by Eric Hammel
*
While Mark Gravel had been arguing fruitlessly with the TOC for trucks to take out Golf/2/5's wounded, Captain Chuck Meadows had ordered Lieutenant Mike McNeil's 1st Platoon to take over the company lead. McNeil's platoon turned left at the end of the bridge and proceeded up Highway 1, right in the shadow of the massive wall of the Citadel. In the first block McNeil's platoon passed a movie theater that was showing Gone with the Wind. Back at the bridge ramp, Chuck Meadows, still shaken from the challenge at the bridge, was looking over the casualties and taking reports. It was quiet—a condition Meadows was learning to dread as a portent of violence.
Private First Class Bill Tant, who had been thirsting for his first action earlier in the day, was about to get a bellyful of it. Tant's squad, led by Corporal Glenn Lucas, was the vanguard of McNeil's platoon when it reached an intersection with a tiny alley leading through some buildings fronting the Citadel wall. Corporal Lucas turned to Tant, who was the point fire-team leader, and told him to wait until he, Lucas, could check out the passage. Tant was in awe of Lucas's calm bravery. Though Lucas had only ten days left in Vietnam, he was still taking mortal chances.
No sooner had Corporal Lucas disappeared from view than Tant heard an AK-47 burst to life. Then an M-16 fired. Then Corporal Lucas ran into sight. He had a flesh wound and a story. An NVA soldier had fired at him, and he had fired back. He said he thought the NVA soldier had been killed. With that, Lucas resumed the lead and moved up Highway 1 again. The next street up was the Thuong Tu Gate road, a pretty little commercial intersection with a pharmacy on one corner.
When Corporal Lucas's squad turned right at the intersection, it was confronted by the intimidating Citadel wall; the massive gate; and, of all things, a bridged moat. For the first time Bill Tant could see the huge NLF banner flying on the Citadel flagpole. It was an awesome sight for Tant and his comrades, who had not begun to overcome the multiple shocks of the day.
Just as Corporal Lucas's vanguard squad reached a point about fifty meters north of the Highway 1 intersection, the entire company came under intense fire from atop the Citadel wall and particularly from positions within the gate. From the bridge ramp, Chuck Meadows could see what he presumed to be enemy soldiers moving across Highway 1 southwest of his position. But—despite the evidence of the intense fire—he could not detect any NVA closer in.
The enemy soldiers nearest to Bill Tant's position outside the gate were only thirty to forty meters away. In a flash, four or five Marines behind Tant and on the same side of the street were bowled over. About the same number were shot as they advanced toward the gate on the other side of the street. Tant tried to enter the nearest building to get out of the line of fire, but found that the door and windows had been nailed shut. All the doors and windows of all the buildings fronting the gate road had been sealed. As more and more of his comrades went down, Tant stepped behind a tree, which provided adequate cover from the sheets of bullets that were flying down the narrow road. Corporal Lucas leaped for the same tree, but he did not make it. As Tant looked on, Lucas fell to the roadway. Tant could not see where Lucas had been hit, but it was obvious that the squad leader had been wounded seriously. Tant wanted to rescue Lucas, to pull him behind the tree, but the enemy fire was literally chipping away at his cover on both sides. There was no way to move safely. To his rear, Tant heard someone yelling to Lieutenant McNeil, telling the platoon commander that the point squad was getting cut to pieces.
Captain Meadows and his CP group—the company gunny and several radiomen and forward-observer teams—dashed up the highway to the intersection of the gate road. To be closer to the action, Meadows went forward to a big tree right in front of the pharmacy. From there, he could see into the Thuong Tu Gate during lulls in the shooting. At first glance he ordered Lieutenant McNeil to send several Marines up to the pharmacy roof so they could get better observation and firing positions. McNeil sent an M-60 team and several riflemen to the roof, and they began dueling with the NVA inside the gate.
Even a cursory assessment consisting of quick peeks was enough to convince Captain Meadows that it was time to abort the mission. With over two kilometers of narrow streets separating his lead riflemen from the 1st ARVN Division CP compound, there was no way anyone was going through the Thuong Tu Gate that day.
