Hue 1968: A Turning Point of the American War in Vietnam Hardcover – June 6, 2017

The Vietnam War was believed to be all but over by January 1968. The commander of U.S. forces in South Vietnam, General William Westmoreland, said the end was in sight, while in Washington D.C., Lyndon Johnson’s special assistant for National Security, Walt Rostow, told New York Times reporter Gene Roberts that, apart from a few “brush fire episodes,” the United States had won the war. And so it came as a complete shock when, in the pre-dawn hours of January 31,1968, the Tet Offensive was launched throughout South Vietnam. The taking of Hue, the ancient capital city, was the chief objective, a bold undertaking that Honoi hoped would spark an uprising of South Vietnamese civilians and win the war. After 24 days of bloody and unrelenting fighting, with 80 percent of Hue destroyed and 10,000-plus fatalities, U.S. forces took back the city. The cost was so overwhelming that American debate over the war was never again about winning, only about how to leave.Interestingly, the reporter who was told by Walt Rostow the war over, Gene Roberts, should have been on the scene during the battle for Hue (pronounced “Hway”). His reports for the New York Times were the first and among the best, and it is he to whom this book is dedicated. The author of “Hue 1968,” Mark Bowden, who also wrote “Black Hawk Down” (1999), says his book is “mostly the work of a journalist,” the result of four years of travel (twice to Vietnam), investigation and interviews with those who were there. He tells the story from the points of view of American and Vietnamese politicians and generals as well as those who did the fighting. The result is a gripping day-to-day account of troop movements, fighting inside and nearby the city, and of U.S. high command that was completely out of touch with what was taking place in Hue. General Westmoreland believed the thrust of the Tet Offensive was going to be directed at Khe Sahn, and did so for several weeks despite overwhelming evidence the actual target was Hue.The book is as much about arrogant leadership as it is about the brave soldiers on both sides who did the fighting and bore the results of decisions made by generals and politicians in Hanoi, Saigon, Washington and other positions of safety. In the first days of fighting, the U.S. high command would not believe reports from the CIA, or from those fighting on the front lines, that the well-trained and well-supplied National Liberation Front (combined North Vietnamese and Viet Cong forces) had taken the city. Two companies, about 300 marines, were ordered to attack a force far larger than anyone believed possible—10,000 Front soldiers who had sneaked into the city without detection. These marines suffered enormous losses as a result. When they informed the military command in nearby Phu Bai that they were vastly outnumbered, their reports were not believed. They were accused of exaggeration, timidity and even cowardice, and ordered to attack. Entire units were deeply decimated, by as much as two-thirds, and one unit almost entirely. Meanwhile, the U.S. command continued to send in small units while denying air, naval and artillery support for fear of damaging Hue’s historic buildings, and thereby embarrassing the U.S. All the while, a fleet of helicopters could not keep pace with the mounting casualties needing to be airlifted to hospitals in Saigon. Finally, confronted with overwhelming evidence, they sent in the entire 1st Marine Regiment and part of the 1st Cavalry Division, plus aircraft and heavy artillery, and began taking back the city in grim block-by-block fighting. Hue proved to be the bloodiest battle of the Vietnam War. When at last the few remaining Front soldiers fled for the countryside, Hue lay in ruins. Casualties—combatants on both sides as well as citizens—exceeded 10,000. U.S. Marines and soldiers killed were 250 and1,554 woundedFor most of the battle, General Westmoreland was in a state of self-denial, busy preparing for the attack on Khe Sahn that never came. It seemed Americans back home were better informed on the battle of Hue than the U.S. high command, from having read the daily reports of war correspondents in the national press. CBS news anchor Walter Cronkite, a supporter of the war, did read the reports and was deeply disturbed. He flew to South Vietnam to see the battle of Hue for himself, something Westmoreland deigned not to do. A few weeks later, Cronkite’s report on the CBS evening news confirmed what had been reported in U.S. newspapers for several years: America was losing the war, and the battle of Hue was yet one more confirmation that the U.S. high command was playing fast and loose with the truth. Writes Bowden: “(Walter Cronkite) may not have declared an end to the war, but he had declared the end of something far more significant. For decades, certainly since World War II, the mainstream press and, for that matter, most of the American public, believed their leaders, political and military. Tet was the first of many blows to that faith in coming years. Americans would never again be that trusting.”The first casualty of war is truth, someone once said. Vietnam is yet one more example. Both sides were guilty of withholding the truth, to further their cause. For U.S. soldiers in Hue, the results were tragic. Had their initial reports been believed, the outcome very likely would have been different. Going in with full force at the outset would have avoided the much worse end result. Fewer soldiers would have died and been wounded, not to mention the citizens of Hue trapped in the city by the incessant fighting, and the ancient city itself might have been spared such devastation.Finally, there are the incredible sacrifices of those who did the fighting, most of them 18-to-22 year-olds, only a few of whom volunteered for duty, and the men who led them into battle, lieutenant colonels in their 30s who volunteered for Vietnam to promote their military careers. The word “courage” seems hardly adequate to describe soldiers who, having seen so many of their own shot to pieces by snipers, are ordered to step into the line of fire for the upteenth time in a single day, knowing full well the odds of returning home alive or in one piece are slim indeed. Whether you have no military experience or only a limited knowledge of the Vietnam War, the author makes events vivid and easy to understand, and reveals the battle for Hue as haphazard and savage.

