4

The First Annual
Hue City Turkey Shoot

THOMPSON WAS SO low on ammo and had taken so many casualties, and his men were so beaten down, that on Wednesday, February 14, he rested them. He was down to about half of his strength. Some of his men had not been fed for two days. The enemy remained dug in along Mai Thuc Loan Street, which the grunts had dubbed Rocket Alley. The enemy still held the Dong Ba Tower, which commanded the street. It was clear that before any progress could be made, the marines would have to take it. While there were now regular chopper flights from Phu Bai to southern Hue, hostile fire made it difficult to land in the Citadel. Because the wounded had the highest priority, they went out on the few that did. The dead were left behind, stacked in body bags like cordwood outside the battalion aid station.

The battalion used the relatively quiet day to regroup. Lieutenant Warr, who had lost his platoon in the disastrous first assault, was enormously relieved to leave his position on Rocket Alley. His appetite for the battle was gone. The weapons platoon he took over consisted of two mortar crews, ably led by an experienced gunnery sergeant, which suited Warr fine. He relegated himself to opening crates and keeping the teams supplied. He felt numb, as if he had been, he would later write, “immersed in a vat of novocain.”27 He suspected that his commander, Lieutenant Nelson, was aware of his mental state because Nelson kept looking at him funny. Warr didn’t care. Nelson could eyeball him all he wanted. As commander of the weapons platoon Warr had a radio, but no one called him. He later wrote, “It was just as well, because if anyone had asked my advice at that point, I’m certain that I would have been immediately charged with cowardice in the face of the enemy. I would have advised them all to withdraw, to leave this city in the hands of the enemy who obviously wanted it so badly, and to tell the goddamned politicians who had gotten us into this mess and then tied our hands behind our backs so securely to go fuck themselves.”28

The failure of Thompson’s first foray was reported by Thomas Johnson in Wednesday’s New York Times. “In their first ground battle in the northern part of Hue, an American Marine battalion advanced 500 yards today after meeting stiff resistance from enemy forces . . . ,” Johnson reported. “Marine casualty figures were not disclosed here, but there were estimates that at least 15 men had been killed and 40 wounded.”29

One consequence of the fiasco was that Thompson had a clear idea of what he was up against. His men weren’t going anywhere until he took the tower.

Steve Berntson, the marine combat correspondent, rode up that day from southern Hue with a boatload of reinforcements. A black marine from Philadelphia, who called himself “Philly Dog,”30 had spotted him in the MACV compound.

“Hey, Storyteller, you gonna go with us up the river?” he asked. He explained where they were going. He said, “We’re gonna kick the shit outta some gooks up there.”

Berntson knew that the Hue story was shifting north. On the southern side there were marines joyriding in cars they had hot-wired, and he’d heard about the tank crews racing inside the soccer stadium.

“There’s a bunch of ARVN up there and they ain’t done diddly shit,” said Philly Dog, “and they’re getting overrun all the time, and we’re going up there and take over their building for ’em.”

Philly Dog carried a “blooper,” an M79 grenade launcher. He sweetened the invitation for Berntson by getting him one, too, and on the ride up they sat on opposite sides of the junk and fired off rounds at the riverbanks.

When he arrived in the Citadel, the lull in the fighting gave him a chance to wander around looking for more stories. He had not been writing, but he had been filling his battered green notebook with names and interviews and observations, planning to pull some of them together when the battle was over. Picking his way through a flattened neighborhood controlled by the marines, he was drawn to the sound of rifle shots. It was not the crazy, hurried shooting typical of the fighting along the forward line, just an occasional volley of what sounded like four rifles. He found two snipers, spread out on the roof of a blue bus in the middle of the street, and two others leaning on its front fender.

“Hey, man,” said one of them, David Morales, cheerily. “Welcome to the First Annual Hue City Turkey Shoot!”

Far down the street there were bodies. Enemy soldiers would occasionally try to sprint from one side of the street to the other, giving the snipers targets, which, by the look of it, they hit frequently. Berntson jotted two of the names in his notebook, Morales and Eric Henshall, and watched as a small figure suddenly darted across the street. All four men fired, but the runner made it. Minutes later, three others darted across. One made it, another went down, and the third hesitated, turned around, and started back. He was shot down. Then two more soldiers ran out to recover the downed men, and one of them was shot.

“How long have you guys been doing this?” Berntson asked.

They said they’d been at it for hours. He wrote “3?” in his notebook.

“They just keep running back and forth,” said one of the marines. “They don’t fire at us. You want to take a shot?”

Berntson lifted his rifle and leaned against the fender. He tried to remember his firing discipline from boot camp, slow breath out . . . he held that pose, sighting straight over the bodies on the street, until his eyes started to water. Then another figure darted out . . . squeeze. He had neglected to put his rifle on single shot so the gun jumped and he emptied his magazine. The man made it across.

The snipers teased him about what a bad shot he was.

“You want another shot?” one asked him.

Berntson declined. “I’d only miss again.”

He left them wondering why the enemy, otherwise so smart, would keep exposing themselves like that.

He stopped to talk to Sergeant Tom Birch of Minneapolis, who three days earlier had passed his twenty-fourth birthday, his second in Vietnam. He had celebrated by washing his face, shaving, and brushing his teeth. He’d eaten a C-ration dinner of ham and eggs and beef and had shared a fruitcake from his wife and daughters. He told Berntson he planned to spend his twenty-fifth at home quietly, with a home-cooked meal.

During the lull in the fighting, General Truong flew down to Phu Bai to meet with South Vietnam’s vice president, Nguyen Cao Ky, who had come up from Saigon to confer with General Abrams. With him were General Cushman (the I Corps commander who had initially ordered his men to avoid destroying significant buildings in the city), and all of the rest of Task Force X-Ray’s top leaders. General LaHue briefed Ky on the battle. More than two weeks after the city had been taken, Hue finally had the full attention of Saigon and the MACV. Abrams told reporters after the meeting that Ky had characterized Hanoi’s effort in Hue as doomed, a demonstration of its willingness to sacrifice “thousands of men to win a slight political gain.” He also announced that Ky had accepted full responsibility for the destruction of churches, temples, pagodas, and other culturally significant structures in the city. There was no mention of civilians trapped by the fighting. Any restrictions on force levels were formally lifted—although the marines and ARVN had already done a fair job of destroying most of the city anyway.

When Truong returned he found his command beefed up with another seven hundred men, a full battalion of South Vietnamese forces led by Colonel Pham Van Dinh. The Hac Bao had its pick of these reinforcements. Lieutenant Tran Ngoc “Harry” Hue and Coolican were back in business with a force of 150.31 Pham’s men joined those fighting on the west side of the fortress, where progress had halted for days.

The Front still had about three battalions in the Citadel, just under two thousand men, but the growing strength and numbers of the allied effort had begun to tell. It was getting harder for the Communists to send troops into the fortress. On Friday night, February 16, an ARVN forward observer spotted a battalion-size Front force moving toward the Huu Gate. Alexander Wells, the marine battery’s forward observer, summoned an artillery bombardment that decimated it and killed a regimental commander. Radio intercepts later that evening overheard the enemy’s command center at La Chu refusing the replacement commander’s request to withdraw. He was ordered to proceed, with whatever men he had left, into the fortress to dig in and fight.32

Ten more days of heavy combat were ahead, and for the time being, Thompson’s battalion was stuck. His rate of progress was unacceptable to General LaHue, and it didn’t help that the major was requesting more men, ammo, and supplies. During one testy exchange on the radio, Thompson offered to resign. He was exhausted mentally and physically. At that point losing command would have been a relief. His offer was not accepted.