Golf/2/5 could not advance, but it remained to be seen if the remnants of Corporal Lucas's squad could withdraw from the gate road. As Bill Tant stared at Corporal Lucas's inert form, calculating the odds of a rescue attempt, Hospitalman Donald Kirkham, one of the 1st Platoon's two Navy corpsmen, inched his way up the sidewalk, taking care of each of the wounded Marines he encountered along the way. After many minutes, Kirkham reached a point opposite Corporal Lucas. Just as he was about to move away from the relative safety of the wall to grab the wounded squad leader, Lucas, who had not moved a muscle before Kirkham arrived, motioned violently for the corpsman to stay back. But Doc Kirkham made his move anyway—and was shot in the throat.
Chuck Meadows was on his second tour in Vietnam, as a combat company commander. He had been in dangerous situations before, but he had never been in a mess like the one he was facing now. His company was being systematically chewed to pieces, and there was no guarantee it was going to be able to withdraw without losing most of a platoon. Slowly, as Lieutenant McNeil's rear squads painstakingly built up the tempo of their return fire, several survivors toward the rear of the pinned squad were able to extricate themselves. But there were still dead and wounded Marines caught in the crossfire pouring out of the gate and up the narrow, sheer-sided gate road. A good deal of the limited vista Captain Meadows had enjoyed at the start of the fight was now obscured by dust and gunsmoke. Nevertheless, he was able to direct the fire of the M-60 machine gun from the pharmacy roof. The M-60 seemed to be having some effect on the hottest NVA positions inside the gate. With the aid of smoke grenades effectively laid down by grenadiers firing M-79 grenade launchers, several more of the Marines who were pinned down along the street were extricated.
After a head count Lieutenant McNeil reported that he was still five men short. A great deal of shouting brought forth a clue as to the whereabouts of the missing men. Corporal Glenn Lucas, Private First Class Bill Tant, Lance Corporal Patrick Lucas, Private First Class Gerald Kinny, and Hospitalman Donald Kirk-ham were arrayed around Tant's tree, which was about fifty meters from Captain Meadows's tree.
Someone hot-wired a Vietnamese flatbed rice truck. As Meadows ordered his men to heave or fire smoke grenades through the gate, the truck ran forward to act as a moving shield for those who were still trapped in the street.
As soon as Bill Tant was able to leave the cover of his bullet-riddled tree, he reached out to grab Corporal Glenn Lucas. At the same moment, Lance Corporal Patrick Lucas also grabbed the wounded corporal, and he and Tant dragged him to safety. Two Marines who had come forward with the truck grabbed Doc Kirkham, but the corpsman had already bled to death from the gaping bullet hole in his throat. The extrication was nearly flawless and resulted in no new casualties. However, Private First Class Gerald Kinny was not among the evacuees.
Chuck Meadows momentarily ran out of the special brand of nerve it takes to order other men into mortal danger. He laid down his Ml 6 behind the tree that had served as his cover and ran forward into the smoky haze that enshrouded the gate road. He found Kinny fifty meters forward, on the right side of the street. With one hand, Meadows heaved Kinny up by his belt buckle, and, with Kinny's M-16 in his other hand, he began running back toward the intersection. Halfway back, Meadows ran into his battalion radioman, Corporal William Peterson, who helped drag Kinny the rest of the way behind Meadows's tree in the Highway 1 intersection. Unfortunately, Private First Class Gerald Kinny was dead on arrival.
With Lieutenant McNeil's entire platoon accounted for, Captain Meadows radioed Lieutenant Colonel Gravel and gave his assessment of Golf/2/5's situation. By then, Meadows could tell the 1/1 battalion commander that his company
had sustained five killed and forty-four wounded—losses of about 35 percent— since first being fired on north of the An Cuu Bridge. Meadows told Gravel that, on his own authority, he was pulling back to the Nguyen Hoang Bridge. He asked that trucks be made available to evacuate the dead and wounded. A few minutes later Gravel called back to approve Meadows's plan.
As the main body of Golf/2/5 re-formed around the northwestern bridge ramp, the NVA in the area ceased firing. As soon as it was relatively safe, a Vietnamese man emerged from the rubble of a nearby building. He was wearing an ARVN uniform and a red beret—the symbol of the elite ARVN airborne battalions—and identified himself as 1st Lieutenant Doan Van Ba, a medical doctor. Doctor Ba was hustled aboard one of the last trucks on the north side of the bridge and driven to MACV. He had some difficulty establishing himself as a bona fide physician in the eyes of some spooked MACV staffers. But, to Dr. Steve Bernie, hitherto the only doctor at MACV, Bac Si [Doctor] Ba quickly established himself as a competent surgeon and a real godsend.
