Fire in the Streets

by Eric Hammel

  *

  Despite the fact that he was in hiding, Jim Bullington was better informed about events around South Vietnam than most Americans in Hue. Thanks to shortwave news broadcasts Bulling­ton listened to all day on February 4, he knew that the Commu­nist TCK-TKN plan was in ruins and that Communist forces were in retreat in all but a few locations, chiefly in Saigon, Hue, and Khe Sanh. Though his own fate was still in doubt, Bulling­ton was elated by the good news.

  Only a few blocks from Jim Bullington's hideout, the Than-Trong compound was bathed in despair. The family had a short­wave radio, but frequent visits by roving VC propaganda cadres and search teams prevented any listening. Also, the food was running out. The family had been forced to share its food with many NVA and VC, and about the only fare left was steamed rice with fish sauce, and even that was in short supply. On February 4, Tuy-Cam's mother oversaw the hiding of a 100-kilo sack of rice in the family bunker, where it might be mistaken by searching VC for a bag of sand. The big danger remained the discovery of Tuy-Cam's two servicemen brothers, who were still hiding in the attic. If things seemed to be going well elsewhere in Hue that day, February 4 was the day the Than-Trong clan began to lose hope.

  *

  Attacks to expand the 1st ARVN Division's holdings inside the Citadel had continued. By the morning of February 4, it is probable that the ARVN force inside the Citadel actually outnum­bered the NVA defending force. Most likely, the NVA force deployed inside the Citadel consisted of only the 6th NVA Regi­ment's 800th and 802nd NVA battalions and part of the 12th NVA Sapper Battalion. Though relatively small in numbers, the NVA occupied a massively fortified Japanese-built complex of bunkers and fighting positions. Facing them were the 4th Battal­ion, 2nd ARVN Regiment; a company of the 3rd Battalion, 1st ARVN Regiment; the 1st Battalion, 3rd ARVN Regiment; the 3rd Company, 7th ARVN Armored Cavalry Battalion; and the reinforced 1st ARVN Airborne Task Force—the 2nd, 7th, and 9th ARVN Airborne battalions.

  The major event of February 4 for the 1st ARVN Division was the seizure of the An Hoa gate, at the western end of the Citadel's northwest wall, by the 1st Battalion, 3rd ARVN Regi­ment. The 4th Battalion, 2nd ARVN Regiment, also made good progress, advancing to a point about halfway down the Citadel's southeast wall.

  Outside the Citadel, the 3rd ARVN Regiment's 2nd and 3rd battalions continued their dogged efforts to attack into the Cit­adel through the southwestern gates. Despite their persistence, however, the ARVN battalions made only negligible gains. Their main contribution was in keeping NVA units tied up along the north bank of the Perfume River while the ARVN units inside the Citadel mounted their attacks.

  Also on February 4, the 4th Battalion, 3rd ARVN Regiment, broke through the main body of the 4th NVA Regiment's 804th NVA Battalion. In the end, however, only about 170 members of the ARVN unit, which had been surrounded and fighting desper­ately since the onset of the Communist offensive on January 31, fought through to the MACV Compound.

  *

  There were still an enormous number of loose ends to police up around MACV, and, throughout the day, 1st Marines com­mandeered small elements of 1/1 and 2/5 to undertake many of the missions. One such mission was an attempt to locate and retrieve two Alpha/1/1 Marines who had been killed and left behind during a patrol sweep several days earlier toward Tu Do Stadium, on Tran Cao Van Street northeast of MACV. Around mid-morning, 2nd Lieutenant Bill Donnelly was ordered out to find the bodies. With him went part of his 1st Platoon of Alpha/ 1/1 and an ad hoc platoon of Bravo/1/1 commanded by the Bravo/1/1 first sergeant. Since the area around the stadium was still held by most of the 804th NVA Battalion, Donnelly's patrol was bolstered with an Army M-42 twin-40mm Duster.

  Lieutenant Donnelly and the Alpha/1/1 Marines with him had arrived in Hue only the day before, the last of their company to reach the city from Quang Tri. Similarly, the Bravo/1/1 Marines were new to the city. At least one of the new arrivals, Lance Corporal Ed Neas, an M-60 team leader who had been in Vietnam since August 1967, could not quite believe what he was seeing as the patrol shoved off from MACV. The first scene that set Neas's mind to wandering was a dead NVA soldier he saw hanging out a window. Nearby was another dead NVA who was leaning against a guard shack. That man's eyes were hanging from their sockets, and his testicles were swollen to the size of apples.

