Urban Warfare, Then and Now
Mark Bowden’s Hue 1968 contains much that is timeless.
In 1968, more than 500,000 Americans and 800,000 South Vietnamese troops were fighting 400,000 Viet Cong guerrillas and North Vietnamese (NVA) soldiers. In early February, the enemy launched a surprise attack against dozens of cities and bases throughout the 400-mile length of South Vietnam. While most of the offensive was beaten back within days, it received enormous press coverage and badly shook the confidence of the military and political leadership in both Saigon and Washington.
Hue 1968: A Turning Point of the American War in Vietnam, the new book from Mark Bowden of The Atlantic, tells the tactical narrative of these events splendidly — albeit with a dubious epilogue focused on broader questions of strategy and foreign policy.
The most savage battle occurred inside the historic city of Hue in the northern part of the country. Ten thousand NVA seized the heart of the city, including the ancient citadel enclosed by stone walls 20 feet thick. For 25 days a confused, chaotic battle raged up and down the city’s streets. When it ended, most of the city was destroyed, and the death toll included approximately 250 Americans, 500 South Vietnamese and 5,000 North Vietnamese soldiers, plus 6,000 civilians killed in the fighting and another 2,000 executed by the NVA.
Bowden has stitched together dozens of riveting squad-level firefights, writing from individual points of view collected via dozens of extended interviews over four years of research. Via this accumulation of short stories depicting love, sacrifice, gore, madness, valor, blood, and horror, the reader follows the battle down the deadly streets day by day.
Journalists who shuttled in and out of the raging battle are quoted at length. In Bowden’s eyes, they are particularly admirable because they combine physical courage — intrepidly (if episodically) following after the squads — with intellectual honesty, exposing setbacks inexcusably denied by the military hierarchy. In recounting the battle, the observations of these journalists add color, depth, and pathos.
Bowden also adds to excellent past accounts — e.g., Nick Warr’s Phase Line Green and Eric Hammel’s Fire in the Streets — the perspective of the enemy. He traveled to North Vietnam and interviewed more than two dozen soldiers, both men and women. At several points in the book, he interweaves both sides’ perspectives on the same fight. The North Vietnamese were a superb light-infantry force — disciplined and determined to withstand hardship.
Unfortunately, South Vietnamese soldiers have scant voice in the story, although their losses were twice those of the Americans. The South Vietnamese fought hard. They deserved recognition. The vast majority of U.S. advisers — both at the local level where I served and in the major battles where the legendary Ray “E-Tool” Smith, a prominent figure in Bowden’s book, served — admired their doughtiness and developed a deep affection for our counterparts.
Bowden does not address why both sides fought so relentlessly. Regardless of their losses, the Marines smashed their way forward, one block a day, pushing the NVA back. Certainly the corporals and lieutenants wanted to say, Let’s take a break and get some fresh troops in here. Sometimes they said their orders were plain stupid and got them changed. But when that didn’t happen, they obeyed and went anyway.
For understanding the factors that underlay unit cohesion under extreme stress, the finest book is the novel Matterhorn by Karl Marlantes. It vividly portrays how tradition, heritage, discipline, and faith in leaders and devotion to each other combine to shape the 13-man squad, the 44-man platoon, and the 160-man rifle company.
In a city, the squad is the basic unit moving from house to house. A platoon covers a row of houses on both sides of a street, and a company advances down two streets. Four companies, about 700 men, constitute a battalion led by a lieutenant colonel. In Hue, most battalion commanders were a few streets behind the front lines. They were supposed to grasp the larger dimensions of the battle and accurately report their assessments to the colonels and generals in headquarters dozens of miles away. All too frequently, that did not happen.