"As the subtitle says, the Tet Offensive in February 1968 was the beginning of the end of American involvement in the Vietnam War. The US top military, led by General Westmoreland, failed to discover the build up and failed to respond appropriately once the attacks started. ""Nowhere in [Westmoreland's] understanding of the war was there room for the size an quality of the force that had taken Hue. So the MACV [headquarters] in Saigon and General LaHue in Phu Bai, simply refused to believe it had happened. Reports that contradicted this high-level understanding were dismissed as unreliable, the cries of men facing real combat for the first time, and panicking. Against the certainties of the American command, the truth never stood a chance."" [Loc 2527] Westmoreland's estimates of the enemy force was 500 ""off by a factor of twenty.""[Loc 2527""""The result of the ignorance and denial was to send Marines and Army ""on a fool's errand immediately on arrival at the compound [of Hue]""[Loc 2010] ""Westmoreland seemed almost oblivious to the largest single battle of the Tet Offensive, if not of the entire war, under way in Hue. His forces there were badly outnumbered, struggling, and dying.""[Loc 3206]And the enemy was not what had been experienced before. ""[Marine Calvin] Hart had come to Vietnam expecting to fight amateurs, little men in black pajamas and conical hats who were no match for United States Marines. But the enemy encountered in Hue was tough and professional, every bit their match. These fighters were uniformed and well-equipped, and they set up defensive positions and fields of fire as good as anything taught by the Corps""[Loc 7421]As American deaths mounted in the face of the Army commands assurances the battle was nothing, the American public started to turn against the war. Perhaps the biggest force of change in America's understanding of war was Walter Cronkite's reporting after his visit to the war zone. If you are younger than maybe 50 you may not have an appreciation of Cronkite's impact on public opinion. He was the anchor of the CBS news when there were only three or four national networks. Cronkite's nightly newscast was the most watched. ""[W]hen he interviewed Westy in his crisp fatigues and with a chrome0-plated AK-47 in his office as a prop, the general seemed even more cocksure than usual. He repeated the official line that Tet had been a big success for his forces. He declared the battle of Hue over. He said that US forces and ARVN troops had soundly defeated ten thousand NVA and VC troops there - blithely contradicting his earlier assertion that there were no more than a few hundred enemy soldiers in the city.l Then Cronkite flew to Hue, where ten minutes on the ground was enough to show none of it was true. The battle was still raging.""[Loc 5865] When he returned to the states he delivered a pessimistic editorial on the state of the war. ""Cronkite's cautious pessimism had tremendous impact and made it much harder to dismiss those who opposed the war as 'hippies' or un-American. It was hard to image an American more conventional and authentic than Walter Cronkite.""[Loc 8118] ""Tet had exposed Westy as an untrustworthy source of information, not just to the press and public, but even in his secret communications to the White House.""[Loc 7989]One of the book's biggest strengths is the view of the battle for Hue from the North Vietnamese side. Bowden was able to interview participants from The Front and the NVA, providing a narrative of the lead up to the battle. His other strength is his gripping storytelling of the battle from the American side. The description of Lieutenant Colonel Ernie Cheatham's analysis of a battle situation where troops are pinned down by a machine gun shows the stuff heroes are made of: ""Cheatham studied the problem himself. He crawled out to a telephone pole and waited for the gun to fire. It was using green tracers, so he could see the trajectory of its rounds. He noticed that when it shot at things to its left, ... the rounds were low, but whenever the gun shot to its right ..., the aim was high. This suggested that the gunner's field of fire was obstructed by something on that side, something that forced him to aim the gun up. If he was right, Cheatham figured there was a spot near him out on the street where a man could stand up and still be too low for the machine gun.""[Loc 4543] It takes a real soldier to keep cool in the heat of battle like that.Bowden's biggest weakness is discounting the impact of the battle of Khe Sanh on the battle for Hue. Bowden continually hammers on Westmoreland for his moving forces to Khe Sanh for the coming offensive. But if my understanding is right, the battle of Khe Sanh was actually happening at the same time. The Tet Offensive and attack on Hue was February 1968 while the battle of Khe Sanh went from late January into the spring of the same year.All in all the Marines and Army officers who were leading the men in battle were made victims of the higher ups who simply refused to see the battle for what it was. ""This refusal to face facts was not just a public relations problem; it had tragic consequences for many of the marines and soldiers who fought there. If the extent of the challenge had been weighed realistically at the outset, if commanders had heeded the entirely correct CIS assessment on the first day, and if they had listened to their own field commanders, they might have held off the counterattack until they had readied an appropriate level of force and more effective tactics.""[Loc 8341] There is a lesson here for all leaders - not just military: be open to new information and act on it.