  The image and smell of the dead NVA had not quite receded when several human forms jumped up from hiding places and ran into the center of the street. Instantly, the two keyed-up Marines on point dropped to their knees and opened fire, and the Dus­ter's machine gunner followed suit. Only after the targets had been cut down was anyone able to identify them as civilians, who, unfortunately, had chosen the wrong bunch of Marines to help them to safety. Before the Marines could even begin to register any shock or grief, the Duster started forward again and unavoid­ably crushed the dead civilians beneath its tracks.

  A block beyond the dead civilians, the patrol was fired on by several NVA soldiers holed up in a small house in the center of a field adjacent to the roadway. Other NVA in houses farther up the street also opened fire. The Marines halted, took cover, and returned the fire in both directions. The Duster pulled up beside Lance Corporal Neas's M-60 team, ranged in on the house in the field, and blew it to pieces. The unbelievably intense thrum of the 40mm guns, as they had fired right over Lance Corporal Neas's head, left his ears ringing for days afterward.

  About fifty meters farther up the street, Marines at the head of the patrol column spotted the two dead Marines they had been sent to retrieve. It is possible that the NVA had staked the bodies out, confident that more Marines would eventually return to get them.

  As the Marines opened fire, Lieutenant Donnelly and the first sergeant of Bravo/1/1 worked their way up the street to the bodies. The NVA small-arms fire intensified, and several B-40s streaked out of the NVA-held houses. Lance Corporal Rick Mann, the M-60 squad leader, saw several figures dart out of one of the houses. He turned his machine gun on them, bowling them over. When the smoke cleared, Mann saw a dead baby in the street. He broke down, certain he had just shot the infant, but other Marines told him the baby had been lying there before they arrived. That calmed him down. Later Mann found where a bullet had gone right through a C-ration can he had attached to his M-60 to catch expended cartridge casings. The can was directly in front of Mann's face whenever he fired the M-60, but the bullet had somehow missed him.

  Under intense covering fire, Lieutenant Donnelly and the first sergeant of Bravo/1/1 dragged the two dead Marines back down the street. The patrol disengaged from the firefight and withdrew to MACV, arriving at 1240.

  Shortly after the patrol returned to MACV, the 1st Marines CP came under fire from the east by the 804th NVA Battalion. This intrusion drew the wrath of several of 2/5's 81mm mortars, at least two Marine M-48 tanks, several Army M-55 quad.-50 trucks, two M-42 dual-40mm Dusters, and Marine artillery located far from Hue. The NVA fire was throttled. One Marine was killed in the exchange, and three Marines had to be medevacked. Somehow, someone in the 1st Marines CP divined that eighteen NVA had been killed in the uneven exchange.

  Early in the afternoon, Lieutenant Donnelly's Alpha/1/1 Marines and the platoon from Bravo/1/1 were sent across High­way 1 to join the 1/1 main body in clearing the Jeanne d'Arc complex.

  *

  Along Highway 1 through the day, trouble continued. The first Marine convoy to reach Hue from Phu Bai arrived at 1005, having met only minor sniper fire between the An Cuu Bridge and MACV. At 1150, on their return journey, the same trucks were engaged at medium range by heavy automatic-weapons fire near a small bridge about halfway to Phu Bai. The convoy stopped briefly, and the small security force deployed to return the enemy fire. The enemy was driven off and the convoy con­tinued on into Phu Bai without further trouble. The most omi­nous aspect of the incident was its location. Hitherto, no convoy from Phu Bai had been molested that far south of Hue.

  At about 1600 the second resupply convoy of the day set out from Phu
Bai beneath a gray, overcast sky. The convoy trail officer was 2nd Lieutenant Terry Charbonneau, the Charlie Company, 1st Motor Transport Battalion, platoon commander who had led several convoys between Phu Bai and Camp Evans at the end of January.

  The sudden onset of the Tet offensive, cutting Highway 1 north of Hue, had left Charbonneau's small January 31 convoy stranded in Camp Evans. After seeing his trucks wrecked when they were commandeered as mobile antimortar and antirocket revetments for 101st Airborne Division helicopters, Lieutenant Charbonneau had hitched a helicopter ride to Phu Bai on Febru­ary 3 to see if anything could be done to evacuate his men. Finding no help there and with no way back to Camp Evans, on February 4 Charbonneau had volunteered to help oversee the afternoon convoy to Hue. He assumed he would be back in Phu Bai that evening or early the next morning.

