5

The Tower

LIFTING THE FORCE restrictions had little immediate impact on Thompson’s push. Until the weather changed, aerial bombardment was only occasionally possible. Naval gunfire, while it was enormously loud and impressive, arrived at a trajectory too low to be effective. Shells roared above the clouds over the east wall and flew straight across the fortress to explode against the west wall. Artillery batteries at Phu Bai and Gia Le, south and southeast of the city, had difficulty aiming. They had to place shells in front of Thompson’s line. They were good at shooting over the heads of their own men toward enemy positions beyond, but it was far more difficult to aim at their own troops and have the rounds fall slightly short. It was too risky.

The marines did what they could with what they had. They fired mortars, worked the 90-mm guns of the Patton tanks, and blasted away with the Ontos whenever they dared to bring it close to the enemy line. The tanks were so much in the thick of things that crew members were knocked silly by the force of the explosions against their armor. They came back unconscious, dazed, or dizzy, some so badly concussed that they had to be evacuated. Nearly all had headaches. It was to little avail; the enemy didn’t budge. Tanks aimed their big guns up at the Dong Ba Tower but succeeded only in obliterating its fancy masonry.

Thompson sought and received permission to call up his fourth company, Delta, commanded by Myron Harrington, a captain. It had been left in the triangle to assist with the continuing mop-up efforts there, in keeping with Task Force X-Ray’s estimation that Thompson ought to be able to do in days what General Truong had been unable to do in weeks. Now, having effectively lost one company, the major was allowed to bring the last of his rifle companies forward.

Harrington spent all day Wednesday trying to get his men upriver. The lead Mike Boat, which carried him and his command group and a few of his men, took such heavy fire from Hen Island that its navy skipper refused to make the return trip to pick up the others. It took hours to arrange for Swift Boats to pull South Vietnamese navy junks loaded with the rest of the men. Despite these delays, two of Delta’s platoons were at Mang Ca before dark. The final junks did not arrive until very early Thursday morning. Much to Harrington’s chagrin, a good portion of one of his platoons—twenty men—had been held back by Colonel Hughes to help with convoy security in the triangle. The captain had resisted. Given what Thompson had encountered on his first day, he felt the need inside the fortress was greater, but Hughes thought otherwise, and Harrington had lost that fight. Two of his platoons were under strength, and his third was still stuck back at the boat ramp. It would not arrive until the next day. But as soon as he checked in with Thompson, he was given the job of taking the tower first thing the next morning.

As he left the meeting, he told his radioman Steve Wilson, “Steve, hell is coming tomorrow. You’ve got to be ready.”

The captain was a trained and experienced infantryman, but he was new to combat. He had taken over Delta Company only weeks earlier, coming from a supply job, which had made his more experienced men wary. But he had impressed them. Days earlier he had pulled them back from chasing an enemy squad. “They may be leading us into an ambush,” Harrington had said. To his men, such prudence was a welcome sign. Their new captain had something they valued more than swagger. He solicited advice from his experienced men, listened to it, and acted on it. He also led from the front, exposing himself to the same risks his men faced.

That night he sought out Maury Whitmer, one of his squad leaders, a corporal six months into his second Vietnam tour. They had known each other for about three weeks. Whitmer was a slender, sandy-haired young man with a world-weary manner—when he’d told his father, a navy veteran, that he was going to join the marines, his old man had said, “It’s your life. If you want to fuck it up, fuck it up.” Not much bothered Whitmer. He had impressed Harrington with his poise and natural leadership; the other men looked up to him.

“We’re making a company attack first thing in the morning,” Harrington told him.

“A company attack?” said Whitmer. He reminded the captain that they did not have their full company.

“Yeah,” Harrington said. “I have to get up on this wall and attack this tower.”

“What tower?” Whitmer asked.

“I don’t know,” Harrington said. “I haven’t seen it. Alpha Company got hit hard out there. Bravo Company went to help them, and they took heavy casualties. Now it’s our turn. What do you need?”

“Men,” said Whitmer.

“I don’t have any more men,” Harrington said. He reminded Whitmer that his third platoon was still on the other side of the Huong River. “They might never get here,” he said. “What else do you need?”

“A corpsman.”

“What happened to your corpsman?”

“He got shot the other day, so I don’t have a corpsman.”

Harrington noted that.

“Okay, I’m going to need you to get up on the wall first, and then I’ll give you a radio call to tell you when to attack.”

“I don’t have a radio,” said Whitmer.

