by Dale A. Dye
The fight on the right is just a minute or two old when it starts for us. An NVA machinegun team suddenly appears in a window and sends a long, rattling burst over our heads. There are two or three other shooters firing at us, but I can’t see their positions from flat on the ground behind a row of concrete planters. Right beside me is Admin Clerk who wants to know what we should do now. No telling if gook machinegunner and his buddies have hit anyone as yet. We were all behind fairly good cover when the shooting started. These gooks were a little slow off the mark. If they’d opened up when we first got to the building, we’d all be dead. Likely they were waiting for their buddies over on the right to kick off what looks and sounds like an ambush all along our route of advance. There’s no radio to tell me what’s happening but we can hear more firefighting on our left over where Lieutenant Longlegs is running the show.
From behind a nearby gazebo, a couple of M-16s cut loose so at least of couple of my guys are in the fight. Admin Clerk takes the cue, pokes his rifle between the planters, and begins to blaze away at the shooters in the building. What we need is that Ontos to get up here with those 106s. He’s still back there behind us and making no move to close the distance. What the fuck is he doing? He’s got to be able to see we’re in a tight up here.
Admin Clerk rolls over to reach for a fresh magazine and there are the two smoke grenades that I hung on his webbing before we stepped off into this basket of shit. Snatching both of them off his harness, I tell him to keep firing at any muzzle flash he sees. It’s about 30 meters from where we are to the front of the building, no wind to speak of and a full-charge of adrenaline to back my play, so both of the smoke grenades rattle around on the porch of the structure before they erupt in a mixed yellow and purple cloud. We can’t see shit and neither can the gook shooters, but they keep blazing away at us through that colorful, slowly drifting screen. Yelling uselessly for everyone to stay where they are, I take off running toward the Ontos, waving my arms and trying to get the commander’s attention. He sees me sprinting toward him like a lunatic and swivels his .30 caliber machinegun in my direction.
The wide-eyed driver slams his hatch shut which gives me a foothold and I’m up shouting at the commander’s helmeted head in two quick bounds. He pulls the helmet away from his ears so he can hear me over the radio chatter and listens while I shout for him to get up forward and blow a few holes in our disputed building. He shouts back something about RPGs or B-40 rockets. Apparently, the Ontos is particularly vulnerable, much more so than a tank, and he’s worried that the gooks might ambush him with anti-tank rockets.
Just the one machinegun and a couple of AKs, I tell him and wait a long moment while he mumbles into the lip mic on his helmet. The vehicle lurches into gear and begins a rapid run up toward where my squad is pinned down. There’s just time for me to get off the damn thing and run around to the rear away from the rounds that are already beginning to splat and spin off its frontal armor. These Ontos are light and fast, so the vehicle outruns me rapidly and I’m pumping along trying to catch up when it stops and grinds around on the right track bringing the six recoilless rifle tubes to bear directly on target. He’ll be firing in a moment and the last place you want to be is near the ass end of one or more 106’s. An Ontos firing a salvo from all six tubes can take down small buildings with a storm of vicious back-blast.
He fires two from the top rack and the rounds blow sizeable chunks out of the building’s concrete façade. From a doorway off to the side of the Ontos I can see two NVA sprinting out of the building. Admin Clerk takes both of them down neatly with four rounds from his rifle. The Ontos grinds a little bit more on one track, shifting aim and there’s two of my new guys sprinting out of cover and headed for protection behind the vehicle. The commander is buttoned up so he can’t see the two men running at his vehicle from the side. Screaming for them to stop and get down, I step out of the doorway and wave my arms. One of them gets the message. The other man, one of the heavy-equipment mechanics who probably ought to know better, doesn’t. He’s right behind the Ontos when the gunner fires two more 106 rounds. Back-blast slams into him like a hurricane, blowing off his helmet and most of his equipment, and sending him bowling down the street like a spastic ragdoll.