*
The withdrawal across the Nguyen Hoang Bridge to MACV was completed around 1900, nearly three hours after the doomed move on the Citadel had commenced. After the withdrawal, Lieutenant Colonel Gravel led a squad from Alpha/1/1, two Marine tanks, and several MACV volunteers on an attempt to rescue an unknown number of American civilians from the CORDS building, which was two blocks south and several blocks west of MACV. The ragtag force nearly penetrated to the objective, but it was turned back by an extremely strong NVA response.
As the stymied rescue force was preparing to return to MACV, scores of civilian refugees, many of them children, emerged from the rubble of several nearby buildings. The NVA did not pursue, so the refugees followed the American force back toward the MACV Compound. The Americans were glad to save some lives, but the refugees constituted a security nightmare. The wounded civilians were taken to the overworked MACV dispensary; the others were bedded down in an adjacent ARVN compound.
On January 31, the last fruitful act mounted from MACV was a late-night helicopter medevac from Doc Lao Park engineered by Lieutenant Colonel Mark Gravel. In addition to the eight wounded evacuees who were carried up from MACV and lifted out, four of the rescuers had to be medevacked because of wounds they suffered on the way to the LZ. From this Gravel learned an important if costly lesson: Never again did he send his men into an unsecured area by way of city streets, which the NVA obviously knew well enough to stake out. After January 31, Gravel always took a tank along to make new streets, right through buildings and walled compounds. The method destroyed a lot of Hue, but it saved lives.
*
For the first Marines to arrive in Hue from Phu Bai, January 31 was a bloody day. In the two infantry companies, a combat force of about 300 men, approximately eighty Americans had been killed or wounded, though twenty of the wounded were treated and returned to duty on the spot. For all that, however, MACV was relatively secure, and, more important, higher American headquarters knew for a certainty that Communist forces now held most of the city and apparently were there to stay. The fog of war was far from dissipating, but it had been penetrated. The problem thus became less a matter of determining what was going on than of figuring out a way to deal with it.
***
Chapter 12
By means of radio conversations during the night of January 31, I ARVN Corps and III Marine Amphibious Force (III MAF) established some broad policy guidelines regarding clearing operations in and around Hue. Codifying reality, the two senior headquarters agreed that the Communist forces inside Hue would have to be subdued and driven out under the separate but broadly coordinated efforts of the two local combat commands— Brigadier General Ngo Quang Truong's 1st ARVN Division and Brigadier General Foster LaHue's Task Force X-Ray. The north bank of the Perfume River was declared the boundary between the two commands. That is, Truong's ARVN battalions would be responsible for clearing the Citadel and the approaches to it, while LaHue's yet-to-be-constituted task force would clear the southern city and the approaches to it.
Since I ARVN Corps and III MAF were extremely busy dealing with multiple emergencies in an unprecedented situation that had not begun to attain focus, there was little more either could do beyond informing the subordinate commanders on the scene about the overall agreement. The senior commanders conditionally approved in advance whatever Truong and LaHue did with whatever combat units they could muster. With that, the senior commanders turned their attention to pressing matters nearer to their respective headquarters (Quang Tri City and Danang) and left Hue to Truong and LaHue.
As the situation inside Hue slowly crystallized, higher headquarters continued to respond to the Communist challenge by establishing increasingly lengthy lines of command. At 1123, Task Force X-Ray handed the task of liberating southern Hue over to the 1st Marines. Almost immediately, the 1st Marines CP promulgated an operations order naming the clearing effort Operation Hue City and assigning 1/1 "the mission of conducting sweep and clear operations in [the] assigned area of operations to destroy enemy forces, protect U.S. nationals, and restore [the southern portion] of the city to U.S. control."