“What do you mean you don’t have a radio?”

“I mean, my radio operator was shot through the chest and the bullet went through the radio and destroyed it. We turned it in when we got to Phu Bai, and nobody had a radio to give us in Phu Bai.”

“Jesus,” said Harrington. “You don’t have anything!”

He suggested that they coordinate the attack with their watches, and Whitmer said his watch wasn’t working anymore. What’s more, none of his men’s watches were working either.

“You know, Captain, the weather over here, it just destroys them.”

The captain caught Whitmer’s drift. He and his squad wanted no part of what they were being asked to do.

“Now, you’re a marine,” Harrington said. “You’ll follow orders. I’ll get you up on that wall and you’re going to attack the tower. We have to take that tower and clear it.”

“We’ll do what we can,” said Whitmer.

“I know you’ll do it.”

Illumination flares cast their spooky silver light on both men. The captain put his hand on Whitmer’s shoulder.

“Good luck, Whit,” he said. He had tears in his eyes.33

A brief break in the clouds allowed aerial attacks on the tower that night. It was such a startling break in the status quo that it made Thursday’s New York Times in a story Gene Roberts wrote from Saigon. “United States jets bombed Hue’s historic Citadel repeatedly yesterday in an effort to destroy the enemy’s last major stronghold in a South Vietnamese city.”34

The tower was also targeted by the artillery battery at Phu Bai and shelled from two warships, the destroyer USS Manley and the cruiser USS Providence, which fired a total of two hundred rounds. Captain Smith, Adkisson’s public affairs officer, braved sniper fire to watch from the roof of Truong’s division headquarters. He would describe it as a “symphony of sound and fury.”35 By morning, the stone walls at the tower’s base had crumpled into a steep gradient of rubble. The upper floors were just charred shells. But the stubborn structure still stood. Its lower level had high arched openings on all four sides, and the top floor had rectangular openings that remained secure fighting positions with a commanding view of the streets below.

One of the Front units on the receiving end of this pounding was the sapper battalion that had destroyed the tank base at Tam Thai. Bazooka gunner Le Huu Tong, who had come to Hue on the long march through the mountains, weathered it somehow. There was nothing he could do to defend himself. He came close to being killed several times. Twice he was knocked out cold and awoke disoriented. He dreaded the sound of more incoming fire; once begun, it had continued relentlessly. Getting ammo for his bazooka became difficult. More and more he would fight only with his rifle, saving his rocket rounds for times when he had a clear and appropriate target.

As the sun rose over the South China Sea on Thursday morning, February 15, Harrington set off with his men down the inside wall of the fortress. It was still quiet. They managed to pass a few blocks without being discovered. At street level, staring up at the battered tower for the first time, Harrington thought it looked so bad that for a fleeting moment he allowed himself the hope that it had been abandoned. He quickly learned otherwise. Lieutenant William Conrad, leading his second platoon and moving up behind him, climbed to a second-story balcony to get a better look. Conrad and his radioman and one of his squad leaders were immediately hit with a rocket; all three were wounded and out of action. The platoon’s radio was destroyed. Its men, out of contact and not knowing the way, would not rejoin Harrington until midafternoon.

The captain had found a radio for Whitmer. They stopped together at a stile that led up to the top of the wall. A squad from Bravo Company had secured a small position just north of the tower two days earlier and was holding it.

Whitmer took ten men. He found the Bravo Company sergeant, who showed him around their small position. There was a parapet where you could look down the high wall to the moat below. Just to the south was the narrow bridge before the Dong Ba Gate. It reminded Whitmer of something from a Robin Hood movie. The sergeant pulled him back as he leaned out from the parapet.

“One of my guys was killed leaning out of here to take a look,” he warned.

Whitmer told him that they were going to help attack the tower.

“Where’s the rest of your men?” the Bravo sergeant asked.

“There’s only ten of us.”

“You want us to stay here and help you?”

“You’ve got orders to go someplace else, don’t you?” Whitmer asked.

“Yeah.”

“Then you better go.”