There’s no further fire from the objective building that I can hear or see. The Ontos is slowly backing away up the street. Lieutenant Longlegs and a Corpsman are sprinting toward the back-blast casualty. He’s out of it and peppered with debris but still breathing. All the skin we can see through his ripped uniform is scratched and oozing blood but that’s just topical. The Doc is more worried about the blood showing in his ears. He won’t be hearing much soon—if ever—through those. Doc wants assistance carrying him and I call for the other dumb-shit who narrowly escaped the back-blast. They hustle the unconscious mechanic toward the rear.
Longlegs wants to know what happened. When he hears my brief, he confirms what is becoming obvious. The gooks are standing fast along the line where they triggered the ambushes that hit us in the center and on both flanks. They aren’t going anywhere without a major fight. He tells me to finish up with the building, give it a thorough sweep, and then pull back about half a block. Battalion is going to call in the arty to put some serious dents in the gook line.
Most of what’s left of four NVA inside the building is bits and pieces. The 106 rounds did a job on everyone and everything inside and the cool interior reeks of cordite and fresh blood. There are three little offices off a main passageway but all of them are empty except for a stash of spare AK ammo and some B-40 rocket rounds. There’s no launcher in sight which is great good luck for the Ontos that blew away this hard-point. Outside two new guys are pulling a pair of dead NVA out of some spider holes. One of the newbies has an SKS carbine slung over his back. Legit war trophy and honestly earned if he blew away one or both of the gooks sprawled in the yard. Admin Clerk is still kneeling behind the planters and watching wide-eyed.
“Let’s go!” Admin Clerk turns to me with a puzzled expression on his face. “Check that alley on the other side of the building and then get back here. We’re pulling back.”
Turning to help my two newly minted killers check the gook bodies, I see Admin Clerk follow his muzzle toward the alleyway. He strolls right in front of a small basement window right down at ground level without looking. That’s a bad move and I’m about to let him know that when a burst of fire cuts Admin Clerk’s legs out from under him. Everyone scatters for cover while I curse myself for being stupid. The place clearly has a basement or subterranean crawlway and there’s at least one survivor in there. Either I didn’t notice or ignored it in the excitement with the Ontos.
Admin Clerk is trying to crawl away and the NVA muzzle tracks him waiting for a kill shot. Emptying a magazine to distract the shooter, I grab a grenade and sprint to the side of that window. It’s quiet after the grenade goes but I’m not interested in the results. There’s no more fire, so we pick up Admin Clerk, put him on a door we rip off the building, and hustle him to the rear.
By the time we reach the rally point, high explosive rounds are tearing up the block we just left. Delta has stationed some sharpshooters on nearby rooftops. They are having a field day whacking gooks running into the streets to escape the artillery.
Old Home Week
Delta remains in reserve as three other rifle companies hammer away at enemy hard-points and pockets of resistance in the northern parts of the Citadel. Lieutenant Longlegs says it won’t be long before they’ve got the area secured. ARVN units are filtering in behind our sweeps to hold what’s re-taken. When the situation meets everyone’s satisfaction, we turn around and head south in the direction of the palace compound. It’s what will amount to a last big push. The Vietnamese Marines have got the place nearly surrounded and all that irritating amplified jabber we hear echoing through the city streets is ARVN psyops people trying to talk the remaining defenders into surrendering. There’s been enough damage to this cultura
l icon and the GVN wants to see if they can avoid turning the Imperial Palace into just another pile of ancient rubble.
Listening to the loudspeakers blare one drizzly night, two old friends suddenly appear in Hue asking for me. Lieutenant Longlegs leads them over to the little parlor where I’ve set up housekeeping with the four New Guys remaining in the third squad. And suddenly we are seven with the addition of Doc Toothpick and Reb the Southerner. Last time I saw the lanky redneck from the Florida Panhandle, he had just talked himself into a cushy job as an assistant supply clerk at a compound down near Liberty Bridge. It was just after they’d given him a Silver Star and a third Purple Heart, an epic story which I wrote up for his hometown newspaper.
