by Eric Hammel
In September 1967 the intelligence-gathering team headed by Robert Brewer, the senior U.S. intelligence advisor assigned to the Government of Vietnam's (GVN's) Quang Tri Provincial Headquarters, unmasked a Communist secret agent and immediately doubled him back on his superiors. The double agent, who was dubbed X-l, handed Brewer's team a coup of the first magnitude: a document called Resolution 13. One look set Robert Brewer's heart aquiver, for he knew that Ho Chi Minh, the Vietnamese Communist supreme leader, had promulgated Resolution 1 in 1919, and that only eleven other such resolutions had been set forth in the nearly fifty intervening years.
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Resolution 13 was the product of the Thirteenth Plenum of the North Vietnamese Central Committee. The resolution was an audacious blueprint aimed at attaining a swift victory to a war whose character had taken on the agony of a slow death.
At the time the Thirteenth Plenum was convened, in March or April 1967, the Communists were losing the Second Indochina War, as they called it. Simply put, the reinvigorated Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) and the growing U.S. combat force in South Vietnam were killing, maiming, or capturing more Viet Cong and NVA fighters each month than the VC could recruit or the NVA could infiltrate from the North. Moreover, the North itself was under costly siege as a result of the U.S. Air Force's and U.S. Navy's massively destructive Rolling Thunder bombing program. In the political arena, one of North Vietnam's two chief sponsors, the Soviet Union, was pushing for a negotiated settlement to the expensive and inconclusive war. And, even more ominous, there were signs that the National Liberation Front (NLF), the South Vietnamese Communist party organization, was actively engaged in prenegotiation talks with the United States.
In spite of the hard evidence indicating an eventual and perhaps imminent Communist collapse in the South, the Thirteenth Plenum concluded that victory was attainable if they continued to use the strategies of the First Indochina War, by which the hated French colonialists had been humiliated and driven out.
An old saying has it that wars are controlled by old men seeking to relive past glories. The truth of this is nowhere more evident than in North Vietnam's great Tet Offensive of 1968.
Briefly, Hanoi's Politburo perceived North Vietnam's independence and Communist existence as being based upon a triple foundation. To these old men, the foundation consisted of a Communist general uprising in August 1945, the victory over 10,000 French Army soldiers at Dien Bien Phu in May 1954, and the immediate resultant collapse of French political will to wage war in Indochina.
The evidence now suggests that the aging architects of the Tet Offensive sought to re-create the triple foundation of Communist Vietnamese nationhood. They thought the time was ripe to seize power over the southern portion of partitioned Vietnam by means of a popular insurrection—another general uprising—against the GVN. They felt also that they could achieve a significant and perhaps decisive military victory over U.S. and ARVN forces, thereby destroying or at least impairing their will to continue the war. All was aimed at achieving a military victory that would lead to a decisive political victory.
The Communists dubbed their plan Tong Kong Kich-Tong Khoi Nghia (TCK-TKN)—General Offensive-General Uprising.
TCK-TKN was a long time in reaching fruition, but Phase I was put into action in the summer of 1967 at Con Thien. Con Thien was a U.S. Marine-held hilltop position overlooking the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ), the putative boundary between the two Vietnams. The so-called Con Thien siege and similar NVA-initiated events through the autumn of 1967—chiefly at Loc Ninh, Song Be, and Dak To—had two purposes: to test the mettle of U.S. and ARVN units and to draw the enemy to the periphery of South Vietnam—away from the major cities and political centers that were to be the objectives of Phase II.
Phase I was a bloody debacle for the NVA and VC; they were repulsed at every turn. Though the Communists learned important tactical lessons and were successful in diverting the enemy's attention to the periphery, both the NVA and VC lost many irreplaceable combat veterans and hard-to-replace weapons.
Of the lessons learned from Phase I, the most important was that it was imperative to avoid U.S. combat units whenever possible. The strength and mobility of the U.S. units were a threat to the success of TCK-TKN as a whole. Senior General Vo Nguyen Giap, the chief military architect of TCK-TKN, changed the military plan: henceforth, the NVA and VC were to concentrate their attacks on ARVN combat units, which were weaker than American units. The only U.S. installations that were to be engaged directly were senior command-and-control headquarters and key air bases from which American relief forces could be mounted. Giap assumed—accurately, as it turned out—that American senior commanders would rush U.S. combat units to aid their own endangered headquarters rather than relieve GVN political centers, which were the real targets of the general offensive.