  The first thing that struck Charbonneau as odd about the afternoon convoy to Hue was that most of the Marine replace­ments in the trucks did not even have helmets. They told the lieutenant that there were not enough helmets left in Phu Bai to go around, but they had been assured of an ample supply in Hue—because of all the casualties. The replacements seemed a little somber, and maybe cheerful news like how much gear the casualties were leaving behind was at the heart of their mood. It certainly shocked Terry Charbonneau.

  The last truck in the convoy was a 6 x6 with a .50-caliber machine gun mounted on it. Following it was a brand-new wrecker that had just reached the 1st Motor Transport Battalion. Whenever possible, a wrecker was incorporated into a convoy along Highway 1 so at least one damaged vehicle could be towed to safety. However, Charbonneau noticed something strange about the new wrecker. Its lift was hydraulically operated. Even a raw second lieutenant like Terry Charbonneau knew that hydraulics could be knocked out by the tiniest piece of shrapnel, whereas the older mechanically operated lifts were impervious to anything less than a direct hit.

  The villages along the way looked deserted, which was also something new for Lieutenant Charbonneau, who well remem­bered the throngs of Tet pilgrims he had encountered on his last trip, on January 31. To Charbonneau the silence and emptiness were downright eerie. At length he saw one little boy standing beside the road, waving at the passing trucks. A few of the Marines gave the boy thumbs-up signs in return, but most of the Americans stared at him in stony silence. Where children were involved, Charbonneau thought this was unusual behavior for his countrymen.

  Close to Hue the convoy passed the big signal-intelligence station, marked by its three huge radio masts. When he saw men wearing American uniforms in the station compound, Lieutenant Charbonneau could not believe that the vulnerable installation, set in the middle of a huge field, had not been attacked. Perhaps, he thought, someone was paying the Communists to leave the place alone. How else to explain its inviolate status?

  As the convoy slowed to cross the An Cuu Bridge, Terry Charbonneau suddenly felt like a duck in a shooting gallery. Sure enough, at that very moment, there was a huge explosion followed by the pop and crack of small-arms fire.

  The commander of the twin-40mm Duster that constituted the convoy's main security tried to radio the captain in command of the convoy. There was no response, so he radioed Lieutenant Charbonneau and said simply, "You're in charge, Sir."

  The convoy had stopped, and there was a great deal of shoot­ing ahead, but Charbonneau could not see what was going on from his position in the rear of the convoy. He dismounted from his truck and started walking forward. Suddenly, the trucks ahead started to move forward rapidly. Charbonneau signaled the driver of his truck to start rolling. As the truck came abreast, the lieutenant hopped onto the running board and ordered the .50-cal gunner to lock and load. Then, after climbing into the back of the truck, Charbonneau radioed his position to Phu Bai and explained the situation.

  Dead ahead, right across the An Cuu Bridge, Charbonneau saw the lead vehicle, a Mighty Mite cargo transporter. It was on fire, apparently after detonating an antivehicle mine. The convoy commander had been in the vehicle, but neither he nor his driver were anywhere to be seen.

  Though the vehicles ahead of Lieutenant Charbonneau's truck were rapidly receding to the north, Charbonneau ordered his truck and the wrecker to stop beside the Mighty Mite so he could see if any Marines had been left behind. At first, he saw nobody. But just as Charbonneau was getting ready to leave, someone spotted the convoy commander and his driver next to a roadside building. As Charbonneau's .50-cal gunner sprayed a row of storefronts to the left, the wrecker pulled over and a corpsman jumped off to treat the wounded men. Meanwhile, Lieutenant Charbonneau ordered his driver to advance slowly so the .50-cal gunner could cover the evacuation. He assumed the wrecker would be along in a minute.

  Moments later, when Charbonneau's truck reached the traf­fic circle, he was amazed to see that the Texaco station's huge glass windows were still intact. At that moment, several 60mm mortar rounds detonated around the rear cargo truck, which was several hundred meters ahead of Charbonneau's vehicle. Fortu­nately, the mortars missed, for the truck was loaded with ammu­nition and explosives.

  Dead ahead was the raised causeway across the cane field. Charbonneau saw NVA soldiers hiding behind trees near the road. As the main body of trucks sped along the causeway, the Marines poured out a withering fire and inflicted many casual­ties. However, Charbonneau's truck ran the gauntlet at slow speed because the lieutenant wanted to allow the wrecker to catch up. On the way across the causeway, the .50-cal gunner swung his ominous weapon to the left and right at the NVA in the trees, but he did not fire. Neither did the NVA.