Bowden does a first-rate job of showing how the realities of the front lines and the size of the NVA forces were willfully ignored by the higher-ups. He sets the scene and names those who failed their troops. Again and again, he cites “the valor of Americans . . . who were used badly.” Bowden does not conceal his anger at generals who dribbled their men into battles where they were outgunned and outmanned, and then relieved the hapless battalion commanders. Initially, Marine Brigadier General Foster LaHue dispatched two under-strength battalions, about 1,500 men, to push out 10,000 North Vietnamese soldiers. The overall commander, General William Westmoreland, receives particular opprobrium for deciding — against all rational evidence — to divert more and more forces to Khe Sanh, an obscure plateau in the distant jungle near the Laotian border.
Bowden describes Hue as “the point at which everything changed” and American political will began to disintegrate. A discouraged and bewildered President Lyndon Johnson was in the process of replacing Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, who no longer believed the war could be won. General Westmoreland had become an “untrustworthy source of information.” He had lost his credibility in Washington political circles and throughout the ranks of the press covering the war. Walter Cronkite, the oracle of America, visited with the Marines during the battle for Hue. A few days later, he appeared on CBS Evening News. “There is scarcely an inhabitable building in the whole of Hue,” he said. “If our intention is to restore normalcy . . . [Hue] is obviously a setback. . . . The only rational way out then will be negotiate, not as victors.”
And what “victory” had Westmoreland been pursuing? For 32 months, the American military had divided its forces in an effort to achieve two objectives. Westmoreland pursued a strategy of searching in the jungles for North Vietnamese main-force units in order to destroy them. In Bowden’s judgment, the general “continually and falsely assured political leaders” that he could attrite the enemy forces to the point where North Vietnam would quit.
The other objective was called nation-building or counterinsurgency. It required deploying Americans units across 12,000 hamlets to drive out the local guerrillas and to persuade the famers to support the central government.
The American military did not agree which task should take priority. The Marines sustained about as many casualties in counterinsurgency/nation-building as in fighting the North Vietnamese divisions.
In his definitive book American Strategy in Vietnam, Colonel Harry Summers argued that our generals were wrong to pursue a two-headed strategy: “Instead of concentrating our efforts on repelling external aggression as we had in Korea, we also took upon ourselves the task of nation building.” The American military could have rendered North Vietnam incapable of sustaining its offensive. Mining the harbors up north would have prevented Russian military aid. Bombing the dikes would have diverted manpower to subsistence farming. Large-scale ground attacks into Laos and north of the risible Demilitarized Zone would place the NVA army on the defense.
However, no such operations were undertaken. Instead, U.S. troops fought on the defense inside South Vietnam, from which the U.S. had essentially withdrawn by 1972. In 1973, the U.S. Congress declared a termination of all bombing, regardless of the continuing attacks by the North Vietnamese. Each year after that, aid to South Vietnam was slashed, while the Soviet Union and China steadfastly armed and subsidized North Vietnam. In April of 1975, North Vietnamese soldiers manning Soviet tanks rolled into Saigon as the last Americans escaped by helicopter.
In the book’s epilogue, Bowden writes, “the battle of Hue and the entire Vietnam War seem a tragic and meaningless waste. . . . As some of the nation’s more recent wars have helped to illustrate, ‘victory’ in Vietnam would have been neither possible nor desirable.” This exculpation by blanket denial is both mystical and bewildering. It does not fit with the focus (one significant 25-day urban battle) or the deep research of the book.
Yes, the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are comparable to Vietnam in two particulars. First, in all three cases America insisted upon democratic nation-building that was resisted by the indigenous cultures and eventually exceeded politically sustainable resources. Second, in Vietnam, we conceded a vast sanctuary to our enemy; in Afghanistan, we similarly allowed Pakistan to provide aid and refuge to the Taliban and other terrorist groups.
However, unlike North Vietnam, the Islamist terrorists pose a continuing danger to America. Defeating them cannot be dismissed as “neither possible nor desirable.” There must be “victory,” narrowly defined as an end state that is tolerable to our security interests. Tell me where we are in three years if I follow your strategy should be the directive the commander-in-chief issues to his generals. And most certainly Bowden’s aversion to nation-building should be heeded in regards to our future role in Syria. Beyond that, though, it is not clear how geopolitical lessons from Vietnam apply to our ongoing wars.
