24 February 1968
The next morning Charlie Company received orders to assault across the next phase line, or Hon Thuyen, another street in Hue named in honor of an ancient leader. Hon Thuyen was a famous scholar.
Charlie Three was designated as the assaulting unit, with Charlie Two and the other 1/5 companies establishing supporting fire. At this point (within three blocks of the south wall of the Citadel) it was determined that artillery prep fire support was too dangerous to our own men, so we would have to assault across the street again without much supporting firepower. We were used to it.
Fortunately, we could call in a few tank/Ontos teams to soften up likely enemy positions before the assault with the vehicles’ large-caliber direct-fire weapons. The teams showed up quickly and started their deadly dance.
As the last tank/Ontos team pulled back, the first Charlie Three fire team sprinted across Hon Thuyen and entered the first target house. They cleared it and found it empty. Chief and I ran across the street with the rest of the squad, and we quickly moved fire teams to the adjacent houses and found them similarly abandoned. The heavy, disturbing smell of CS-type tear gas from the E-8 gas launcher attack permeated this section of the Citadel, causing our eyes to well up with tears as we moved through the houses.
The rest of Charlie Three moved across the street and leapfrogged our positions. After about fifteen minutes we had covered enough of the fifth block to be fairly sure that it was completely devoid of any enemy positions.
I called Scott Nelson on Chief’s Prick-25 and reported our unopposed progress. Nelson told me that he would be moving the rest of Charlie Company across Hon Thuyen in our wake and that we should cross the next street when we were ready.
We waited for about a half hour to give Charlie Two enough time to get across Hon Thuyen and get into position to cover our movement across the sixth phase line, just in case. Without waiting for tank or Ontos supporting fires, the point fire team ran across the sixth phase line, or Dinh Cong Trong, named after a famous Vietnamese general who fought the Chinese. The point fire team crossed Dinh Cong Trong without incident and quickly established themselves inside the first target house. According to our maps the next block was larger than all the others, being about twice the depth, so it took a while to check out all the houses. Eventually, however, we checked them all out. We found them all empty.
The lingering odor of tear gas, which had pretty much covered all the territory that the NVA had controlled until the previous night, still caused our eyes to tear up, but I didn’t hear one complaint. Although we weren’t yet at our final objective, the south wall, it looked like the E-8 gas launchers had done the trick. Apparently, the NVA had completely abandoned the southeast sector of the Citadel.
The rest of 1/5’s Marines were now following in the wake of Charlie Company, and Delta Company had started to move forward along the eastern wall of the Citadel. After about an hour and a half we were pretty sure that the NVA were gone, and Scott Nelson decided to go for the wall.
My 1:10,000 map showed that the last phase line, called Tong duy Tan, separated us from a small, triangular-shaped block which snuggled up to the southeast corner of the Citadel. Although it was cater-corner from the block we had been traveling through, Nelson and I decided to cut diagonally through this triangular block because it took us a couple hundred meters away from the Thuong Tu Porch, or tower, that was the easternmost of four southern entrances to the Citadel. If there were still NVA inside this section of the Citadel, the tower was the most likely position that they would try to defend.
Once again, maybe for the last time, the point fire team from Charlie Three sprinted across the seventh phase line, Tong duy Tan, and cleared the first house. It was empty.
Chief and I moved the rest of the platoon across the street. We fell in behind the point fire team and told them to move through the corner block and to get up on the wall, but to keep their heads down.
There was a small house in the middle of this block. As I walked up its back steps and through its back door, I stopped cold. I stood for a moment facing an old Vietnamese woman, sitting in a rocking chair, quietly rocking in her chair as if this were just another ordinary day. We had not seen a civilian in this area since the night the baby was born. American forces had been shelling this section of the city for many days, and an unbelievably fierce battle had been raging all around this old woman for days. Yet here she was, quietly rocking away the morning.
She was old, nearly ageless, ancient. She was wearing a shapeless black dress, with a shawl pulled over her frail shoulders. Covering her head was an old, tattered, black scarf. Her face was eroded, ravaged with deep wrinkles carved by the heavy wear of time. The woman sat in her rocking chair, saying nothing, staring at nothing, never even acknowledging our presence, just rocking away her final days. She must have been too old to leave when the city had been evacuated, and the NVA must have fed her and cared for her while they fiercely defended their captured territory.
No one in front of me or behind me spoke to her, although I am certain that all of us were filled with the wonder of this woman’s survival in the midst of this hellish chaos. We simply walked by her, and I never saw her again.
The NVA were gone. We moved across the final block and took the short run across the narrow street that separated us from the south wall of the Citadel. Carefully and cautiously at first, we climbed the ancient brick steps to the top of the wall and peered over the bulwark.
