10

Checkmate

ON TUESDAY, the twentieth, Major Thompson was publicly relieved of his command. General Abrams said he considered the effort inside the Citadel to have been “inadequate.”65 General Cushman announced to reporters that Thompson’s command would be assumed by Colonel Hughes, who had been commanding the overall effort from the MACV compound.

When this decision was relayed to Hughes, however, he said he would resign before he would accept an order to replace Thompson. The major stayed and the matter died.66

Very early the next morning, Thompson assembled his officers. They were closing in on the southern wall, but each advance seemed harder and more painful than the last. The battle had been terrible, and now it had also turned tedious. Each day was the same, an attack by mortars and artillery and planes, if they could make runs, then the tanks and Ontos followed by hunched-over marines braving the street. Their fight would then progress house to house, room to room, followed by the enemy falling back and retrenching. Thompson felt his men, those that remained, were wearing out. But they were close. Ahead were the southern wall and the Thuong Tu Gate, which opened toward the river, the downed bridge, and southern Hue.

But as the marines advanced those final blocks, the Front’s remaining forces were compressed into an ever-smaller area and their defenses became, if anything, more desperate and more robust. Across the street from the current battle line was an especially difficult objective, a tall building that had been giving them fits. It was the biggest building they had encountered inside the fortress. From its upper floors and roof, enemy guns commanded the blocks below.

Thompson reconsidered what Coolican had advised him on his first night in the Citadel. The young captain, who had been fighting with the Hac Bao, had argued that night was the best time to move. The major asked his officers if instead of going after the building in the morning, as usual, they might consider a surprise move in the dark. If they could seize it before sunrise, then they would own the high ground for the final push to the wall.

All three of his frontline company commanders—­Harrington, Nelson, and Fern Jennings—liked the idea, but none was eager to volunteer his men for yet another risky undertaking. It was hard enough to ask them to keep hurling themselves across vicious battle lines. How would you convince them to undertake something even more daring? Sensing their hesitancy, “Hand Grenade” Polk offered his Alpha Company.

Thompson admired Polk. He thought the young officer had breathed fresh bravado into his haggard command. It had lifted his own sagging spirits, and he was hopeful that the cocksure young officer’s spirit would have a similar effect on the others. As the lieutenant led his small raiding party across the street, Thompson told his three captains to keep their radios tuned to Polk’s frequency throughout. He wanted them to hear the lieutenant at work.

But when the team left, with Polk in the lead, they found no one to fight! Just an old man and three terrified children were in the building. The Front apparently had grown so accustomed to the battle’s rhythm that they had left their forward positions for the night. It made sense. Farther back they could sit out the morning mortar barrage at a safe distance. So when dawn came, Polk and his men were looking down from an upper floor when numbers of enemy soldiers began to emerge from buildings to the rear. They came strolling across the street and through the building’s wide courtyard, returning to take up their fighting positions like men reporting for a morning work shift.

Polk’s radio operator called Whiskey X-Ray across the river, gave them the coordinates, and urged them to start firing immediately. The mortar crew checked with their battalion commander, who judged the target too close to the marines’ position.

“Don’t fire,” he said.

The mortar crew stressed that it was Alpha Company itself requesting the fire mission. Then came another call from Polk’s man.

“Hurry up, for chrissakes, hurry up! Danger close! Fifty meters!”

With Polk pressing the issue, permission was granted. In the riverfront mortar pit, Ed Landry heard a ferocious exchange of gunfire start up inside the Citadel before they started. Polk’s men were shooting down at the enemy soldiers by the time the first big rounds lofted across the river and over the walls. They scored direct hits with three rounds. Three more quickly followed. With Polk’s men picking off targets from above, the remainder of Thompson’s forces moved across the street to grab the enemy’s forward line. A tear gas shell from Whiskey X-Ray exploded over the blocks farther ahead. The battery would send twenty rounds in all, racing to clean their tubes between each firing. Along the battle line, for once the marines owned the high ground. The surprise move broke the Front’s last line of resistance before the southern wall. Thompson achieved all of his objectives by noon.