Fortunately, Bowden’s musings on strategy and foreign policy are merely an out-of-place epilogue hastily appended. Essentially, Bowden has written a classic narrative about the role of grit and the individual soldier in urban battle.
Hue was not a tactical microcosm of the war; indeed, it was the singular exception in a war fought in the rice paddies and jungles. Of the 58,000 American fatalities during the war, less than 0.5 percent occurred during the battle to retake Hue. But Hue’s import is not restricted to history.
We have not seen the end of city brawls of hurricane force, and the nature of the savage fighting has not changed. Urban warfare is increasing as more of the world’s population leaves rural areas. In 2004, American forces twice assaulted the city of Fallujah. Eighteen thousand of the city’s 39,000 buildings were damaged or destroyed. More than 120 Americans and thousands of Iraqi civilians and insurgents died. Were it not for modern medical techniques, about as many Americans would have been killed in Fallujah as in Hue. Today, the battles raging across Syria and Iraq are mainly urban. In Mosul alone, tens of thousands have died, with many thousands yet to come.
The tactics Bowden describes in graphic detail — avoiding the booby-trapped doors and instead smashing through the sides of buildings, clearing room to room, staying off any street or open area, moving always by bounds — are as vital today as they were in Hue.
READ MORE:
Sangin, Bloody Sangin, and Wretched Afghanistan
In 2004 Fallujah, a Lesson for 2017 Mosul
Courage and Cowardice in the Vietnam War’s Final Hours
— Bing West served in Marine infantry in Vietnam and has written nine books about our wars in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan.
The Horror of Urban Combat in Vietnam
By Gary Anderson
http://www.washingtontimes.com/
May 30, 3017
U.S. Marine takes cover while fighting in Hue, Vietnam, during Tet Offensive, 1968 (Don North)
A few years ago, I was lecturing my students on strategic surprise. I asked each of them to write paragraph on how surprise was used at Hue in 1968 based on what they knew of it. With few exceptions, the reply was that Hue was the battle where the Viet Cong won the war in a general uprising. These were graduate students, and their woeful knowledge of the Vietnam War was gained through the state of education in our high schools and undergraduate college programs. Their ignorance is more a comment on the “liberal” in liberal arts than in any defect in my students. Today, we are chronologically as far removed from Vietnam as my generation was from World War I in 1968; and its lessons are in danger of being lost. Mark Bowden tries to remedy this with his excellent new book, “Hue 1968.”
Mr. Bowden points out that the Tet Offensive campaign, of which Hue was the major battle, was a strategic surprise that ranks along with Pearl Harbor and Sept. 11 as a colossal American intelligence failure. However, it was not planned and fought by peasant Viet Cong (VC) guerrillas. It was planned by the North Vietnamese general staff and political leaders in Hanoi and fought largely by regular regiments of the North Vietnamese Army (NVA); the VC were relegated to being scouts, guides, suicide sappers, and cannon fodder.
The NVA and Viet Cong lost every tactical engagement and failed to achieve their primary objective, a popular uprising that would topple the South Vietnamese government and force the Americans out of the war. However, Tet was the turning point of the war because America’s leaders were discredited by the surprise and lost the confidence of a significant portion of the American public. Tet ruined Lyndon Johnson’s presidency. There was no “light at the end of the tunnel.” Although the last U.S. bombs would not fall until 1973, the North Vietnamese had irretrievably gained the psychological advantage.
Mr. Bowden covers the overall planning for Tet to set context, but concentrates on the battle for Hue City in hour by hour detail as it represents the degree to which America leaders from the White House down to the tactical levels saw their assumptions and narratives shattered. Until Tet, the NVA and VC had generally waged guerrilla tactics and operated in battalion strength only rarely.