To help with the assault, Harrington had a tank, which had initially stayed back in order to preserve surprise. But very soon any chance of sneaking up on the tower was blown. First, there was the blunder of his lieutenant exposing himself on the balcony, and then Harrington gave away his own spot. He stepped away from the wall with his radioman to get a better look at the tower and drew a torrent of fire. One of the marines behind him was hit. The captain sought cover, feeling stupid. He had not even begun to fight and his force already had been reduced by half. Still, he was determined to justify Thompson’s faith in him. The terrible bombardment the night before had, if nothing else, underscored the importance of their mission. He called for the tank to come forward and spent the rest of the morning standing behind it, directly across the street from the tower, trying to get his second platoon back and to maneuver his roughly one hundred men into attack positions. By late afternoon his lead platoon, led by Sergeant Bob Thoms, a gung ho career marine who would later receive a battlefield commission, was on the north side of Rocket Alley with another led by Lieutenant Jack Imlah. They had been exchanging small-arms fire with the enemy across the street.

It was a long day of waiting for Harrington’s men. At his position on top of the wall, Whitmer was summoned by one of his men, Randy Romine, who was standing at the parapet.

“Whit! Come over here,” he said.

“Don’t be looking through there,” Whitmer told him. “That guy just told me a sniper shot and killed one of his guys looking through there!”

“Yeah, but there’s a bunch of NVA down there!” Romine said.

Whitmer crept over and peered down. There was a whole squad of enemy soldiers at the base of the high wall. It looked like they were practicing wall-climbing exercises. Whitmer assembled his squad. Romine carried a grenade launcher.

“As soon as Romine pops off a round, you guys drop grenades down at them,” he said. They did as instructed, felling all of the men below. The squad immediately came under fire and backed away from the parapet.

It was four in the afternoon when Harrington attacked. Whitmer’s squad was about the length of a football field away. They moved forward, clearing the burned-out houses, trenches, and foxholes as they went—they killed six enemy snipers. They stopped a good long stone’s throw from the tower. Up ahead they could see there was an L-shaped trench before the tower itself that had been covered by tin roofing, dirt, and bricks. There was also a bunker aboveground surrounded by bricks. The shelling and bombing the previous day had left debris scattered everywhere, which afforded the enemy lots of places to hide. Whitmer could hear them talking and could see some of them aiming down toward the street where Harrington had set his command post.

With Whitmer’s squad close enough, the captain called for covering fire and he sent more men up to the top of the wall. They scaled two stiles, one immediately north and the other south of the tower’s crumpled base.

The tank opened up, and the marines rushed the tower from both sides. Along with Imlah’s platoon, Whitmer came forward with his men from the north, shooting three or four more enemy still in their foxholes. One popped up screaming with a homemade bomb in his hand, wrapped in bamboo leaves with a lit fuse protruding. He was apparently waiting for the fuse to burn down before hurling it. Whitmer shot him in the head. He was still yelling when he was shot three more times from the other direction. He crumpled and the bomb exploded.

There were not that many enemy soldiers left in the tower itself, but all of Harrington’s men were exposed to fire from rooftops and upper floors in the neighborhood around it: rockets, rifle fire, and grenades. One explosion lifted Thoms into the air in a ball of flame. He and several of his men landed hard in the slope of rubble. Thoms had several pieces of shrapnel in him, and the flames burned off his shirt and the cover of his helmet. The blast also had torn his trouser leg from the crotch to the top of his boot. Since few marines wore underwear, Thoms was a startling sight.

Whitmer came back down to the street to confer with Harrington, who was directing the tank’s gun. They were shouting to each other when a rocket bore down. The corporal dived to his left, the captain to his right. It flew past the tank and exploded against a wall nearby. Neither man was hurt.

“Get back up there!” Harrington screamed to the corporal. “Take the rest of that tower!”

Whitmer found a mule loaded with ammo, grabbed some grenades, and recruited more marines to carry as much as they could back up the slope. Near the top he jumped through an opening at one end of a trench and, in the darkness, could make out eyes. He fired his rifle on automatic and then felt it come apart in his hands. He was hit several times in his flak jacket and knocked over backward. Two of his men, Dave Schultz and Ray Sexton, dragged him out of the hole.

“Throw some grenades in there!” he told them.

Grenades were thrown, and several of his other men ran up and shot down through the tin covering.

“Where are you hit?” Sexton asked.

“Man, I’m hit all over,” Whitmer said, except . . . he wasn’t! The only blood he found was on his hand. He had three or four small cuts on it and on his little finger. He had bruises on his chest under the vest. He assumed the rounds must have come from farther down the trench and may have passed through the men immediately in front of him, so they lacked the force to penetrate. He joined his men as they sprinted up the ramp toward the tower itself . . . and in the next instant he found himself again at the bottom of the wall. He was on his back covered with dust and plaster. He tried to move, but someone took hold of his leg. An enemy soldier in a spider hole beneath him had slid out another bamboo-wrapped explosive and was now holding Whitmer so he could not scoot away. The corporal used his other foot to kick the bomb back into the hole. The grip released, Whitmer scrambled back and the bomb went off, pelting him with the enemy soldier’s remains.