From this new vantage point, about thirty feet above street level, we could see a vast panorama. Across the Perfume River lay south Hue and the terrible destruction that had befallen it. We could see the shattered Nguyen Hoang Bridge, the large bridge that had previously allowed travelers on Highway One to cross the Perfume River. Looking to the west, we observed the Thuong Tu Porch, or tower, sticking out like a sore thumb another twenty feet higher than the wall. Although this tower was about four hundred meters away, we could sense that the NVA were there, and we clearly remembered the devastation rained down upon us from the NVA occupying the Dong Ba Porch on phase line green. So we crouched back down below the bulwark, unwilling after all we had been through to give an NVA sniper an easy target. Behind the tower, another three or four hundred meters further away, stood the walls of the Imperial Palace. The palace was most likely the next defensive position of our enemy, and some of us started to speculate about how difficult it would be to take the palace away from the NVA. Mostly, however, we were just happy that we had been able to move through the final three blocks without a shot being fired.
Apparently, the NVA could not deal with our “secret weapon,” the E-8 gas launchers, a weapon so secret that even we didn’t know anything about it until the previous evening. That started me to thinking about the “what ifs.” What if we had brought the E-8 gas launchers and had used them the very first day? Would they have worked as effectively, or had the NVA soldiers, like our Marines, been equipped with gas masks and then discarded them over the past few days when it appeared that they would be unnecessary? I stopped thinking about that quickly, though, because there was no way to know the answers.
It was enough to realize that it had taken 1/5 nearly ten days of bloody fighting to progress four blocks toward our objective; that we had lost over 50 percent of our manpower through casualties during the process; and that it had taken less than three hours to progress the remaining three blocks, during which time we had not been shot at once. The only lesson that could be learned from this was that nothing is ever certain in war. In war, everything is always totally unpredictable.
The sounds of late morning were unsettling as we sat up there on the wall, because it was just too damned quiet. I hadn’t heard a shot fired during our three-block walk, a period of slightly over two hours. After living through the constant fighting during the daytime of the last ten days, the quiet was unsettling. I pulled off my pack and helmet and sat down, using my helmet as a low stool. After rummaging around in my pack and finding a C ration meal to cook, I then told Chief to call Scott Nelson to let him know that the objective was secured.
As I prepared yet another unappetizing but necessary C ration meal, I looked around at the Citadel wall. For the first time, I began to understand why Delta Company had experienced such a tough time taking the tower. Behind the bulwarks, or parapets, of the wall, there were many fighting holes built into the wall itself. The fighting holes were about three feet square and three to four feet deep and were spaced only a few feet apart. If this theme continued throughout the Citadel’s defensive complex, the towers would be a maze of fighting holes. I began to realize just how lucky we were that the NVA hadn’t overrun the First ARVN Division compound. If we had been forced to attack the enemy from the outside of the Citadel, we would have paid a terrible price just to get inside.
After we had been sitting on the wall for about a half hour, a commotion down below us, coming from our rear area, got my attention. I looked up just in time to witness one of those classic wartime events that make the front pages and are awe-inspiring to the civilians who read the hometown news, but which are laughable to the combat soldiers who were there. Evidently, the 1/5 CP group had finally decided to put in an appearance with the front line troops and were surrounded by a covey of reporters and photographers.
The battalion CP group was “assaulting the Citadel wall” en masse, led by a crusty radio operator who worked for the forward air controller. Most of the combat Marines happened to like the FAC radio operator, because he could get on his magic radio and call in the big birds of death, but in this case he had gone just a little too far. As this cluster of battalion CP group Marines “stormed the Citadel wall” for the reporters, led by the FAC radio operator who even had an American flag on a six-foot flagpole in his hands, the Marines of Charlie Three, the men who had done all the work and had dealt with all of the death and destruction, started to get angry.
“Shit, Lieutenant,” said PFC Robert Lattimer, “look at them fuckers. We haven’t seen those dudes since we left the ARVN compound, and here they are getting their pictures taken for the press, taking credit for the whole damned thing. Maybe we should give them some realism, you know, shoot a few M-16 rounds over their heads, make them duck a little.”
I looked away from the media circus, got eye contact with Lattimer, and replied, “Leave them alone, Lattimer. They don’t know any better.” The truth was, I just didn’t give a damn. I knew who the heroes were, and if the press and the public wanted to feel better by looking at a few pictures of some rear-area dudes charging the wall that we sat on, so be it. We could always tell our grandchildren the truth, that we were sitting on the wall looking down at these silly people, and that the heroes never seemed to get the credit that they deserved.
A couple of hours later Lima Company from 3/5 passed through our positions and assaulted the Thuong Tu Porch tower. They met with some fierce resistance initially, but persisted. Within minutes Lima Company’s Marines had overwhelmed the remaining NVA defenders, and the southeast sector of the Citadel was finally secured. The NVA had most certainly withdrawn from the southeast section of the Citadel and had escaped into the Imperial Palace.
