By far the heaviest street fighting followed the Marines of Task Force X-Ray, a brigade-size component of the 1st Marine Division. For almost a month, X-Ray battled block by block from south of the Perfume River right up to the walls of the Imperial Palace in the Hue Citadel. Typical of the vicious fighting was the combat endured by Company A, 1st Battalion, 1st Marines, 1st Marine Division. Less typical but just as representative were the exploits of a member of the 3rd Platoon, Sergeant Alfredo Gonzalez. On January 31, 1968, shortly after crossing the Dai Giang River ten miles southeast of Hue, Sgt Gonzalez’s “Bald Eagle” reaction force was hit by intense enemy fire. One of the Marines on top of a tank fell to the ground wounded. With complete disregard for his own safety, Sgt Gonzalez ran through the murderous crossfire to the assistance of his injured comrade. He lifted him up and although receiving serious fragmentation wounds during the rescue, he carried the injured Marine to safety. When a fortified machine gun bunker pinned down the entire company, Sgt Gonzalez, fully aware of the danger involved, charged across the fire-swept “Street without Joy” and destroyed the hostile position at point-blank range with grenades. Although seriously wounded again on February 3, he steadfastly refused medical treatment and continued to supervise his men and lead the attack. On February 4, the enemy had again pinned the company down, inflicting heavy casualties with automatic weapons and rocket fire. Sgt Gonzalez, utilizing a number of light antitank assault weapons, saved his entire platoon when he fearlessly moved from position to position firing numerous rounds at point blank range into the heavily fortified enemy emplacements. He singlehandedly knocked out the rocket positions and suppressed much of the enemy fire before falling mortally wounded. For conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity at the risk of his life above and beyond the call of duty, Sergeant Alfredo Gonzalez was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor.2
Staff Sergeant Joe R. Hooper was yet another shining example of American valor at Hue. A member of Delta Company, 2nd Battalion, 501st Airborne Infantry, 101st Airborne Division, he received the Medal of Honor for personally knocking out seven enemy bunkers and killing 22 enemy soldiers on February 21, 1968.3 While SSgt Hooper and Sgt Gonzalez were singled out to receive the Medal of Honor, many more fighting in the ferocious battle at Hue deserved it.
A little known fact about the battle for Hue was that Hanoi attempted a rare instance to employ its own airpower to support its soldiers, another indication of how serious the communists were about the campaign. On February 7, the North Vietnamese sent four IL-14 twin-engine cargo aircraft south to the battle area carrying explosives and field telephone cables. Faced with terrible weather, they airdropped their cargo into a lagoon roughly ten kilometers north of Hue. Three of the aircraft returned safely, but the fourth crashed into a mountain killing all aboard. Five days later two more modified IL-14s attempted a second mission to bomb Hue, but bad weather prevented them from finding the target. Both aircraft radioed that they were heading out to sea to jettison their bombs; they were never heard from again.4
The 25-day battle for Hue cost all sides dearly. USMC units sustained 142 KIA and close to 1,100 wounded. For their part in the battle, the 1st Cavalry Division (Airmobile) listed casualties of 68 killed and 453 wounded while the 1st Brigade, 101st Airborne Division reported 6 KIA and 56 WIA. All told, including ARVN losses, allied military casualties totaled more than 600 dead and nearly 3,800 wounded and missing. The enemy, likewise, did not escape unscathed. MACV estimated that 5,000 communist troops met their deaths in the bitter house-to-house fighting in Vietnam’s traditional cultural capital.5 Additionally, over 5,000 Hue civilians died in the fighting, most of them brutally executed by the NVA/VC. After the battle, the allies discovered mass graves containing approximately 3,000 civilians. Some had their feet and hands tied, and many showed signs of having been shot at close range execution style. At least 600 had been buried alive. The communists also abducted several thousand civilians to serve as porters during the battle; most vanished, never to be heard from again.6
Tactically, Hue signified an allied victory because the NVA and VC forces were driven from the city, paying a heavy price for their offensive, but was it a strategic victory? MACV claimed as much, yet on the home front such a notion did not take hold. Sizable segments of the public were confused, rattled, and skeptical of General Westmoreland’s rationalization regarding the overall surprise of Tet. He contended that while intelligence reports had foreseen a major enemy offensive, “nobody anticipated the extent to which attacks on towns and cities actually developed throughout the country.” Apparently General Westmoreland never did fathom why the surprise of Tet so upset the American public. Furthermore, the MACV commander wrote after the fact, somewhat bitterly, it would seem, that neither he nor his staff foresaw that “press and television would transform what was undeniably a catastrophic military defeat for the enemy into a presumed debacle for Americans and South Vietnamese.”7 Nor did Westmoreland or his staff ever foresee, as indicated by the enemy’s losses during Tet, the horrendous casualties that Hanoi was willing to absorb to achieve its goals, a miscalculation which may well have called into question MACV’s entire strategy of attrition, a stratagem that measured success not by positions taken and held but by the all-important body count.