It was just the start of a long day for the mortar crew, which continued to receive fire requests—roughly one every fifteen minutes. Two Phantom jets screamed low over them at one point and loosed two five-hundred-pound bombs that exploded inside with such force that Landry felt the percussion all the way across the river like a great gust of wind.

With the capture of the southern wall, and the fall of La Chu, the Battle of Hue was all but over. General Tolson’s reinforced brigade, having moved past La Chu, now closed rapidly on the Citadel’s western gates, and the Front troops that remained inside were in danger of being bottled up. That night they slipped away through the only two gates they still controlled, those at the southwest corner of the fortress, the Huu and Nha Do. Major Eshelman, who had been so frustrated trying to advance with the Vietnamese marines on the fortress’s west side, was shocked Wednesday morning, February 21, to discover enemy lines only lightly defended. There was still some shooting from the enemy’s rear guard, but the impenetrable fields of fire that had stymied them for days had vanished. As if to prove you get what you need when you no longer need it, on the same day they were reinforced by a fresh company of US Marines.67

There was still fighting here and there, but life sprang back into the city at an astonishing pace. Sensing the end was near, crowds of civilians filled the streets. New York Times reporter Thomas Johnson took a ride in a marine truck making its way through the crowds. “They’re crazy,” the driver said. “Bullets zing up and down these streets all the time and these people think it’s a side show.”68

Life began to flow once more in and around the ruins. Sampans and fishing boats once more plied the Huong, scattering whenever gunfire erupted—usually around US naval vessels—but returning when it died down. Families again sold greens, celery, and mangoes from boats along the canals, and, Johnson noted, marines moving through the streets were offered soda, peanut brittle, dried fish, soup, and candies.

The enemy’s hold on the Citadel had been reduced to the royal palace and its grounds, before which still flew the Alliance flag. A few weeks earlier, the Times of London had referred to it as “mocking them [the marines] from the top of the 123 ft. mast on the Citadel waterfront.”69 It had flown twenty-three days. The grounds around the palace had sheltered troops that had been launching mortars and rockets at the allied forces for weeks.

When a terrible battle is almost over, the men who have survived regard with special dread the final assault—one last chance to catch a fatal or maiming round. There was talk of a possible suicidal last stand by Front fanatics. Lieutenant Polk joked about it with his men the night before, strumming a guitar he had found in the ruins.

“Gee, Lieutenant, can I go first up on the wall?” asked a marine, facetiously.

“Only if you carry a bayonet clenched in your teeth,” said Polk.70

Choosing which unit to lead the final assault was made easier by the insistence of Harry Hue, the Hac Bao commander. The week before he had urged Thompson to “just blow a hole in the palace walls and we’ll rush in and kill everybody.” It wasn’t realistic at the time, but now that it was, Thompson felt the aptly named Hue was the man for the job. So on Friday morning, February 23, the palace grounds were bombarded and the Hac Bao broke in, accompanied by its American adviser, Jim Coolican—he had helped man the tower at the MACV compound on the first night and was now present for the battle’s final act. The Hac Bao were followed by Colonel Dinh’s soldiers.

Like so many of these final assaults, this one was anticlimactic. The enemy was gone. Only a few rear-guard soldiers fired on them, and these were quickly killed. The Hac Bao discovered the bodies of sixty-four enemy soldiers on the palace grounds—the Front had been using the relatively safe haven as a hospital and had left in too big a hurry to finish burying their dead. The invading force also found a supply of weapons and ammo, and the remains of a horse and dog that had evidently been slaughtered for food.

A nearly naked, emaciated man staggered from the underbrush to greet them. A member of Truong’s First Division, he had been cut off in the original siege of the Citadel and had spent the previous weeks half submerged in foliage in one of the palace’s ceremonial lagoons, sneaking out at night to scrounge for food. He was Colonel Dinh’s older brother.