This is an incredible book. An incredible piece of writing. I have read many, many books about the American war in Vietnam over the years, but this one is quite exceptional. It tells the story of the Tet Offensive from both sides of the conflict, which is in my experience a rare thing where the war of the 1960s in Vietnam is concerned. I was a young boy of 12 when Tet happened, and I can recall the images in the Sunday supplements that my father would be reading. They fuelled my fascination about this conflict, that is still with me now.If you read no other book about this conflict, read Huê 1968 and you might start to understand in a way not previously possible (in my humble opinion).

I never read such an in-depth account of any battle fought in Vietnam. As a very young child from my the comfort of my parents living room I was watching the daily battles fought on TV , but this book brought home the truth an ugly truth about America’s involvement in Vietnam. The amount of absolute carnage on both sides is really unimaginable and the lies told by Westmorland compounds the insult to the memories of the young men and women who fought and died in Vietnam. If ever there’s a book to be read on the battle for Hue this is it . I hope some day to go back to Vietnam and visit Hue. In memory of all those who died on both sides and including the countless civilians.

I've accidentally read most of Mark Bowdens work. He's a lovely read who enjoys the excitement of violent drama and is particularly adept at the multiple narrative situation. Here he takes on a significant turning point in the Vietnam war. The history and the meaning of the conflict are well portrayed and his sympathy for the civilians contrasts with everyone else's utter disregard. However he still slips into a language of calling the VC 'the enemy' and so it is clear where his final.allegiance resides.

Superbly written with a clear narrative of a confused month long battle. Bowden includes personal accounts from all levels and both the allied and communist sides. He manages to blend strategic analysis (noting both sides' senior leadership were pursing self-deceiving scenarios, but more disastrously so for the US), operational narrative (he includes the 1st Cavalry action against the NLF/ NVA supply lines as well as the Marines battle in both southern and northern Hue), tactical analysis and graphic personal testimony. And he does this very, very well. Probably the only omission I could think of was the shallower depth of ARVN accounts and tactical analysis of their operations (and there are probably sound reasons for the smaller number of non-officer testimonials (especially) available from this quarter).

What a brilliant read. I have always been interested in the insular battle that was Hue. Whilst the Tet offensive raged throughout the country and the US high command were incorrectly predicting the main thrust elsewhere, Hue was captured and it's citizens terrorized and slaughtered by the the Viet Cong. The Marines that eventually fought their way into the city had to endure the horrors of inner city combat and scores were lost. Utilizing anything they could lay their hands on the Americans blasted and fought their way across street after street and even then the high command refused to accept how desperate things were inside the ancient walls of the citadel. This book is a must for those who have a interest in combat history at its most violent and the ways and means of fighting men to succeed.