“Thought you were out of here on three Purples, dude. What happened?” Reb dumps his field gear in a corner and offers me a hit from a canteen filled with a familiar concoction of gin and grape Kool-aid.
“They wasn’t movin’ fast enough to suit me.” He retrieves the canteen and passes it to Doc Toothpick. “I had me some words with an admin worm and then whooped his ass. All on a sudden, mah paperwork disappeared. They had me burnin’ shitters which ain’t no kinda business for nobody, so I told the Sarn’t Major he might just as well send my ass up to Hue City. On the way I run into Toothpick and he said you was up in here somewheres. Longlegs brung us right to ya.”
“What happened to your dick-skinner?” Doc Toothpick, a rangy, rugged Third Class Hospital Corpsman from St. Louis, picked up my bandaged hand, gave it a sniff and grimaced. “Either you’ve been wiping your ass with that hand or it’s infected.” While he peels off the filthy bandages to take a look, Doc plucks one of his trademarks out of a pocket, pops it into his mouth and begins to chew. You can generally gauge his mood by how hard he’s working one of his ever-present toothpicks. He told me once when I was interviewing him for a story about his rescue of three wounded men under fire that his mother sent them to him by the box-full, one box for every week in The Nam.
“How’d you get caught up in this deal, Doc? Last I heard they pulled you off the line and sent you to a Regimental Aid Station.”
“You got any idea how many corpsman been blown away on this fuckin’ op?”
“Got to be a bunch…”
“You fuckin’ A, Skippy. I took one look at them snot-nosed replacements and told the Chief he better just send my ass up here where I might could do some good.” He examines my swollen hand and discolored thumb under a flashlight. “And the first thing we better do is get you over to the BAS where we can pump some antibiotics directly into this hand.” He digs around in his Unit One medical kit and tears open some fresh bandages. “Meanwhile,” he says dumping two pills out of a plastic bottle, “take these with a hit of Reb’s Purple Jesus.”
“You heard about Steve?”
Doc Toothpick pauses in his bandaging and nods. “I was helping out on the southside when they brought him in off one of the Mike Boats. We got him on a chopper right away. I expect he’s in Yokosuka by now or somewhere on the way home.”
“How did he look?”
“How the fuck does anybody look that gets hammered by a B-40, dude? He’s tore up but I’m betting he’ll keep the arm. Not so sure about the leg, but he’s out of it and headed stateside. They got good Docs back there can probably save it.” Doc Toothpick finishes the re-wrap and checks his watch. “We ain’t doing anything right now and I know a dude over at the BAS. Let’s walk over there and get you treated before this thing shrivels up and drops off your fuckin’ wrist.”
Sentries on watch at various points along the route to the BAS challenge us several times but nobody shoots anything more damaging than insults about stupid bastards wandering around in the dark. “It seems like I’m always patching your ass up, Dude.” Toothpick pushes his helmet back off his eyes and we talk about another time on another op when he spent a long afternoon picking Chicom shrapnel out of my butt and leg. “You’ve got to take better care of yourself and stop playing grunt.”
“It ain’t playing up here in Hue, Doc.”
“Ain’t it a bitch? Seems like making it through this Hue City deal is like trying to run between the raindrops without getting wet.”
“There it is, Doc. There it is.”
Senior Corpsman at the BAS volunteers to wake one of the surgeons, but Toothpick says he’ll handle what needs to be done. Under a surgical light, the two of them look at my damaged hand and make little grunting noises for a while. When they’ve seen enough and decided on a course of action Senior Corpsman swabs my hand with some kind of topical anesthetic while Toothpick prepares a syringe full of thick white fluid. “Chew on this.” He pokes one of his toothpicks in my mouth and closes in with the syringe. “This might pinch a bit.”
It feels like a thousand fire ants attacking my hand as Doc probes and injects at various places, shooting a strong antibiotic directly into the infected flesh. When it’s over and my hand is re-bandaged into an even more unwieldy mitt, we duck out of the BAS and run into Lieutenant Longlegs who is checking on some of his wounded grunts.