Le Tu Minh, the chief of the party’s Central Committee for Hue, had seen the end coming. The leaders of the Front’s forces had assembled at a village just west of the Huu Gate eleven days earlier. They noted their mounting losses and the gradual buildup of American and ARVN troops. During the meeting American planes dropped bombs on the village. General Kinh shared a foxhole with the political commissar for the Hue city front, Le Kha Phieu. Neither was hurt, but the futility of holding Hue was driven home dramatically.71 The last of the Front’s forces to leave the city were those in the fortress’s southwest corner guarding the Nha Do and Huu Gates.

The phased withdrawal had begun three nights earlier. On the last night, it became a chaotic rush. The final days of the battle had been excruciating. Lieutenant Tang Van Mieu had one of his company commanders killed right beside him by an American sniper; the bullet took out the man’s eyeball and sent it smacking into Tang’s face. A smaller man than his subordinates, Tang surmised that the sniper, seeing a group of enemy soldiers conferring, must have assumed that the larger man was the more important. His NVA regulars maintained order on the way out but, anticipating a crushing last blow, the VC and local fighters broke ranks and ran. Students who had been pressed into service carrying the wounded threw their stretchers down on the road and wept. They pleaded that they could go no farther. Tang’s Seventh Battalion had begun the offensive with six hundred men. At the end only fifty would walk out.72

There was an aspect of the battle that the Americans missed. Throughout, the opposing Vietnamese sides eavesdropped on, heckled, and threatened each other over the radio. At one point, one of General Truong’s officers, named Chot, had broken into the Front’s radio frequency and demanded to talk to Tang, who took the call. Chot told Tang he was going to offer a ransom for his capture.

Tang told him to go ahead.

“I dare you to defeat and capture me!” said Chot.

“I dare you to try to defeat and capture me!” replied Tang. “I am going to capture you. You will be defeated.”

As hard as the fight had been, Tang was distressed when the order came to retreat. He believed it would have been worthwhile staying and fighting on, even if they were all killed. As he moved his men out Nha Do Gate, he worried about the local militias; they had been recruited from inside the city, and many would stay behind hoping to blend back into the civilian population. What would happen to them now? Surely their neighbors would know them and point them out. Was he just supposed to desert them? He felt his men, if reinforced, might have carried on for days more. But orders were orders. Tang had them pick up the wounded dropped by the students and had the students carry weapons and ammo instead. The frantic exit of these broken units stood in stark contrast to the proud and happy ranks that had entered the city on the first morning of Tet. One entire battalion had been reduced to just six men.

Mai Xuan Bao, whose sappers had launched the attack on police headquarters on the first night, had received the order to withdraw on Tuesday night, before Thompson’s men had taken the south wall. The company he was with had been cut down to thirty men and had moved to a position outside the Citadel. There were newly arrived ARVN troops between them and their escape route south. When the withdrawal order came, the political commissar assigned to Bao’s company urged him to attack the enemy position immediately.

“No, we can’t,” Bao told him. “If we attack now, we’ll suffer even more casualties. We have to be patient.”

They waited through the night, trying to lull the enemy into thinking that nothing would happen until morning, which was the usual pattern. Bao’s men attacked well before sunrise and broke through. They retreated, leaving many of their wounded behind and taking ARVN soldiers who had surrendered. They marched to the lowland liberated areas, pounded by artillery as they passed east of Phu Bai. The shelling killed even more of Bao’s men and some of the prisoners.

Nguyen Quang Ha’s sapper unit, which had assaulted the ARVN armored compound at Tam Thai on the first night with 150 men, was down to just 20. Ha himself had received six minor wounds before a piece of shrapnel cut into his intestines. He had begun wearing his backpack in front in hopes of warding off just such a wound, but the shrapnel sliced through. He and what was left of his unit had been running from house to house for days. They would build shelters in each place to shield them from constant bombardment. Ha left the Citadel in a hammock strung from a pole carried by two of his comrades.

Sergeant Cao Van Sen, the Viet Cong regular who had prepared the Alliance flag and delivered it on the first day, left with his unit on Wednesday night. Sen and his men had fought for three weeks around the Tay Loc airstrip, taking it, losing it, retaking it, and ultimately losing it as the ARVN built up enough power to hold them off. The approach of the marines in the final days, along with more and more shells and bombs, was finally too much. Sen was amazed at the firepower beating down everywhere and on everything, so much that sometimes the Americans hit the ARVN troops.