When he got to his feet, Whitmer was so blood-splattered that he could not tell if he was wounded. To his surprise, it all seemed to have come from the man killed in the hole—he would later discover shrapnel fragments in his legs. He didn’t feel any pain. He rejoined his men, who were now in the lower level of the tower. Whitmer looked in such bad shape that his men now led him.

“Are you ready to go?” asked Don Hammons.

“Okay,” said Whitmer.

“Okay, follow us,” said Tony Meggs, a private.

Bricks and chips of stone were flying off the walls around them. There was another explosion directly in front of them.

Once more, Whitmer came to twenty feet down the ramp, again on his back. Beside him was Hammons, his helmet blown off, calling, “Whit! Whit! Help me!”

Corpsman Alan Kent arrived at the base of the tower in time to see the men sprawled on the rubble. He had come down from Mang Ca on a wild mule ride with a driver named Ray Howard, who for some reason wore his helmet backward, and who had HOWARD IS MY NAME / TROUBLE IS MY GAME scrawled on his flak jacket. Kent had stretched himself flat on the back bed of Howard’s vehicle, hanging on to the rails for dear life. Howard kept bellowing, “Keep your head down!” as he steered the mule through gunfire. He had dropped Kent off and then waited as the corpsman climbed toward Whitmer and Dave Schultz, who also had been blown off the tower. Those two were trying to pull Hammons to cover when Schultz was shot. The corpsman and the corporal managed to pull both men down. Schultz had been hit in the lower leg; Hammons looked worse off. He had a hole in his back by his shoulder blade, and blood was pumping out of it rhythmically.

“I’m hit bad,” Hammons kept repeating. “I’m hit bad. Whit, I’m hit bad. My family, my family.” His wife had given birth months earlier, and he seemed panicked to be letting her down. Then he passed out. He didn’t look good.

Kent patched them up quickly and they were placed on Howard’s mule. He roared off with them back to Mang Ca.

Whitmer went back up the slope. Most of the tower was now held by marines, but they were running out of ammo. Some of the men were hurling rocks and bricks. Enemy soldiers would duck, expecting a grenade, and that would stop them from shooting for a few moments.

This intense fighting lasted almost thirty minutes. By four thirty Harrington’s men had the tower. It was little more than a high pile of rubble, but it was theirs . . . temporarily.

Whitmer was back up the hill looking for a member of his squad who was missing, Tom Zwetow. Thoms was helping. The two were talking quietly when they heard a muted voice calling out, “Corporal Whit! Corporal Whit!”

The voice was coming from underground. Zwetow had taken cover in an underground bunker vacated by the enemy, and an explosion had caved it in over him. It had knocked him out, and when he revived he was trapped. All of his body was buried except for his head, which, remarkably, remained uncovered in a pocket below the surface. There was space enough for him to breathe, but that was it. He had heard Vietnamese voices talking around him, so he had stayed still and quiet for hours. Then he heard Whitmer.

Everyone started digging. After they removed several large stones, Thoms spotted a helmet cover. They dug deeper and uncovered Zwetow’s head and part of one arm. Thoms removed his helmet and poured water into it from his canteen, then he dipped his bandolier in the water and tenderly washed the dust and dirt from Zwetow’s eyes. He patted him on the head, encouraging him. Both men were crying, but Zwetow smiled. He said the enemy had literally stood on top of him, yelling to each other as they fired down at the marines. For Thoms, it was the most joyful moment of a difficult day. Zwetow had a few bruises and scrapes, his face looked like someone had beaten him up, he had clearly been concussed and had been frightened terribly, but he was otherwise okay.

Harrington’s men were hungry. A trip back to Mang Ca to collect C rations would have been too dangerous, so he sent some of his men to scrounge. Whitmer and two from his squad went through some of the empty houses on the block. They opened cupboards and drawers and found nothing. Whitmer remembered seeing fat colorful koi in an ornamental pond behind one of the houses on the way in. Fish are fish, Whitmer thought. They found the pond . . . and it was empty! Days later Thoms confessed: “Whit, I want to tell you something. I ate your fucking fish.”