  There were no further incidents as Lieutenant Charbon­neau's truck rolled slowly into the urban area and on to MACV. However, the wrecker still had not caught up. The lieutenant ran up to the Duster and told the commander that they were going back to find the wrecker. The Army sergeant, whose face registered shock mixed with extreme dismay, blurted out, "But we're an antiaircraft weapon."

  "Fine," Terry Charbonneau shot back, "if we see any Com­mie planes, you can shoot them down. Now, let's roll!"

  Fortunately, as Charbonneau was climbing into the Duster, the wrecker came barreling up Highway 1 and screeched to a halt inside the MACV gate. The Mighty Mite driver had most of his foot blown off, and the motor-transport captain was full of tiny slivers of shrapnel. The Charlie Company gunny, who had been riding in the wrecker, had been hit beneath one eye by a ricochet, and the wrecker's hydraulic-fluid storage tank had been holed by many bullets, rendering the brand-new vehicle useless.

  Terry Charbonneau's bullet-riddled convoy reached Hue at 1700. At 1940, before the trucks could be unloaded and repaired for the return journey to Phu Bai, word reached MACV that the NVA had finally blown the An Cuu Bridge into the Phu Cam Canal. Highway 1 between Phu Bai and Hue was closed.

  Fox/2/5's seizure of the treasury complex, followed rapidly by the bloodless occupation of the adjacent post office complex, and Hotel/2/ 5's final seizure of the Public Health Complex brought 2/5 all the way to Le Dinh Duong Street by 1700, February 4. Though the battalion's morale was sky-high and there was adequate daylight left, it was decided that 2/5 was to halt along the northeast side of Le Dinh Duong and set in for the night. The reason: neither of 2/5's flanks was secure. To Fox/2/ 5's left, 1/1 had penetrated barely halfway into the Jeanne d'Arc complex, well short of Ly Thuong Kiet Street; on the right, Hotel/2/5's right flank was unprotected along the riverfront north of Le Loi Street.

  The 1/1 Marines were unable to push through the Jeanne d'Arc complex that afternoon. The battalion's two companies were both understrength, and Lieutenant Colonel Mark Gravel did not have sufficient organic supporting arms at his disposal. Also, there are security advantages to be gained from having a dangling flank curve behind an advancing front line; it prevented the enemy from rolling up the main line by way of the open flank. So, it was decided to hold in place and renew the attack on the morning of February 5. However, only an hour after 2/5 had halted, some aggressive NVA provided the impetus for an
un­planned attack.

  At 1755, Hotel/2/5 Marines set in at the rear of the Public Health Complex were taken under intense fire by NVA small arms and machine guns emplaced inside the French Cultural Center, a two-story building in the riverfront parkland northwest of Le Loi Street and southwest of Le Dinh Duong Street. While most of Hotel/2/5 returned the NVA fire with even stronger fire, Captain Ron Christmas dispatched 2nd Lieutenant Leo Myers's 1st Platoon across Le Dinh Duong to occupy a substan­tially built two-story building from which flanking fire could be placed on the French Cultural Center.

  The first two Marines to reach the objective were Private First Class Walter Kaczmarek and Lance Corporal Ron Walters. The two had been ordered to clear the building with grenades, at which point the rest of the platoon would charge inside. Kacz­marek and Walters reached the front door without incident, and each tossed a fragmentation grenade through the door, as or­dered. However, Kaczmarek got a little carried away and threw in a second grenade. As soon as he did and before it blew, the first of his buddies passed him on his way in the door. Kaczmarek frantically grabbed the Marine and turned to block the thunder­ing herd that was right on his heels. The second grenade blew, and then everyone entered the building and ran a classic clearing operation. No NVA were to be found, but around the northeast windows the floors were covered with expended cartridge cas­ings. As usual, the NVA had "boogied."

  The house Lieutenant Myers's platoon seized was clearly the home of a very rich and influential family—a physician's home, as it turned out. In addition to opulent furnishings, which included a stuffed tiger, the Marines found large cans of cottonseed oil and heavy sacks of rice, all with prominent USAID logos on their sides. Veterans who had scoured many a poor South Vietnamese village commented that they had never seen their nation's gifts in the hands of the poor.