On the political side of the plan, the North Vietnamese and their southern Communist allies believed that the people of South Vietnam were ready to rise up against the so-called puppet regime in Saigon. It had long been a delusion of the aging Politburo that the August 1945 Communist coup against the French had been wholeheartedly supported—if not actively advanced—by the majority of Vietnamese and other Indochinese peoples. By mid-1967, the Hanoi government was certain that South Vietnam's common citizens were prepared to join in the reunification of their nation under the Communist banner. At the very least, the northerners believed, the peoples of South Vietnam so hated the American occupiers and their openly corrupt puppet regime that they would rise up simply to reassert their freedom and independence. Once the NVA and VC and their political cadres had invested the South's political centers, the Communists thought the majority of the people would turn out to take up arms and build barricades to prevent the return of the capitalist oppressors. The Politburo hoped that large portions of the ARVN rank and file, softened up in advance by anti-GVN and anti-American propaganda, would mutiny and perhaps even rally to the Communists.
Phase II of Resolution 13 called for an assault on the major cities and political centers of the South. Phase III was to be an all-out attack on the Khe Sanh Combat Base, which was to be besieged just prior to the Phase II assault. The operation against isolated Khe Sanh was designed to be a replica of the victory at Dien Bien Phu. In 1954 the French had agreed to negotiate before Dien Bien Phu fell, but the loss of that isolated base so appalled the French public that the political will of the French government collapsed. The Politburo believed that the 1968 Phase II attacks on the cities would convince the American public that the war could not be won; the fall of Khe Sanh would end the Americans' ability to negotiate realistically over the reunification of Vietnam. This was the strategy that had brought victory in the First Indochina War, arid the Politburo thought it could be made to work again.
In actuality the negotiation phase of TCK-TKN was kicked off in advance of the others. On December 30, 1967, North Vietnamese Foreign Minister Nguyen Duy Trinh stated publicly that the Communists were ready to negotiate a peace settlement immediately upon the cessation of the American bombing of the North. Trinh's was the first definite statement out of Hanoi to that effect; previously the Communists had said only that peace talks could begin if the bombing ceased. In the context of TCK-TKN, Trinh's announcement was the first assault on American political motivation to remain in the war.
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Robert Brewer's double agent, X-l, was not, of course, to be totally trusted. For one thing, his Resolution 13 was much more specific about targets and timetables than most Communist plans that had fallen into U.S. or South Vietnamese hands. Moreover, it was not written in the usual Communist jargon. To test the resolution's validity, Brewer drew up a long list of indicators that, if they surfaced between September 1967 and January 1968, would validate X-l's version of Resolution 13.
Throughout December and January the Communists tripped off the indicators on Brewer's list, one after another. For example, Brewer felt that if the Communi
sts were really going to mount TCK-TKN, they would precede it with reconnaissance by higher-ranking officers than had previously been involved in such missions. Sure enough, several NA captains were killed near Thrieu Phong District Headquarters. And, on the night of January 1-2, 1968, an NVA regimental commander and four other officers were killed by U.S. Marines in the wire at Khe Sanh. Brewer and his staff felt also that, if the Communists were planning to attack Quang Tri City with the seven battalions indicated in Resolution 13, they would probably use the assembly areas they had used in the past, booby-trapping them in advance to keep ARVN and U.S. Marine patrols out. On schedule, the assembly areas blossomed with booby traps.
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As Robert Brewer and scores of other intelligence types throughout South Vietnam were to learn, they did not know the half of it. But they knew something, enough to prepare themselves and such of their countrymen and allies as could be persuaded to listen. For the vast majority of South Vietnam's 14,000,000 citizens and the 500,000 Western troops based in South Vietnam, TCK-TKN would be delivered in the dark of night, an utterly devastating surprise.
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Chapter 2
Hue, to the Western eye, where the civilizations of Vietnam and France merged to form a unique culture reminiscent of and yet distinct from both, the embodiment of the old catchphrase "where East meets West." A city outwardly both Buddhist and Catholic, both Vietnamese and French, both ancient and modern, both progressive and conservative. Hue of the broad, tree-lined European boulevards and the thronging Asian marketplace. Hue, the Imperial City, golden relic of Vietnam's faded glories; Hue, the university city, hopeful symbol of Vietnam's modern future. A city uneasily at peace in a nation totally at war, Hue was now at the tranquil eye of the hurricane, but was soon to reap the whirlwind.
