Solidly entrenched within the walls of the Citadel, Hue’s inner city, the enemy fought on. Reluctant to destroy one of their few real cultural treasures, Saigon’s government had initially demurred in employing air and artillery strikes against the Citadel, and our leaders had acquiesced to their desires.
And while these powers dallied about the destruction of stone walls, North Vietnamese cadres methodically murdered three thousand men, women, and children—and Marines, paratroopers, ARVN soldiers, and Cav troopers continued to die.
In February’s waning days, after air and artillery were finally brought to bear on the inner city, and after the Cav had fielded sufficient troops to stop the resupply of enemy forces therein, we began to notice a shift in our encounters with the enemy. Whereas before we had oriented our main effort northward, we now found our foe approaching us from the south. Charlie was no longer trying to sneak into Hue. He was trying to sneak out.
“Sir,” Blair said, scurrying up beside me as we trudged along one of Thua Thien’s winding rice-paddy dikes, accompanying Three Six on a business-as-usual search-and-destroy trek.
“Three’s on the horn, right?” I answered.
“No, sir. Captain Carroll’s been hit! They killed him, sir.”
“What?”
“Just heard it. They got into something east of us, and his RTO said couple of their men were killed and Carroll was down. Next transmission, he told Major Byson their Six was dead.”
“Let me listen in, please,” I said, grabbing his handset.
Runner, this is Arizona Six. What’s the status on your Six? Over,”
Colonel Lich was saying in a very concerned voice.
“Runner Two Six… Uh, killed in action. Over.”
There was a long pause before Colonel Lich again came on the air and, with a discernible sigh, said, “Okay. You’re in command. I’m en route. Out.”
Bob Carroll had been a close friend, and his death saddened me, as it did his soldiers. But he was not the first company commander, nor would he be the last, to die in a war that others would later call a company commander’s war. Vietnam, unlike most of our nation’s wars, was a war without fronts, a war fought in the enemy’s lair by widely scattered infantry companies. Like cavalry troops on our western plains a century before, the soldiers of these companies fought alone.
A short while later we took a break next to another nameless and virtually deserted village. It had stopped drizzling, but the sky remained overcast, dark, and low. A misty wetness enveloped us.
“Too bad about Carroll,” Lieutenant Halloway remarked as we sat on a lowlying mud-and-stone wall at village’s edge.
“And his soldiers,” I muttered in return. “Not too far from us—a couple, three klicks east of here.”
“That’s Blue Max supporting ’em now, sir,” Moseley said, pointing to a pair of Cobra attack helicopters that were alternately making firing runs on an unseen target to the east of us. Moments after each completed its pass, we’d hear the muffled reports of their rockets and 40-mm impacting. “And they’re not gonna be supporting them much longer if this ceiling keeps dropping,” he added, dryly.
“Wonder what they ran into?” Halloway asked.
“Who knows,” I replied. “Damn, wish we’d run into something. We’re just not making contact up here like we did on the plain, Bob.”
“That’s ‘cause the plain—the mountain—was our playpen. The street is Charlie’s,” he responded. “Just takes time to figure out the lay of the land, Six. Once we do, we’ll be scoring same as we did down south.”
“Hope you’re right. Only concern is that Charlie’s had a twenty-, twenty-five-year head start on figuring the lay of the land around here.”
Lieutenant Moseley, changing the course of our conversation, commented,
“Appears the Marines are about to wind it up in Hue. Least that’s what the papers are saying.”
“About time,” Halloway said. “How long they been at it now? A month?”
“Nearly,” I said.
“Got a letter from my wife yesterday. She said they must have a TV cameraman assigned to every other soldier and Marine fighting in Hue. Said it’s as much a part of the evening news as the weather. You know, ‘And now, turning to the battle for Hue’.”
As he talked, I idly watched his RTO clean his disassembled M-16. “That couldn’t wait till tonight, Torres?” I asked.
“No, sir. Weather’s hard on her. She needs a lot of TLC in weather like this.”
Smiling, Halloway said, “Cleanest weapon in the United States Army, sir. Seems to always be in pieces before him. And every two, three days, he extracts, cleans, oils, and reinserts each of the three hundred rounds.”
“Two hundred and seventy, LT,” Torres said, correcting his platoon leader. “Fifteen magazines, eighteen rounds per. Ought to always go two rounds shy if you want your magazine to feed properly.”
“Whatever,” Halloway said. “Anyway, I’m not faulting you for your paranoia. Hell, might save your life some day.”
“Might save yours, Robert,” I said.
As we got to our feet to continue our wanderings in and about Thua Thien Province, it started to drizzle again.
The following morning, after the log bird had departed and we were finishing up our C&D of hard-boiled eggs, bread, oranges, and coffee, Major Byson’s command-and-control helicopter set down unannounced on our LZ. Meeting him as he dismounted the communication-laden Huey, I saluted and said, “Ready, sir!”
Smiling, he returned my salute. “Tall Comanche, are you in a posture for a pickup?”
“Your timing couldn’t have been better, sir,” I said. “We were just about to split up and begin today’s walk in the sand.”
“Great. If the ceiling holds, got three hooks coming in here at 0900.”
“Our LZ’s gonna be green, sir?”
“Should be,” he responded. “It’s Evans.”
“Evans, sir?” the Bull asked, joining us.
“Just for the day, First Sergeant,” Byson replied. “The colonel wants to get you in for a shower and a little drying out. Then it’s back to the war, okay?”
“Okay, sir!” Sullivan responded. “And please pass along my thanks to the colonel. Snuffie can sure as hell use a little drying out. Clean jungles, I suppose?”
“It’s all taken care of. Trains will just do the uniform dump there instead of out here.”
Then the major turned to more serious matters. “Listen, I know the weather’s miserable, and the sun rarely shines, but your sufferings have not been for naught. The battle for Hue, for all practical purposes, is pretty much history. Marines are still mopping up in the Citadel, and they may be doing that for some time yet, but Charlie’s beaten—royally! And the reason he lost the battle is because you and others in the Cav have been suffering out here, denying him the ability to reinforce. Of course, it’s been costly. Battalion’s taken some bad hits lately.”
“Yeah, sorry to hear ‘bout Bob Carroll,” I said.
He merely nodded and continued his discourse. “Anyway, as you probably know, the traffic out of Hue is heading north now, so I want you all to keep yourselves oriented south. Within the next couple days or so, we’re gonna start working the middle of the street. Gonna get into Charlie’s twenty-year lair and pacify the street like we did Bong Son’s plain.”
This was all well and good, but at the moment a shower and a change of uniforms were top priority.
Thirty minutes or so after Major Byson took off, we heard the inbound CH-47s. Twenty minutes later we were at Evans, and soon after that, with our feet ankle deep in mud, we were in a GP medium tent, under a shower head dispensing cold water. And it was great!
Outside the tent, Willie and our trains folk busied themselves outfitting us with clean, dry uniforms. After donning these, we were trucked to battalion’s portion of Evans and fed a hot lunch. Then, after cleaning their weapons and caring for their gear, the soldiers of Charlie Company were given the run of the camp for a couple of hours to visit the PX, steam bath, special services, and so forth. Many simply napped the day away.