In spite of various interpretations regarding the efficacy of that strategy, it is reasonable to assume that following Tet, with televised coverage of the dramatic fight at the U.S. Embassy and the battle of Hue fresh on their minds, Americans were understandably caught off guard and rocked back on their heels by the turn of events in Vietnam. Without question, the Tet Offensive cast doubt on the accuracy, if not the candor, of General Westmoreland’s optimistic forecasts about the war. For example, just three months earlier during a November 21, 1967 speech at the National Press Club in Washington, DC, General Westmoreland got a lot of coverage for saying, “With 1968 a new phase is starting … we have reached an important point where the end begins to come into view.”8 The general went on to tell his audience that the enemy was “certainly losing” and that their hopes “were bankrupt.” At a follow-up news conference he even used the phrase “light at the end of the tunnel” to describe the outlook for the war, repeating almost word-for-word French General Henri Navarre’s optimistic though doomed May 1953 prediction about France’s long campaign in Indochina. For all practical purposes, the contrast between Westmoreland’s optimistic assertions and what appeared to be happening on Vietnam battlefields served as a major catalyst for precipitating a dramatic downturn in the American public’s willingness to support the war.
In some measure, the bombshell of the Tet Offensive in general and the battle for Hue in particular did, indeed, herald a pronounced paradigm shift in American public opinion; in many ways Hue symbolized that erosion of support. For example, a Marine captain who commanded a 100-man rifle company during the battle for Hue unintentionally articulated the feelings of many Americans when he asked: “Did we have to destroy the town in order to save it?”9 From that time forward, American support for the war in Vietnam declined.
Rarely, however, can the reason behind a complicated event—or opinion—be attributed to a ‘single causation’ explanation. Nevertheless, after Tet and during the years since, countless Americans, including the MACV commander and many a Vietnam veteran, have cited the “liberal press” for continually misreporting the war to the American people; apparently the only true stories came from authorized MACV sources in Vietnam. A prevalent attitude argued that slanted news reports prompted the change in public opinion regarding support for the war.
Yet blaming the press for that shift by painting all journalists with the same tar brush smacked more of singling out scapegoats than facing head on the mistakes of omission or commission, or the realities of a frustrating and challenging military campaign, complicated by international and domestic politics. For many Americans, perhaps nothing captured the revulsion of the Tet Offensive and the war itself more than the disturbing televised images of
South Vietnam’s national police chief, Nguyen Ngoc Loan, pistol in outstretched hand, executing a suspected Vietcong guerrilla with a bullet through the head on a busy Saigon street. Moreover, the disconcerting sight of Viet Cong insurgents storming the grounds of the American Embassy in Saigon was in no way the fault of the Fourth Estate; pointing the ‘blame finger’ at reporters for whipping up anti-war sentiment was in most cases analogous to ‘shooting the messenger.’
In any event, prior to Tet the majority of Americans thought we were winning in Vietnam; however, the massive, coordinated communist attack throughout the country shook that belief right down to its core. But in truth it was not shaken by any single cause brought on by liberal bias on the part of the press. Obviously, news reporting about Vietnam influenced public opinion, yet it was never the stand-alone basis for the shift in attitude, even though Gallup polls taken between February and March 1968 reported a drop in “hawks,” or supporters of the war, from 60 percent to 41 percent, and a corresponding leap in “doves” from 24 percent to 42 percent.10 Clearly, attitudes were changing. For the first time, a sizable percentage of Americans had begun to conclude that the war was unwinnable.