Thoms and his seven remaining men shared the small amount of water they had left and passed around one box of C rations. They helped patch each other up—all of them had shrapnel wounds. There was a pack of Salem cigarettes in the box, so Thoms opened it and passed one to everyone. They all smoked, the cigarettes cupped in their dirty hands to keep the light from giving away their position. Zwetow whispered to Thoms loud enough for all to hear, “Hey, Sarge, didn’t you hear smoking can be hazardous to your health?” That produced a healthy round of muffled laughter.

The fight wasn’t over. At about four in the morning, the enemy counterattacked, chasing the marines back down the gradient. Damien Rodriguez had been in the tower’s lower level, shooting down at the enemy, when a rocket exploded in the room. He must have seen it flash, because he jumped just as it went off. He was hurled out of the structure and came down in the rubble with what turned out to be twenty-two pieces of shrapnel in his body. Half of his left calf muscle was gone, and one piece had torn straight across the top of his right wrist. He crawled down alongside another marine, passing dead and wounded men. They heard someone nearby calling for help but didn’t see anyone. Rodriquez and the other marine crawled around until they were directly over the voice.

“He’s right here, man,” said the other marine.

“Help me!” the buried man called.

They began pulling off bricks, Rodriguez using his one good hand. He saw a photographer nearby, squatting behind cover—John Olson of Stars and Stripes. The photographer had come up with Kyoichi Sawada just in time to witness the Front retake the tower.

“Hey, motherfucker, get over here and help us!” Rodriguez said.

Olson stayed where he was. They uncovered half of the man; he was alive and sitting up straight. Rodriguez was now feeling his blood loss. He recognized his symptoms; he was going into shock.

“You know what, man,” Rodriguez told the half-buried marine, “you better lean down because there are snipers here all over the place.”

Rodriguez crawled across to where Olson was. A corpsman found him and began to patch him up. He pulled out a needle with morphine.

“Save that shit,” Rodriguez said. “There are a lot of guys back there—I don’t know if they’re alive or what—they are going to need all the stuff you’ve got.”

Harrington was still at the base of the tower, once more taking fire from above, urging his men back up. The marines’ best chance of killing the enemy soldiers above them was to get close enough to throw grenades through the tower’s windows, but when they stood to throw they were vulnerable, not only to the enemy back in the tower but to those on rooftops across the street.

Olson kept shooting pictures. He caught dramatic images of Thoms starting back up the rubble. The sergeant had taken shirts from two dead enemy soldiers and cut off the sleeves to have something to ward off the chill, and his torn trousers made it look like he was wearing a skirt. One of the men with him was Selwyn Taitt, a marine from New York whom everyone called “S-Man.”

Thoms and Taitt managed to climb high enough to hurl grenades at positions in the tower, but the angle was bad, so the sergeant slid over and up to a better spot. Taitt had brought up a pouch filled with grenades. He would pull the pin on a grenade and toss it like a hot potato to Thoms, who would catch it and throw it up into the opening. When they made it to a flat spot on the wall, Taitt demonstrated a pretty good arm himself. He was small but athletic, and he could hurl a grenade a good distance. Photographer Don McCullin snapped a picture of him from behind, standing up amid the ruins of the huts and houses on top of the wall, just as one left his hand. In the lower right-hand corner of the frame, hiding under a piece of tin roof, was an enemy soldier who fired at him. Taitt saw the muzzle flash and heard the round crack past. He hit the ground, found his rifle, and was able to shoot before the man could fire again.

By early morning Harrington’s marines owned the tower for good. They pulled twenty-four dead enemy soldiers from it and threw their bodies off the front of the tower. They had suffered badly themselves—six men killed and fifty wounded. Harrington had lost 40 percent of the men he’d brought into the Citadel. A few blocks back there was also heavy fighting, and fighter-bombers moved low over the city firing and dropping bombs. In the next day’s New York Times, reporter Johnson wrote, “Shell casings from machine guns fell like rain on hundreds of Vietnamese spectators who swarmed out on the streets to watch the air action.” He noted that the effort, while taking the tower, had advanced the marines’ position by only two hundred yards.36 But they were a critically important two hundred yards.

Whitmer was evacuated with the other wounded that evening. His injury was minor. When he got back to Phu Bai, one of the walking wounded, he was ordered to look through nearly a hundred body bags and identify those he recognized.

It took him two days to complete the job, unzipping the bags and looking at the pale, lifeless faces. He found Don Hammons, who had died from his wounds. It did not surprise Whitmer. Hammons had looked dead when they carried him away. But on the second day of this grim assignment he got a shock. He found the body of a friend whom he had left alive and well in Hue.37