A Ground Pounder’s Perspectives on Strategy, Vietnam War Style
I started writing this book in February 1983, almost exactly fifteen years to the day after this story’s events actually occurred.
I must confess that I have an unfair advantage over most writers in that, despite the relatively long duration of this effort, the writing of this story has expended very little actual literary “elbow grease.” You see, I lived these events, and in some parts of my mind, I have been living them, every day of my life, since they took place.
To be sure, during the first ten or so of those fifteen years, I had absolutely no conscious realization that I was constantly reliving the days and weeks we spent in Hue during the Tet Offensive.
After having concluded my second consecutive, unsuccessful, five-year marriage, I sought counseling in an effort to understand just exactly why matrimony and I were seemingly incompatible. I spent the better part of six months visiting a very nice, competent psychiatrist twice a week, baring my soul to this capable and sympathetic individual, telling her the story of my life. That was in 1978. In 1983, after the unexpected death of my father and the resulting catharsis that I experienced, I reflected back on that counseling. In a flash I realized for the first time that my attentive and professional counselor, despite her having picked my brain for nearly fifty hours over that six-month period, had absolutely no clue that I was a Vietnam veteran. In 1983 I had to confront the fact that the events recorded in this book were having a devastating and negative effect on my life and on my interpersonal relationships with people, despite my having buried these memories so deeply that I no longer consciously remembered them.
Having been profoundly shocked by the revelation that my wartime experiences were haunting me without my conscious knowledge, I made the very difficult decision to try to consciously remember what had happened and to write it all down as a form of therapy.
Of course, fifteen years is a long time, and certain parts of the memories had eroded. But I quickly found out that my memories of the story were there in vivid and graphic detail, although some dates and names were dim and vague. So I decided to do some basic research.
Through correspondence with several sources of research materials, I began to accumulate a significant stack of documents, including maps of Vietnam, the Command Chronology of the First Battalion, Fifth Marine Regiment, during the period of 1–29 February 1968, and a copy of the Combat After-action Report on Operation “Hue,” which I assume was written by 1/5’s battalion commander after the battle was over. My readings of these documents were very disturbing, because there were serious discrepancies between my memories and these documents.
Once I started this project, it took on a life of its own. I became almost obsessed with finding anything and everything written about the Vietnam War, especially anything having to do with the Tet Offensive of 1968.1 found that much of what was written was very sketchy, and that the limited information available followed the line established by the “official” records.
Let’s get to the bottom line.
The battle for the Citadel of Hue, during the Tet Offensive of 1968, is universally considered by writers and historians as the most hard-fought and bloody battle of that long and bloodthirsty war. I do not dispute that. I saw it and lived it, up close and personal. It was a devastating confrontation between a large, determined force of North Vietnamese Army regulars and an equally determined force of U.S. Marines. Even given the best of all possible scenarios, under these circumstances, much blood would be lost.
Neither do I dispute the outcome. Although it took nearly a month of hard fighting and personal sacrifice, the Marines achieved a decisive victory, ultimately crushing a numerically superior enemy.
The dispute, here, is over the “rules of engagement” established by higher authorities and placed upon the Marines of 1/5.
Every book I have ever read about the Vietnam War seems to center on three themes. The first is the American politicians’ micromanagement of the war effort. The second is how the establishment of extremely strict rules of engagement handicapped American forces by the same politicos who destined our military to ultimate failure in spite of an incredible advantage in firepower and technology. The last theme is about how America’s military leadership failed to resist or change this self-defeating scenario.
Is there any other period in mankind’s history of warfare during which a war’s losing party won virtually every single battle? I think not.
The after-action report and command chronology of the battle for the Citadel of Hue create the impression that the military leaders had finally learned their lessons and had avoided these pitfalls. Specifically, these documents state that every effort was made to provide heavy artillery, air strikes, and naval gunfire support to the troops on the ground from the beginning of the battle. The reports further state that American attacks during this battle were made “upon completion of prep fires, walking artillery in front of advancing troops.”
When I first read these reports, I was dumbfounded. It was devastating enough to force to the surface my memories of the fighting and the dying of a terrible battle. It was much worse to find that the chain of command, for reasons unknown, had decided to fabricate a more acceptable history than what my memories demanded, and that these “facts” were becoming accepted as the actuality of history. When I read these “facts,” I felt that they were a betrayal of the men who fought and died there. This discovery became my motivation, my impetus, to see that history was made accurate.
Quite by chance, in 1986,1 was exposed to The Art of War, by Sun Tzu. I was attending a professional sales strategy conference sponsored by the computer company I was then working for, and the conference coordinator continually referred to this work. Since it sounded like a fascinating source of information for business strategy, I purchased a copy of it and started reading. I did not expect to find what I found.
There are at least eleven quotations in The Art of War, including the four at the beginning of this book, warning military leaders that “interference by the sovereign” is a surefire formula for disaster. Of course, in ancient China, this precept of warfare strategy was particularly important. It could take days or weeks to transmit commands from headquarters to the battle site. In those days, by the time a message from the sovereign arrived at the battlefield, the entire tactical situation could have changed; thus those orders, if executed, could easily result in disasters. The modern-day equivalent of this, the “rules of engagement” that Vietnam combat veterans were forced to deal with, could, and often did, cause their own disasters.
The Battle for Hue, during the infamous Tet Offensive of 1968 at the height of the Vietnam War, was an important chapter in Marine Corps history. The result of over thirty days of devastating house-to-house combat in the largest city in central Vietnam was a completely routed and nearly destroyed enemy force of over two NVA regiments by two battalions of Marines from the Fifth Marine Regiment. The First Battalion, Fifth Marine Regiment—my outfit—was issued a Presidential Unit Citation for our crushing defeat of the large NVA force occupying Hue’s Citadel, a huge walled and moated fortress guarding the Imperial Palace, the spiritual and religious center for millions of Vietnamese people.
The Battle for Hue also caused widespread destruction in this beautiful city, high casualties on both sides of the fighting lines, and the deaths of thousands of noncombatants, murdered by Viet Cong and NVA troops during the first few days of the Tet “liberation.” The battle was, ultimately, convincingly won by the Marines and was reported by the U.S. press to have been a “great victory” by U.S. and South Vietnamese forces. This battle was, in reality, a very close thing, a near-disaster, which could have just as easily resulted in the complete destruction of the First Battalion, Fifth Marine Regiment as a fighting unit. The Battle for Hue, now another fabled victory in the Leatherneck’s long history of major American victories, could have just as easily gone down in history as a major defeat along the lines of the Dien Bien Phu disaster in the French Indochinese War in 1954.
As someone who luckily survived the three weeks of house-to-house fighting inside the Citadel and who has lived to read and study The Art of War, I can be certain that several ancient Chinese military strategists rolled over in their graves in February 1968.