These national doubts manifested themselves in a series of disconcerting questions. If we were winning, how could that massive attack have happened? If we were winning, why had General Westmoreland requested 206,000 more troops? If we were winning, why did a disgruntled Robert McNamara resign under fire as Secretary of Defense? If we were winning, why did Walter Cronkite, arguably the most trusted man in America, broadcast on February 27, 1968 that:
To say that we are closer to victory today is to believe, in the face of the evidence, the optimists who have been wrong in the past. To suggest we are on the edge of defeat is to yield to unreasonable pessimism. To say that we are mired in stalemate seems the only realistic, yet unsatisfactory, conclusion…. But it is increasingly clear to this reporter that the only rational way out then will be to negotiate, not as victors, but as an honorable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy, and did the best they could.11
While network television news anchors, various political pundits, and high-level administration officials in Washington debated the “deeper meanings of the deeper meanings” concerning how Tet had happened and why, American combat forces in Vietnam pressed on with the grim job at hand in the single most deadly year for Americans in the entire war. Nowhere was the fighting more intense than in the two northern-most provinces at the big battles of Hue and Khe Sanh.
Intertwined throughout the Tet Offensive was the specter of Khe Sanh, an obscure, isolated plateau base just below the DMZ and only a few miles west of the Laotian border. The 77-day siege, where 6,000 Marines were surrounded by more than 20,000 NVA from the 325C and 304 Divisions, lasted from January 20 to April 8 and constituted one of the longest and largest battles of the entire war. Known as Operation Scotland, the defense of Khe Sanh Combat Base and the hilltops surrounding it fell to Colonel David E. Lownds and his 26th Marine Regiment. With the only road into Khe Sanh, Route 9, cut and held by elements of the enemy’s 320th and 324th Divisions, Lownds and his men were forced by circumstance to rely totally on resupply by air. Coupled with the distinct possibility that the four NVA divisions in the area were massing for a large set-piece battle, comparisons to 1954’s stunning Viet Minh victory 14 years earlier at Dien Bin Phu were bound to occur.
Ironically, much of the argument about defending Khe Sanh came from the Marines themselves. By tradition and doctrine they had a natural distaste for static defense, insisting that the real danger in I Corps came from a direct enemy threat to Quang Tri City, not from massed NVA forces around the isolated Khe Sanh outpost. As was to be seen throughout the Vietnam War, multiple layers of disagreement often surfaced, not only between different participating services, but also within each unit. Nowhere was that dispute more pronounced than between the Marines and MACV. For example, in spite of Westmoreland’s orders to reinforce and hold Khe Sanh, Brigadier General Lowell E. English, assistant commander of the 3rd Marine Division, complained that defense of the remote outpost was ridiculous. He viewed Khe Sanh as “a trap to expend absolutely unreasonable amounts of men and material to defend a piece of terrain that wasn’t worth a damn.”12
Operation Niagara, a massive tactical air campaign for the defense of Khe Sanh, set off the next confrontation between General Westmoreland and the Marines. The MACV commander insisted on centralizing Niagara under a single manager for air, Air Force General William W. Momyer; the Marine Corps balked. They possessed their own aviation squadrons that operated under their own close air support doctrine and were extremely reluctant to relinquish authority over their aircraft to an Air Force general. According to Westmoreland, that was “the one issue during my service in Vietnam to prompt me to consider resigning.”13 He got his way. By the end of Operation Niagara, more than 24,000 tactical air strikes and 2,700 B-52 sorties dropped 110,000 tons of bombs on NVA forces in and around Khe Sanh, squashing entire NVA units and killing an estimated 10,000 enemy soldiers.14
On the ground, some of the bloodiest small unit fights of the Vietnam War occurred on several of the key hills approximately seven kilometers west of Khe Sanh Combat Base. Hills 861, 881 North and 881 South, named for their height in meters, formed the prominent terrain around the Khe Sanh plateau. Climbing the steep slopes of Hill 881 South, 2nd Lieutenant Michael H. Thomas engaged in one of those fights on January 20, 1968. Lt Thomas led his 2nd Platoon from Company I, 3rd Battalion, 26th Marines, against a battalion-sized force of enemy soldiers occupying a series of reinforced bunkers dug into one of the hill’s ridges. From those locations the platoon was immediately taken under intense automatic weapons fire, wounding several of the Marines. When a medical evacuation helicopter approached to extract the wounded, it was hit by highly accurate machine gun fire and crashed. Lt Thomas quickly organized a rescue team and led his men through murderous small arms fire to the crash site and dragged the crew to cover.