The Americans knew a big attack was coming, but they thought it would be at Khe Sanh in a remote area where the Americans hoped to lure the NVA into a climatic big battle, which would be the reverse of Dien Bien Phu where the NVA had crushed the French in 1954. The reality was that the planners in Hanoi used Khe Sanh as a “matador’s cape” to mask their preparations for a nationwide offensive. When U.S. general officers near Hue learned that the enemy had seized much of the city, they thought it was a few hundred commandos and ordered a Marine battalion to clean them out. The Communists had infiltrated whole regiments from the north and the Marines were initially attacking into a dug-in force that outnumbered them by at least 10-1.
What followed was an epic urban battle in which the Marine Corps (supported by what Army troops could be scraped up) eventually prevailed by dint of superior supporting arms and pure grit on the part of companies, platoons and squads. Mr. Bowden was a reporter before he became an author, and he uses a reporter’s concise style to tell both sides of the story from the president of the United States to a teenage VC scout/guide. Just about everyone in the battle went in with false assumptions, and came out with an altered sense of the horror of urban combat.
Many of the Marine characters such as Ernie Cheatham and Ron Christmas became legends of the corps and as senior officers urged all the services to get better at urban combat. Their efforts paid off in places like Ramadi and Fallujah from 2003-04. Unfortunately, we have been less adept at teaching our friends and allies the lessons of urban warfare. The battle for Mosul in Iraq looks depressingly like Hue, albeit on a much larger scale.
Mr. Bowden has done a superb job of telling the story as he did with “Blackhawk Down.” One can sometimes get lost in the plethora of Vietnamese names, but as in war the individuals are less important than lessons imparted; and in Hue, there were lessons aplenty.
• Gary Anderson is a retired Marine Corps colonel who lectures at the George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs.
A ferocious Vietnam battle portrayed as a pivotal moment of the war
By Frederik Logevall, June 22, 2017
The plan was nothing if not audacious. On Jan. 31, 1968, after months of meticulous preparation, North Vietnamese leaders launched a series of closely coordinated attacks throughout South Vietnam, timed with the start of the Lunar New Year, or Tet to the Vietnamese. Their aim: to deliver a debilitating military blow to U.S. and South Vietnamese forces and incite the southern populace to rise up and overthrow the Saigon-based government of Nguyen Van Thieu. For 2 1 / 2 years, large-scale fighting had raged in Vietnam, and Hanoi officials hoped in one bold campaign to change the equation and secure victory in the war.
The Tet Offensive did not succeed in this core objective: The general uprising did not occur, and the coordinated attacks were beaten back by American and ARVN (Army of the Republic of Vietnam) forces. But the endeavor nevertheless represented a political victory for Hanoi, as it called into question U.S. military leaders’ confident — and, as we now know, disingenuous — predictions in earlier months that the war would soon be won. The heavy fighting inflamed American domestic opinion and indirectly caused an embattled President Lyndon Johnson to reject a further increase in the U.S. troop presence and to rule out (publicly at least) a run for reelection. In May, peace talks began in Paris.
Small wonder that Tet looms large in our collective understanding of the war or that it should be the focus of Mark Bowden’s vivid and absorbing, if not entirely convincing, new book, “Hue 1968: A Turning Point of the American War in Vietnam.” Hue (pronounced Hway), Vietnam’s cultural capital and its third-largest city, was the setting for the most ferocious battle during the offensive. Not since the early days of the French struggle against Ho Chi Minh’s Viet Minh, in 1946-47, had Vietnam seen this kind of urban warfare, as North Vietnamese army and Viet Cong troops went up against American and ARVN units, often block by block.
By the time the battle ended, on Feb. 25, the U.S./ARVN side had prevailed, but the city lay in ruins. Almost 6,000 civilians had been killed in the fighting, not including several hundred South Vietnamese civil servants who were executed by communist soldiers. The Americans lost 250 Marines and soldiers, and 1,554 more were wounded. ARVN casualties ran approximately twice as high. Deaths incurred by what Bowden refers to as “The Front” (short for the National Liberation Front, but confusing here in that the NLF would typically refer to the Viet Cong alone, not the combined communist forces) totaled between 2,400 and 5,000, depending on which account one trusts.