Le Huu Tong, the bazooka gunner, had been nearly deaf for weeks. He could no longer distinguish the noises made by bombs or grenades or rifles. He had a constant buzzing in his ears, and he could not bear the horrid odor that hung over everything in the Citadel. The smell was worse during the day because at least at night, if they were near a rotting corpse, they could drag it away or bury it. He had forgotten what it was like to go to sleep. He was sad but relieved when his unit was ordered back to “the green,” its base camps in the mountains. His battalion, which had helped assault the tank compound, was one of the last to leave the city. They hung on outside the Citadel until Sunday, February 25, traveling by boat to the train station in southern Hue and then overland to the west. They were bombed badly on the way.

When they returned to the camp they had nothing because they had thrown everything away when they departed, expecting never to return. Hoang Thanh Tung, the commissar who specialized in converting captured ARVN troops, felt a great sadness on returning to his unit’s old mountain camp. It was a place he had never expected to see again, but, looking back, he realized that, even camping there, they had enjoyed some pleasures. Now they had nothing. They had to search, scrounge, and beg for food, seeking help from Montagnard tribesmen. It was a month before regular food supplies resumed. For the first time since he joined the VC, he felt pessimistic about the war. Perhaps they would not prevail. They had briefly tasted victory, but it was the smell of death in Hue that would never leave him.

The young militia leader Nguyen Van Quang, who had been one of the first to enter the Citadel, was one of the last to leave. He got the order the night before the storming of the royal palace. He led the remainder of his unit out of the city that night through the Huu Gate. A machine gunner inside the royal palace had begged to be allowed to stay.

“I know my way around,” the young man told him. Quang learned later that the man had fought until he had run out of ammo and had been killed.

Lieutenant Hoang Anh De, whose men had fought for southern Hue in the first week, and had gradually fallen back to the outskirts of the triangle to continue harassing the growing numbers of Americans, did not receive the order to leave until Sunday, February 25. He had moved all of his men into the suburbs in the days before, and from there they retreated south to the lowlands of Phu Vang.

For the symbolic final act, Major Thompson had been told there would be no replay of the American flag raising at the province headquarters. The flag before Ngo Mon Gate was the final and most visible prize. The major wasn’t happy about it, nor were many of his marines, who felt they had paid dearly for the privilege of running up Old Glory, but the Alliance flag would be replaced by the big yellow-and-red-striped flag of South Vietnam.

The cords on the flagstaff had been cut, so two nimble Hac Bao scaled the pole. Portions of it had been blown away, leaving only twisted strands of rebar, but the men climbed over the gaps to the top and finally cut down the hopeful symbol of Hanoi’s Tong-Tan-cong-Noi-day. The ARVN troops then tied their own yellow and red banner to the top.

The battle for Hue had ended, but the bloodletting had not. After more than three weeks of hard fighting, the city was finally, from a military standpoint, where American officials had said it was on the first day—clear except for pockets of enemy resistance. Now that Saigon was back in charge, there would be further hell to pay. Phan Van Khoa, the mayor who had been rescued weeks earlier by Captain Mike Downs’s marines, issued an order for public execution of looters and of those who had sided with the Front. An unnamed American official had seconded the order in a statement to an Associated Press reporter.

“There will be summary executions, public executions of VC and hopefully some of the infrastructure,” the official said, referring to those who had cooperated in forming a “liberation government” in the previous weeks. He said he was encouraging Khoa to include as a prominent victim the former Hue police chief, Nguyen Chi Canh, who had left the city after the Buddhist uprisings in 1965 and returned to assume the role after the city was overrun. Khoa told reporters that his men would begin culling refugees, looking for those who had sided with the Front in the previous weeks.73

General Nguyen Ngoc Loan, the top police official who had been made infamous weeks earlier when cameras caught him shooting a bound Viet Cong prisoner in the head, left Saigon for Hue Thursday night. He would supervise the interrogations.