Learning that the adjacent platoon was pinned down and that its leader was wounded, the Pawnee, Oklahoma native maneuvered his unit through the concentrated enemy fire across 500 meters of open terrain to reinforce the beleaguered platoon. Lt Thomas then repeatedly exposed himself to a withering hail of bullets as he moved from one position to another, encouraging and directing his men’s return fire. Discovering that an eight-man patrol was cut off, he organized and personally led a search party into the killing zone, successfully locating the patrol, all its members wounded. One at a time, he hoisted each man on his back and moved them to positions of relative safety. Although wounded in the face while carrying a sixth Marine to cover, he refused medical assistance and elected to continue his rescue efforts. Despite his painful wound, loss of blood, and sheer exhaustion, the intrepid platoon leader, with complete disregard for his own safety, again crawled through the savage barrage in an attempt to rescue the two remaining casualties who were lying in the open. At that point he received multiple wounds and was killed. For his extraordinary heroism, Lieutenant Michael H. Thomas was posthumously awarded the Navy Cross.15
Once the Marines had secured Hill 881 South, they taunted the enemy each morning by raising an American flag on a makeshift flagpole, complete with a bugle call, “To the Colors.” One of the Marine officers observed that they did it so the NVA “would observe the colors being raised and know that the ragged, dirty, and tired marines were still full of fight and were there to stay.” And every morning the enemy responded to the ceremony with a concentrated barrage of artillery and mortar fire.16
Even as the large, newsworthy battles raged around Hue and Khe Sanh, most of the firefights in I Corps were short, furious clashes between platoon or squad-sized units, and the majority only lasted a few minutes. In the A Shau Valley, the small, clandestine, unpublicized clashes were even more ferocious and bloody, frequently involving Special Forces reconnaissance teams consisting of only six to ten men—against hundreds.
S
ince the beginning of 1968, CCN’s forward operating base at Phu Bai had been tasked with a dicey intelligence collection effort in the A Shau Valley, code-named Grand Canyon. NVA supply depots in and around the valley fed and armed most of the enemy troops in central and southern I Corps; consequently the supplies that sustained the 1968 Tet Offensive against Hue had arrived through the valley. Ordered by General Westmoreland, Grand Canyon inserted numerous SOG teams into the valley to determine the extent of the infiltration—only to have the teams chewed up by NVA counter-recon companies. Losses became so heavy that some SOG team leaders balked at going back into the Valley of Death. In an attempt to shore up the reconnaissance effort and sagging morale, a new commander took over as FOB boss on March 3. The veteran SF officer arrived at Phu Bai apparently infuriated by the number of failed or aborted A Shau missions and incensed by the attitudes of team leaders, so to motivate his men and lead by example, the new commander accompanied a team into the A Shau on March 4. Two days later he was killed on the valley’s east wall during a helicopter insert when the CH-46 he was aboard was shot down.17
Three weeks later, SOG sent another team into the Valley of Death—with almost identical results. On March 27, Staff Sergeant Johnny C. Calhoun was leading his team just south of Ta Bat when it was attacked by a large NVA force. SSgt Calhoun stood alone providing covering fire for the rest of the patrol as they withdrew. During the bitter fighting at point blank range, the Newman, Georgia native was hit several times in the chest and stomach, and when last seen by interpreter Ho-Thong as he slumped to the ground, Calhoun pulled the pin from a grenade and clutched it to explode among the enemy soldiers swarming around him. Even though the rest of the team was eventually extracted, Johnny Calhoun rests forever in the A Shau. For his extraordinary heroism, he was posthumously awarded the Distinguished Service Cross.18
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