That afternoon, as more fresh Marine units arrived inside the Citadel, Charlie Company was finally able to pull back. We were moved back to phase line green and assigned to cleanup duty. This meant that we had to search every house meticulously for any NVA stragglers and to pick up any bodies that the NVA had left behind. It also turned out that we had to keep the civilians out of their homes until the Citadel was declared safe again, which would not happen until the NVA were completely routed. And it was soon evident that the NVA were still holed up inside the Imperial Palace. NVA snipers on the Imperial Palace wall started shooting at targets of opportunity, which became more and more abundant as replacement troops started to join 1/5.
The new guys stood out like a sore thumb, because their uniforms were almost bright green (if you could ever define Marine Corps green as being bright) and very clean, but mainly because they didn’t know enough about city fighting to keep their heads down. At one point, upon witnessing three clean Marines walking boldly down the middle of the street, I lost my cool and hollered at them without thinking. “Hey, you stupid assholes, get outta the middle of the fucking street! Where the fuck do you think you are, fucking Disneyland? There are plenty of NVA snipers still around here to welcome you to the Citadel if you keep strolling down the street like that!”
I guess I got their attention, because all three of them scurried out of the middle of the street and hunched down just a little bit. They didn’t say anything to me in response, either, although I noticed as they walked by my position that one of them was a captain and the other two were senior staff NCOs. I still had my second lieutenant’s gold bars hidden under my collar, so they probably thought I was a stupid private and didn’t know any better, and since they couldn’t bust me for disrespect, they decided to leave me alone. But maybe it was the tone of my voice and my appearance. . . .
Charlie Three took up residence in the house that Estes had died in. It had an actual sit-down toilet and a couple of functional beds, so it was a good choice, but I think we homed in on the place because we had all lost something there. We stayed there for a few days as the mop-up operation continued and as the Vietnamese Black Panther Battalion was given the assignment to assault the Imperial Palace.
This time, even though the Imperial Palace really was sacred ground, there was plenty of heavy support brought to bear on the NVA inside the palace grounds. The tanks and Ontos made many passes on the palace wall until a large hole had been blown in it, giving the Black Panthers an entrance to use that could not be as well defended as the tower-dominated entrance.
I had mixed emotions when I was first told that someone else would be making the final assault into the Imperial Palace, that the Marines of 1/5 would not be involved. Part of me was resentful that anyone else would be given the “honor” of delivering the “coup de grace” and driving the NVA out of the Citadel once and for all. A different, saner part of me was relieved, however, because surely this battle would be as bloody as any that had occurred thus far. It would be vicious, because now that the NVA were trapped inside the Imperial Palace, they had nowhere to go. We had been told that the Citadel was completely surrounded by American and ARVN forces and that all avenues of egress were completely sealed off. With the NVA cornered, they were now going to be given the simple choice of surrendering or dying. We didn’t think that the NVA would surrender. And so, for two more days the tanks and Ontos delivered their deadly loads onto the NVA inside the Imperial Palace to support the Black Panthers in their final assault.
Meanwhile, the Marines of Charlie Three filled up the toilet in our commandeered home with puke and shit (the toilet was a modern sit-down version with a flushing tank, but it had long since ceased to function; this had no deterring affect on any of us who desired the simple pleasure of a seated defecation). And we continued to search out the houses and to police the area of bodies and unexploded ordnance.
On the afternoon before we departed the Citadel, one of the Marines of Charlie Three remembered the dead NVA body that had been run over by the tanks.
“Hey, Lieutenant,” he said, “do you remember where that dead gook was that the tanks ran over?”
“Yeah, I remember,” I said. “It was a couple of blocks over and a block up.” With that in mind and with a couple five-gallon cans of gasoline, about a half dozen of us walked off in search of the dead NVA body that the tanks had run over. Although we were on the right street within a few minutes, it took us a while to find this particular body, because it wasn’t much of a body any more. It was more like a grease spot. It was a spot on the side of the street, about three feet long and about a foot wide, covered by a few tattered shreds of green cloth. It was him, all right, but there wasn’t much left of him. This particular NVA body had become symbolic of the frustration of the tank and Ontos drivers during the battle for the Citadel and had probably been run over hundreds of times over the past few days.
I grabbed a gas can, twisted the cap off, and poured about a gallon of the flammable liquid over the grease spot. Replacing the gas can’s cap, I stepped a few feet away from the spot and nodded to Chief, who pulled out a book of matches and lit the spot on fire. Without thinking about it, I pulled off my helmet and stood watching the flames, contemplating this act and the fate of the dead NVA soldier who had been run over so many times. In some ways, this burning NVA grease spot was symbolic of the participants of this terrible battle, and now that the fighting was over, the symbol was being burned from existence.