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The Christian year turned from 1967 to 1968; Tet Nguyen Dan—the Buddhist Lunar New Year, the Year of the Monkey-approached. Hue had been so long untouched by the war that it was virtually unguarded, and unprepared for the special fate Resolution 13 had fashioned for it.
In all their bloody history, the Vietnamese never forgot Tet, never stinted in its celebration. In all of Vietnam, nowhere was the annual week-long festival celebrated as intensely as it was in Hue. Think of Tet week as all your cherished religious holidays and favorite patriotic festivals rolled into one. If you can do that, you can perhaps begin to understand the reverence and joy with which Tet is celebrated in Vietnam. But you cannot begin to experience the thrill and sense of renewal of Tet in Hue.
To top-ranked officials in both Vietnams, Tet 1968 probably offered new hope, new light. Certainly, to the Communists who had planned Phase II of the General Offensive-General Uprising to coincide with the Lunar New Year, Tet 1968 held a bold hope for the future. And to the highly placed optimists in Saigon and their American allies, it seemed possible that the Year of the Monkey might bring a favorable peace, for the Communists appeared to be in decline: Communist battlefield casualties had been extremely high in recent months; the NLF was making peaceable noises, and the North Vietnamese foreign minister had recently proposed a quid pro quo that could lead to direct negotiations.
As for the common folk—the farmers and soldiers, civil servants and shopkeepers on whose shoulders the blows of war fell most heavily—most felt as the people of Thuy Thanh Village felt: they wanted only to be left alone.
To be left alone: as Tet 1968 approached, fate and Vo Nguyen Giap had already ensured that the people of Hue would not realize that hope. No city in Vietnam was to experience as much violent bloodshed and destruction for so many days as was Hue and her 140,000 citizens.
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The largest, most obvious symbol of Hue's dual past—the Vietnamese imperial past and the French imperialist past—was the hulking Imperial Citadel, copied from the Imperial City in Peking and adapted by French military architects. Emperor Gia Long began work on the Citadel in 1802, upon his ascension to the throne. His ascension followed years of bloody civil war, which began when his family, the Nguyen dynasty, was deposed and murdered and ended when the usurper's son was executed. When the Citadel was completed in 1820, its French architects adjudged it to be impregnable by any Asian army of the day. Defended by a moat and six-meter-high earth-filled masonry walls, its four corners aligned in the cardinal directions, the Citadel measured 2,500 meters on each of its sides. Over the years the ramparts were strengthened, so in some places they were seventy-five meters thick. Behind these walls was an entire city: streets, parks, moats, homes, villas, shops, and government buildings. Within this city was a second walled city, the Imperial Palace. The palace walls were two to five meters high, and they measured 700 meters to a side. In all, the Citadel encompassed more than six square kilometers.
The Citadel dominated all of Hue from its position on the northern bank of Song Huong, the River of Perfumes. In late 1967 a modern European-style city nearly as large as the Citadel spread along the Perfume River's south bank, directly opposite the Citadel. Between rice paddies and the numerous streams and canals were patches of dry ground that formed Hue's distinctive neighborhoods. During the war years, when the city's population swelled from the influx of peasants from the countryside, unsightly shantytowns and squatters' villages sprang up, ringing the city on valuable land traditionally kept under intense cultivation.
Hue rested on the generally flat coastal plain, between the South China Sea, only three kilometers to the east, and the impinging Annamite Cordillera, only three kilometers to the west. Situated in this flat, narrow passage directly astride National Route 1 (Highway 1), Vietnam's main north-south coastal highway, it is strange that Hue was not seriously molested by the Viet Cong prior to 1968. This peace was perhaps a measure of her special place in the hearts of the South Vietnamese of both camps.
Few ARVN units were based in or around Hue, though the very competent 1st ARVN Division was headquartered in a corner of the Citadel along with one of its infantry battalions. And the city's ample port facilities and railroad and road junctions made it a natural location for support units and some of the 1st ARVN Division's cantonments and training facilities.
