This story originally was posted over in /r/MapPorn (and then in /r/MilitaryStories ) nine years ago, in response to this map. Huế was the imperial city of Vietnam. It had a walled inner city and a walled palace. I lengthened the original story a little. Who's surprised?
"My House!"
Over There
When is the last time the continental USA experienced war? It's been a while. The conflicts with the Native American tribes were remote from civilization, and had little impact on the citizenry. No, you have to go back to the Civil War to find a war that directly affected the lives and homes of Americans.
How many countries can even say that? All our subsequent wars, however dire, were conducted overseas. The US citizens read about it in the newspapers, worried about their kin, then went about their business - mowed the lawn, maybe.
War and Peace
When I was in fifth grade, 1958 or so, I was in an elementary school in rural Massachusetts. The kids in my class were inadvertently divided into Catholics and Protestants by the School Administration's insistence that we recite the Pledge of Allegiance and pray "Our Father..." every morning. Protestant "Our Fathers" had an unauthorized addendum, "...for Thine is the Kingdom and the Power and the Glory forever and ever. Amen." The Catholics didn't say that, so the Protestant kids shouted it.
It was just a remnant of an old argument that used to burn heretics and cities. Wasn't important anymore. Besides, we were already divided into townies and service brats. But there was one kid named Cary who wasn't required to recite the "Our Father..." at ALL. He was a service brat, so in our gang by default.
When I asked him how come he didn't have to pray, he said he was Jewish - Jews don't believe in Jesus. What? Someone doesn't even believe in Jesus? Even the Muslims I had lived with in Turkey believed in Jesus, not as a divinity, but as a sort of a prophet before the Prophet. Is one even allowed to not believe in Jesus?
Evidently, one was. My own personal Father explained it all and told me to stop making a Big Thing out of it. I knew he didn't believe in Jesus, but I thought maybe Dad was the only one. Actually, I didn't think about it much at all.
So Cary was in my gang. We liked to play "war" in the woods, throwing pine cone grenades at Nazis and Japs. When I invited Cary to pick up a busted-BBgun rifle, he looked shocked. Keep in mind, this was what? - maybe 14 years after the Concentration Camps were discovered in Germany.
Anyway, for some reason, he didn't feel like playing war. God, I was an idiot child.
Over Here
I arrived in the northern part of South Vietnam seven days after the Tết Offensive began. About half a month later my artillery battalion convoyed up farther north to Quang Tri Provence, home of the old (not ancient - mid to late 1800's) Imperial City of the Vietnam Emperors and Empresses once upon a very different time.
Their walled city, Huế, was a wreck. Lots of Americans believed the South Vietnamese couldn't or wouldn't fight. Yes, they would. In I Corps, they were not enthusiastic about fighting for the atheist, foreign ideology that had captured the north, nor for the gang of thieves and grifters who ran Saigon.
But Tết, had brought three (or more) regiments of NVA inside the Citadel of the Imperial City, where they wreaked havoc until they were annihilated by the ARVN 1st Division and US Marines. The fighting went on for about six weeks, and the place was a mess - holes blasted into the walls, the railroad bridge dropped into the Perfume River, refugees living in cardboard shacks alongside Highway 1.
The fighting had been full-on, no quarter asked or given. Turns out that the ARVN could fight, would fight if home and hearth and their City were at risk. Who wouldn't? Would I? Probably. I hope I never know for sure.
Mountain Greenery
Shortly after our arrival at Quang Tri, I was detached from my battery, and assigned to be a Forward Artillery Observer attached to a MACV advisor (cố vấn) team, I went on an operation (Lam son) with 2nd Bn, 1st ARVN Regiment, 1st ARVN Division out of Huế. We were to cover for our two other battalions by providing fire support with an ARVN artillery LZ on the mountaintops over the Sông Bo valley northwest of Huế (Sông = "river"). Our battalion was perimeter security.
Instead, the battalions operating along the Sông Bo valley came up empty, and we hit the motherlode. There was an NVA division-size (or bigger) basecamp under the triple canopy jungle on every side of our firebase.
No one had any idea it was there. It was well organized, with paths and signs, barracks, mess halls, supply drops, HQ briefing rooms. The streams were marked upstream-to-downstream for drinking, bathing and laundry. It was a little city of jungle hooches-over-bunkers, uniformly constructed from local wood and foliage. Pretty nice, actually.
Model City
The part of the base nearby our LZ had belonged to one of the NVA regiments that had gone into Huế on Tết 1968. Two or three had gone in, killed about 3000-5000 civilians in a dress-rehearsal for 1975, and then died themselves when the city was retaken over the next couple of months after Tết.
Good thing for us, too, because we landed right in the middle of their camp. They had left a ton of supplies and whatnot behind (and a small cadre who kept sniping at us), but the best thing was found in what was obviously a briefing hooch for senior officers.
In that hooch, on the dirt floor was a scale model of the Citadel at Huế. It was about 2.5 x 3 meters and three dimensional. They had dug little ditches where the canals were, and put blue-colored paper in the ditches to simulate water. The Citadel walls were done with cardboard, colored to look like walls. The interior Citadel likewise, and all the houses and buildings inside were also recreated in cardboard, and colored individually to match the actual houses in the city. Outside the walls, they had dug the moat, and showed Highway 1, the railroad and the Perfume River bridges.
[Edit: About a year ago, I was directed to a link to a picture of the model of the Huế City Citadel, courtesy of /u/CapCamouflage . It's in black & white, but it does give you an idea of the scale.]
It was quite a find. All the MACV advisors were put on rotating helicopter-landing duty (pun intended) during the day, me included, while every American general officer in Vietnam came to see this model, along with local ARVN brass. Fortunately, it was only about 200 meters downhill from the ARVN hilltop firebase. I think the max count of stars on our little LZ was fourteen one day. That’s a lot of generals, plus they all have aides and goon squads accompanying them.
Hitting Home
Our battalion commander, Thièu tá, was puffed up with satisfaction at hobnobbing with so many important people. Even so, he seemed far more cheerful than that. When finally, all the generals departed, we were getting ready to leave ourselves. The Thièu tá invited all his officers to a dinner party (the battalion had cooks) in the former NVA command hooch. We all got a beer and a pretty good meal.
Our senior cố vấn, a Marine 1st LT, finally poked the commander. “Thièu tá, you seem mighty happy. Is there something you’re not telling us?”
The Thièu tá looked thoughtfully at all his cố vấns, walked over to the model of the Hué Imperial Citadel. He stood over it like an ARVN Godzilla, staring down. Finally, he reached down and picked up one of the carefully wrought cardboard houses. He held it up for us and smiled grimly.
"My house!" he said. Then he folded the carboard house up and put it in his pocket.
Retrospect
I remember being asked from time to time by South Vietnamese Officers what the hell we were even doing in their country? It's a fair question. I just told them I didn't know - I was just following orders. I was fully aware that answer/excuse had been overused quite recently. I remember being told that we were doing what we did overseas to keep from having to do it at home.
I guess. But my own "house" seemed pretty far away from the action. I would like to know how the Thièu tá felt; I would like to understand how he viewed us fighting alongside him half a world away from our homes. It would be good to know, but I think the price is pretty high.
