and other necessities. Marines worked rapidly with forklifts, ignoring the occasional gunshots that cracked overhead or slapped into the water. Mortar shells sometimes came close. When one hurled up dirt and shrapnel, a Filipino woman, wife of an American adviser, scooped up her five-year-old and hid behind a pallet of C rations. There were about fifty people waiting to board, including wounded marines on stretchers and those still upright, grungy and tired in their bloodstained fatigues and bandages—most had been hit in the arms, hands, legs, or feet. Theirs were not life-threatening wounds, but many were stiff, swollen, and painful. Navy crewmen warned them and the civilians that they would be safer waiting back at the compound, but the Mike Boats tended not to linger, and those waiting feared missing their chance if they moved. No one left.

Roberts watched with his usual air of quiet detachment. The woman holding the child told him in a low voice, “We’ve been through so much these last nine days, it wouldn’t seem fair if something happened to my son now.”

“The only thing we can do now is hope the bastards are lousy shots,” said one of the wounded. He sat lounging against a packing case smoking a cigarette. “There ain’t no place to hide.”

He was right. A direct hit on any of the ammo pallets would probably have killed them all. But the mortars kept missing. Two fell in the river, “kicking up small geysers of water,” Roberts wrote. One hit a packing crate at a distance from where the passengers waited. When it came time to board, women, children, and the stretcher-borne wounded went first. The walking wounded and other passengers were an interesting mix. Among them were two priests who had been held by the Front and then released, several South Vietnamese physicians (who had been searched carefully before being allowed to board), and a six-man team from the International Control Commission (ICC). This was a UN-sponsored group made up of volunteers from Poland, Canada, and India, who were there to monitor adherence to the Geneva Accords, which governed treatment of prisoners and civilians. The ICC teams were always careful to include members with opposing sympathies in the war—the Canadians leaned toward their US cousins and South Vietnam, the Soviet bloc Poles toward Hanoi, and the Indians were hard to read. This delegation had been discovered by marines the day before after hiding in their headquarters for a week. One of the members, Indian colonel G. D. Joshi, said that the Front had rocketed their building and “shot it up with mortars and rifles,” but had backed off when informed who they were. Joining them was David Greenway, a reporter for Time.

None of the passengers relaxed until the boat pulled away and began moving downriver, but their relief was short-lived. As soon as the destroyed bridge receded, gunfire picked up from both banks. Enemy soldiers could be seen jumping up to shoot rockets at them. The river flowed past the south wall of the Citadel and bent north as it approached Hen Island, a long sliver of land at the center of the Huong, which divided the flow into two greatly narrowed forks. The shores were three times closer no matter which way you went. Both banks were controlled by the Front.

“If you’ve got weapons, you ought to get them ready,” a crewman announced ominously. “It will be a miracle if we don’t have to use them.”

As they entered the fork, shooting did become more intense. A small patrol boat behind them was hit by a rocket and sank. Bright red tracer rounds cracked overhead and the wounded marines attempted to fire back. Some bit at the bandages on their hands to free their fingers. One who could not manage to pull the trigger on his rifle handed it to another who could. The petty officer skippering the boat called for every man on board to grab a weapon, get to the rails, and return fire. Greenway did as instructed, shooting blindly at the riverbanks first from one side and then the other. Roberts refused—journalists were not supposed to be combatants.57

The boat seemed to be just inching downriver.

One of the ICC men asked, “Is this boat moving at all?”

It took hours to reach the South China Sea. Most of the shooting stopped about a half hour after they slipped past the island and then left the Citadel behind. One of the Canadians, an army major, pulled out a bottle of Ambassador Scotch from under his jacket. He gave it to the marines, who passed it around eagerly, emptying it in four minutes—Roberts timed it. The Canadian then gave them another. He explained that he had passed by the Cercle Sportif on his way down Le Loi Street that morning and had liberated all the bottles he could carry. His jacket and cargo pants pockets were all heavy with them. After a while, Roberts and the marines and some of the other ICC members sat in a circle, passing around a bottle.

When they made the South China Sea, the vessel started bouncing and heaving. There were ten-foot swells. One of the Poles wandered over to the circle and asked the Canadian major in broken English if he had Dramamine (motion sickness) pills.

“I saw them on the bureau in your room,” he said.

“God, in all the haste I forgot to bring the Dramamine along,” the major said.

The Pole stumbled to the other side, hung his head over the rail, and vomited.

Then the major pulled a bottle of pills from one of his many pockets. He flipped it in his hand.

“Fuck him,” he said, gesturing toward the sick Pole. “He’s for the other side.”

Those with more seaworthy stomachs continued with the Scotch until late that night. Seven hours after they had started the fifty-­seven-mile voyage they slid up to a dock at Da Nang. The Filipino woman crossed a gangplank to the pier and then reached back to take her boy from one of the crewmen. She hugged him happily. “We’re here!” she said. “We’re here!”

Roberts didn’t realize how drunk he was until he stood up. He made his way to the edge, stepped off the boat, and missed the gangplank. His new friends fished him out of the drink.58