There was no U.S. combat unit based within miles of Hue in late 1967. The main American facility in Hue was the MACV Compound, headquarters of Advisory Team 3 of the Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (MACV, pronounced "mack-vee"). From this sparsely fortified former hotel, hard against Highway 1 and just a little more than a block south of the Perfume River, U.S. Army officers and specialists and a few U.S. Marine and Australian trainers traveled out to advise the 1st ARVN Division. The MACV Compound was hardly more than it had been in its former life: a hotel for transient advisors supported by some permanently billeted administrative personnel.
The nearest large American base to Hue was at Phu Bai, which was astride Highway 1 about eleven kilometers south of the Perfume River. The Phu Bai Combat Base, as it was somewhat grandiloquently titled, was a major American headquarters and support facility. For the moment, overseeing Phu Bai and several U.S. Marine combat units working out of it was Task Force X-Ray, a subheadquarters of the 1st U.S. Marine Division. The Hue-Phu Bai airfield—a field run by the U.S. Air Force, just north of the combat base—was the largest facility of its kind in the region.
North of Hue, on Highway 1 exactly seventeen kilometers from the Imperial Palace, was a former French Army base called PK 17 (Post Kilometer 17). The site was now the headquarters of the 1st ARVN Division's 3rd Infantry Regiment and, usually, a reinforced battalion or two. Still farther north along Highway 1 was Camp Evans, a major base operated under the aegis of the 3rd U.S. Marine Division but soon to be turned over to freshly transferred U.S. Army units.
Though Hue could be reinforced easily from nearby Phu Bai, PK 17, and Camp Evans, the truth was that at the end of January 1968 no one in Hue or any of the nearby bases was giving any thought to the looming Communist threat. No one knew there was a threat. The ARVN infantry battalion assigned to the city consist
ed mostly of new conscripts undergoing the first stages of basic training. All the other battalions of the 1st ARVN Division were in the field, spread across Quang Tri and Thua Thien provinces, South Vietnam's two northernmost states.
If the 1st ARVN Division was tactically unprepared to defend Hue because of pressing business elsewhere, the civilian population, in no way inured to the war that had reached other southern cities, was equally unready to meet an attack. There were thousands of war-experienced refugees in Hue, but that is exactly the point—Hue had always been the perfect refuge because it was so utterly untouched by the war. Indeed, the only violence Hue had seen in the decade of the 1960s had been during protest demonstrations by Hue's devout, politically active Buddhists. The first of these, in 1963, had been directed against favoritism by the Catholic president, Ngo Dinh Diem, on behalf of Catholics. The 1963 Buddhist uprising had been a major factor in Diem's downfall, and a similar Buddhist insurrection in 1966 had nearly led to the ouster of the military junta in power at that time. The second Buddhist insurrection was quelled and the junta saved by direct U.S. military intervention in Hue.
It was a telling measure of Hue's secure and peaceful status that high-ranking ARVN officers paid large bribes to win assignment to the various military and civil agencies headquartered there.
The American military situation in the far northern reaches of South Vietnam's Military Region I (I Corps) was in a state of flux. The American presence in I Corps was doubling and perhaps trebling.
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Before 1968,1 Corps was the realm of the I ARVN Corps (the 1st and 2nd ARVN divisions and 51st ARVN Infantry Regiment) and the III U.S. Marine Amphibious Force (III MAF—the 1st and 3rd Marine divisions, the 23rd "Americal" Infantry Division, and the 2nd Republic of Korea Marine Brigade). As 1967 gave way to 1968, several new units were deployed to I Corps: the 1st Cavalry Division and the newly arrived airmobile 101st Airborne Division. The Americal Division was to remain in the southern I Corps area, alongside the 2nd ARVN Division, 51st ARVN Regiment, and 2nd Korean Marine Brigade. The 1st Marine Division—an experienced, first-rate combat unit—was to move into northern I Corps to fight #beside the 1st ARVN and 3rd Marine divisions. At the same time, the U.S. Army's innovative, highly mobile, and brilliantly successful 1st Cavalry Division—the Air Cav—was moving, one brigade at a time, into northern I Corps to help the 1st ARVN and 3rd Marine divisions counter increased NVA activity. Indeed, the NVA threat was deemed so serious—and the potential for a sweeping American victory so great—that northern I Corps was slated to receive more American combat troops than any other region of the country, including the strategically vital III Corps region around Saigon.