A veteran journalist and the author of “Black Hawk Down,” a gripping account of the brief and disastrous U.S. military campaign in Somalia in 1993, Bowden opts here for the same narrative approach that worked well in the earlier book: a day-by-day, sometimes hour-by-hour, reconstruction of events. There is a potent immediacy to his narrative, an almost cinematic vividness, and the momentum seldom flags, even over more than 500 pages. Given especially the multiple armed forces involved in the battle and the sprawling cast of characters, this is no small feat.
Not the least of the book’s virtues is its author’s staunch refusal to speak in terms of heroes and villains, at least as far as the fighters and their local commanders are concerned (the respective senior civilian and military leaderships come in for harsher treatment, depicted as arrogant and mostly out of touch). Both sides, the author shows, were capable of acts of courage and of ruthlessness; neither had a monopoly on dedication or self-doubt. The Vietnamese, so often cardboard figures in histories of the war, here emerge as flesh-and-blood players with their own hopes and ambitions and fears — even if the ARVN mostly recedes from view as the story progresses.
As he did in “Black Hawk Down,” Bowden relies heavily on interviews to bring the events to life. The recollections of Americans as well as Vietnamese form a core part of his research and a core part of his narrative. At times these individuals evidently were able to recapitulate for him verbatim dialogue from half a century ago — either that, or Bowden has a worryingly casual attitude toward the use of quotation marks. More broadly, the author’s minimalist approach to source citation makes it hard to know where he gets a lot of his information. Many chapters have barely any endnotes.
(More minimalism: I’ve been reading serious nonfiction history books for a long time, and never before have I flipped to the back for the index only to be directed to a website.)
As befitting a battle history of this kind, the book has relatively little to say about the broader political and military context in which the encounter in Hue occurred. When Bowden does venture into this terrain, he is not always sure-footed. For him, as for many authors on the war, a principal problem for the United States in Vietnam was that its leaders supposedly did not understand the environment they had entered, did not comprehend the Vietnamese, did not appreciate the nature of the task before them. He approvingly quotes one American veteran of the battle: “I do not think we really understood much. . . . Our policy makers, I do not think really had any grasp at all on what was going to happen.”
Color me skeptical. As Bowden’s own evidence shows, senior U.S. officials knew long before the Tet Offensive that the obstacles in the way of lasting success in the war were formidable and growing; many of them indeed knew it even before they initiated the air war and sent the first combat troops in early 1965. Although largely ignorant of Vietnamese history and culture, they understood full well that the odds were against them.
For this reason one can question Bowden’s assertion that Tet, and the Battle of Hue, was “the pivot point” in the war, after which “the debate was never again about how to win but about how to leave.” Discontent in elite and general American opinion had been rising for many months before the offensive; almost certainly, it would have continued to grow even without Hanoi’s bold gambit. Militarily, both sides pursued aggressive battlefield operations after Hue, and both drove a hard bargain when the Paris talks commenced in the spring. President Johnson, though no longer officially a candidate for reelection, stuck to a firm bargaining position and quietly hoped that whoever succeeded him would wage the military effort with vigor — as indeed Richard Nixon did. Ten thousand Americans would be killed in Southeast Asia in 1969, as many as in 1967. Not until early 1973 would the negotiators in Paris at long last sign a peace deal.
But fine: If some of Bowden’s broader claims are questionable, what remains is still impressive. In “Hue 1968” he has given us an engrossing, fair-minded, up-close account of one of the great battles in the long struggle for Vietnam.
Fredrik Logevall, a historian at Harvard, is the author most recently of “Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America’s Vietnam,” which won the Pulitzer Prize for History.
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