I hadn’t noticed it when we torched the grease spot, but as the fire dwindled down and I replaced my helmet and prepared to leave the spot forever, I looked up and saw that everyone else in the vicinity had also stopped and removed his helmet. Looking around me, I saw that there were many Marines within eyesight of our small group who had seen what we had done. They had also stopped what they were doing, had removed their helmets, and had spent a few moments of thoughtful silence.
It was the closest thing we had to a memorial service.
The next morning, 1/5 was relieved of our responsibilities inside the Citadel fortress of Hue. We walked out the Thuong Tu Porch, the south tower’s gate, across the ancient moat, through the business district that fronted the Citadel and separated it from the Perfume River, and made our way to the edge of the river. Mike boats were waiting for us to move us back south across the river. A Mike boat, as the smaller “cousin” of the Whiskey boat, could comfortably carry at least fifty combat-loaded Marines, so there was room to spare.
When we climbed into the Mike boats, I could take a silent head count, because there were so few of us left in Charlie Company. Of the original fifty-one Marines of Charlie One who entered the Citadel, only thirteen of us rode in that boat.
Docs Loudermilk and English were sitting together in the bow area of the boat, looking as though they were having a quiet, private conversation. Lines of fatigue and despair shadowed both their faces, as the weight of their responsibilities and their memories of giving immediate medical assistance to their buddies continued to weigh heavily upon them both. Both these young men had performed their duties in an extraordinary way and had been directly responsible for saving many lives during those days inside the Citadel. In Doc Loudermilk’s case, he was also a part of a birth. He had experienced the full cycle of life and death and had helped to alleviate the suffering of others. Like all the corpsmen I served with during my time in Vietnam, these docs were critically important members of our team, and I always thought of them as fellow Marines.
PFC Robert Lattimer hung out with his buddy, Gomer, in the rear of the boat. They weren’t talking about anything. They had both succumbed to exhaustion and sat in a lump on the deck.
Benny Benware was rummaging through his pack, trying to find something to eat, without much success. Benny also sat on the deck, and his pack sat between his long, spindly legs, which were drawn up so that his heels competed with his butt.
Lance Corporal Charles Davis sat by himself along the left side of the deck of the large boat, staring at the other side of the boat.
That was it. Out of the forty or so Marines who comprised Charlie Company on the day we left the Citadel, there were seven of us on that boat who had originally been a part of Charlie One. All the Marines of Charlie Company were on this one boat, so I was sure of my tally. Seven.
Although I was not then completely aware of the details, eleven Charlie One Marines died inside the Citadel fortress of Hue, and thirty-three Charlie One Marines were wounded badly enough to require medical evacuation.
The last two Marines to board the Mike boat for the short trip to the south bank were The Gunny and 1st Lt. Scott Nelson, the Skipper. The Gunny really didn’t look too much different than he had looked two weeks before, because he had already been a grizzled veteran before we entered the Citadel. He just looked tired and dirty as he sat down on the tail of a mule, leaned back on a stack of C ration cases there, and lit up a slightly rumpled Lucky Strike.
Scott Nelson had earned the title, Skipper. After Hue, I never again thought of him as 1st Lt. Scott Nelson; he was the Skipper. I’m certain that all the other men in that boat that day felt the same.
I didn’t envy him his position; I still don’t, to this day. As the commanding officer of the company that was thrust into the center of the deadly cauldron of house-to-house fighting inside the Citadel of Hue, he was a key part of the military equation that meant, in many instances, life or death to the Marines in his charge. At the same time, he was the man who had to communicate with the upper levels of command, the critical supporting elements, and our sister companies. In this particular battle, he also had had to deal with the initial rules of engagement that had restricted our heavy support and had cost so many lives. It was like being inside a pressure cooker with an incredible amount of pressure coming from a dozen directions at once. Scott Nelson had been the one Marine that I had observed inside the Citadel who had not cracked under this incredible pressure at least for a moment or two.
He stood alone at the bow of the Mike boat as the crew raised the bow ramp. The boat slowly and deliberately backed away from the muddy bank of the Perfume River and began its slow turn toward the south bank. The Skipper’s expression was unreadable. If you hadn’t known him before, you wouldn’t have known that he had been through the gauntlet, except that he was also tired and dirty. But there was no grin on his face. His expression was neutral. He stood there and, removing his helmet, gazed off into the distance, tugging absent-mindedly at his mustache.
No one looked back. There was no curiosity displayed about the Citadel any longer. We had seen enough. More than that, I think most of us felt that if we had looked back at the Citadel, we would all turn into blocks of salt. It was over.