“It’s on for tomorrow,” he tells us, the big push into the Imperial Palace area. We’ll get a detailed briefing in the morning but the broad brush puts us on the left of the Vietnamese Marines sweeping due south until we hit the palace grounds. And this time the battalion CO is taking a page from the NVA playbook. We’ll be moving under cover of our own shooters positioned on rooftops and upper levels of buildings all along the way.
By the time we get back to the squad, the South Vietnamese are once again loudly begging their northern cousins to give it up, be reasonable and rally to the Saigon side. Reb has polished off the Purple Jesus so there’s nothing to do but try to sleep while the propaganda echoes up and down the streets of the Citadel. Hopefully, it’s as hard on the NVA as it is on us.
King Nguyen’s Court
When the push starts at dawn, we move steadily south block to block along what the map says is Dinh Bo Linh Street, a string-straight north-south avenue that leads to the Thuong Tu Gate in the southern walls. We need to cross about nine or ten east-west streets along the way and the first several intersections are covered by 1/5 shooters up on rooftops or in the second floor windows of buildings. They go into action when our sweeps force stay-behinds out into the streets or alleys. None of the gooks we’ve encountered so far seem anxious to do much beyond fire a few rounds to slow us down and then split for a new position. It’s by far the easiest time we’ve had on a northside sweep, and I’m starting to hear some trash-talking from the grunts who speculate that we’ve finally got this thing licked. I’m not buying it and neither is Reb or Toothpick. We’ve all been lured and lulled into NVA traps before and this is no time to be getting over-confident.
On the other side of our assigned block is the eastern perimeter of the Imperial Palace. My guys are moving on the right flank of Delta’s advance which puts us closest to the palace perimeter and in spotty contact with some Vietnamese Marines moving in the same direction. Every once in a while we spot an American officer wearing their distinctive tiger-stripe camouflage and he gives us a wave. We can tell he’s a round-eye because he towers over the little VN Marines humping along beside him carrying radios.
It’s a slow process, but we expected that. We hold up at every intersection while the Company Commanders send teams ahead of us to take high observation positions. We don’t move on until word is passed that the cover teams are in position. I’m keeping an eye on the new guys, but it’s easier now with Reb and Toothpick helping keep them in order and out of trouble. It gives me some time to think about the battalion briefing which contained conflicting information. That’s got me wondering and worrying about this light resistance.
An intelligence officer from MACV and an English-speaking ARVN officer briefed the command group saying they had reliable reports that a good number of surviving NVA have pulled out of the city toward the northwest where recently deployed units of the Army’s 1st Cavalr
y Division are moving to block them. On the other hand, the ARVN officer related, they have radio intercepts in which NVA commanders in Hue asked for permission to withdraw; pleas which Hanoi promptly denied with orders to hold and die in place if necessary. So which is it? Are they running or are they dug in somewhere for a last stand? Everyone has a guess but no one has an answer.
It’s just before noon when we got our first close-up look at the Imperial Palace. We hold in place near the northeast corner of the complex and just stare at the manicured gardens, moats and winding pathways that all lead to an ornate building that must be something like an Imperial court or throne room. Reb takes the opportunity to empty his runny guts into a nearby alleyway. The Purple Jesus has done a job on him and he’s been running off to shit nearly every time we stop. Alpha Company on our left gets into a serious fight and we are ordered to freeze while they got the situation sorted. My guys spread out along a perimeter wall and just stare into the palace complex. It doesn’t look like anything has been disturbed or damaged.
Reb joins me looking into the heart of the palace complex. There’s not a gook in sight. It’s just 50 meters or so to that structure and there’s a little path that leads right to it over an arched bridge. I’m so tempted to just jump the low wall and trot over there to get a look at what this whole deal has been all about that I can’t stand it. “Suppose they’s gooks in that building?” Reb is snapping pictures with a little Instamatic camera and that gives me a very stupid idea.