*
On the Communist side of the command equation, the Tri-Thien-Hue Front headquarters was moved out of the hills overlooking Hue to Thon La Chu, a prosperous agricultural hamlet about four kilometers northwest of the Citadel's north corner, immediately south of Highway 1. The front headquarters was an American-built concrete-and-steel multistory bunker. The 5th NVA Regiment set in to guard the new base, and the commanders got back to work coordinating the mayhem Communist forces were wreaking throughout Quang Tri and Thua Thien provinces.
South of the Perfume River, the Communists used February 1 as a day of consolidation and stocktaking. Except for a dogged, indecisive battle that continued to rage at the Thua Thien Provincial Prison, the battalions of the 4th NVA Regiment sat back on what they had gained and pretty much ignored the objectives that had eluded their grasp. They continued to pluck minor prizes they had overlooked or had deliberately bypassed on January 31, but, on February 1, they made no significant moves against the apparently unperceived thorn in their side—the MACV Compound. Also on February 1, while elements of the 4th and 6th NVA regiments were engaged in mopping up GVN outposts and rounding up "criminal elements" throughout Hue, NVA infantry and sapper units began overseeing the erection of field fortifications around the southern city and east of the Citadel. The work was accomplished mainly by civilians who were impressed into ad hoc labor battalions.
*
The Communist battalions inside Hue had attained most of their military goals and had seized most of their key military objectives by 0800, January 31, the hour at which they raised the NLF flag over the Citadel. However, beginning exactly 24 hours later—at 0800, February 1—the 1st ARVN Airborne Battle Group—composed of the 2nd and 7th ARVN Airborne battalions; bolstered by the 3rd Company, 7th ARVN Armored Cavalry Battalion; and supported by an ARVN 105mm artillery battery at PK 17—breached the 806th NVA Battalion's defenses north and northeast of the Citadel and sprang into the 1st ARVN Division CP compound. These reinforcing units, particularly the cavalry troop, had sustained heavy losses in the full day of fighting they had weathered to reach the Citadel. Their arrival, however, meant that General Truong not only had the means for holding his CP compound indefinitely, but that he had a powerful, able combat force with which to begin serious counterattacks. And, Truong was informed that the 9th ARVN Airborne Battalion would be airlifted from Saigon to PK 17 the next day. In addition, he learned that on February 2 the U.S. Marines would helilift the entire 4th Battalion, 2nd ARVN Regiment, from Quang Tri City directly into the Citadel.
While the airborne units were consolidating inside the 1st ARVN Division CP compound, all four infantry battalions of the 3rd ARVN Regiment were still involved in separate actions in which they had become enmeshed throughout January 31. Continuing their loosely coordinated attacks fr
om west of the Citadel along the north bank of the Perfume, the 3rd ARVN Regiment's 2nd and 3rd battalions managed to reach the southwestern Citadel wall. However, neither battalion could muster the momentum required to carry on through either of the southwestern gates, which were held by the 12th NVA Sapper Battalion. As the day wore on, the best either ARVN battalion could manage was to clear narrow enclaves hard against the wall and set in for more bitter fighting. The two ARVN infantry battalions had run out of steam and were, for all practical purposes, trapped.
To the east of the city, the 3rd ARVN Regiment's 1st and 4th battalions found themselves unable to even begin counterattacks against Hue. Throughout January 31, the 1st Battalion had fought to break out of an encirclement and maneuver eastward to an ARVN outpost on the coast of the South China Sea. On February 1, this battalion boarded a small flotilla of motorized junks and was transported up the Perfume River to a spot east of the Citadel. From there, it battled its way toward the 1st ARVN Division CP compound, where it arrived at 1500, an important addition to General Truong's burgeoning force.
The 4th Battalion, 3rd ARVN Regiment, remained hard-pressed. It had been encircled by elements of the 804th NVA Battalion at the outset of the Tet attacks, and throughout February 1 it remained so—fighting for its life.
*
During the night of January 31, Tuy-Cam heard the ominous sound of digging behind the family house. She strained her ears to pick up the faint sound of human voices, but the NVA soldiers outside were inhumanly quiet. Even the sandals they wore, which were made of tires, did not squeak when they walked.
Toward dawn, Tuy-Cam heard raindrops on banana leaves. As she listened, Chuong, the houseboy, came in from the kitchen and said he had seen big gun positions and a newly dug trench, all camouflaged with branches and leaves, along the bamboo fence at the rear of the family compound.