A return to Vietnam: Veterans occupy a former battleground 50 years after Tet

Halfway across the Truong Tien Bridge, walking north, George Haught seemed to jolt. He grabbed at the air and found Danny Cholewa beside him.

With arms over each other’s shoulders they proceeded, walking back into 1968, when they were 19, hearing the screams of their buddies being hit and the din of machine gun tracers clanging off the bridge girders, darting for cover, firing weapons to get to the other side while dragging their wounded and dead against fire coming from the Citadel.

Suddenly, the intersection was today’s. It teemed with scooters and bicycles carrying people who were born in the 1980s and ’90s. Mr. Haught stared wide-eyed past them and wiped his cheek.

“You all right?” Mr. Cholewa asked, looking carefully into his friend’s round, sweet face. He knew the answer. He had been a first-time returnee once himself.

“It took a day to cross a street”

Late last summer, Mr. Haught, who lives in Monaca, made up his mind to go back to Vietnam. He had been buoyed by support at gatherings of the local Veterans Breakfast Club, with whom he first shared the horror of his weeks in Hue as a corporal in Golf Company, 2nd Battalion, 5th Marines.

His father-in-law encouraged him to go, too.

“He said, ‘You only have one 50th.’”

Military Historical Tours, a company in Woodbridge, Va., was offering a trip to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the Tet Offensive — a blitz of surprise attacks throughout South Vietnam by North Vietnamese military and their southern allies just before the Tet lunar new year holiday. Of the many battle sites of the Tet Offensive, Hue (pronounced Hway) was the trip’s focus.

Mr. Haught remembered the traffic circle at the entrance to the city off Highway One and the gas station where his company commander, Capt. Chuck Meadows, now a retired colonel, found a tourist map. He remembered a market, boats on the Perfume River. He remembered, in blips between panic and running and hiding and ducking, the French colonial villas and gardens, the plane trees along the sidewalks.

He remembered only dozing, afraid to fall asleep “because if you did, you might not wake up.”

As someone who had buried his story for 48 years, telling it for the first time in a torrent of emotion, he was prepared for more of the same as he planned his trip: “I want to see what it’s going to bring up,” he said. “I tell people it took a day to cross a street and they look at me like I’m crazy.”

The Battle of Hue was the bloodiest battle of the war in Vietnam, with some estimates as high as 10,000 civilians and combatants killed. It was also a rare urban battle, with snipers in second- and third-story windows. News from Hue was light because Gen. William Westmoreland, commander of U.S. forces, told the government and the media that Hue was under control.

In his 2017 book “Hue 1968,” Mark Bowden described this misleading narrative as “a conspiracy of denial.”

Hue was fully under the control of the North Vietnamese army and their southern allies. More than 8,000 of their troops had amassed around Hue, occupying the city and its heavily fortified Citadel as Tet festivities were about to begin.

Resistance initially came from just two companies of Marines to support several battalions of the South Vietnamese army, or ARVN.

The imbalance was perverse, but so much about the foray into Hue was out of whack.

There was almost no intelligence to suggest any major concern about enemy activity, plus a ceasefire was supposed to be on for Tet.

Capt. Meadows didn’t know what he was leading his 160-man Golf Company into. He even had to scavenge for a city map.

The mission was to retrieve ARVN’s Gen. Ngo Quang Truong, commander of his army’s first division in the Citadel, and take him safely back to Phu Bai. It sounded like an easy day trip to a city — a rare treat for guys whose war experiences had been in the jungle and the boonies.

So they left their packs behind.

Capt. Meadows had a funny feeling as their 6×6 trucks rolled north on Highway One. It was almost Tet — a time of travel for homecoming — and no one was around? he thought. No traffic on the roads? Strange.

When they arrived in Hue, they found Alpha Company, 1st battalion, 1st Marines in tatters, already ambushed. Together, they made their way to the compound of military advisors under attack. Then they headed to the Citadel to retrieve ARVN’s general.

“I’m glad we didn’t make it in”

Mr. Haught was one of few Marines who spent the entire Battle of Hue in Hue. A scrap of a guy at 140 pounds when he entered Hue and 130 when he left, he was trained to handle a 3.5 rocket launcher, a flamethrower, a machine gun and a 106 recoilless rifle.

In the first day of fighting, he saw his friend Clyde Carter go down, the first of the company to be killed. Seven others from Golf died on the first day and 45 were wounded.

There was no air support — in part because of bad weather, in part because the threat in Hue was still not officially recognized. Bombing was off limits because of Hue’s historic architecture. That order was eventually rescinded, but not before scores of men were killed.

Some of those men were on Mr. Haught’s mind as he and Danny Cholewa fell in with the rest of the returning veterans from Golf Company, walking peacefully to the end of the bridge.

On Tran Hung Dao Street, parallel to the river, the group turned right at the first intersection,a street that led into the Citadel through the Truong Tu gate.

“This is a critical spot for Golf Company,” Col. Meadows said. “This is the corner were Larry [Lucas] was wounded, where [Rich] Cobb hid behind a tree. We lost Glen Lucas, we lost [Don] Kirkham and we lost [Gerald] Kinny.

“Even for Marines, we were a little outnumbered,” said Col. Meadows. “I reflect back to the second time I made this trip, trying to piece together the pieces. I still shake my head at how we made it over the bridge.”

Col. Meadows, who was 28, lost nearly 35 percent of his men, wounded or killed. He decided not to enter the CItadel but to pull back, recross the bridge.

“We couldn’t get any further. I never completed the mission I was sent on, and that stayed with me for years,” he said. “The first trip back, in 1996, I went to the farthest point we got to and then I walked into the Citadel.”

Fifty years ago, he had no idea that just inside the gate, a wide open space would have become a killing field.

“If we had gotten in, we would have all been lost, obliterated,” he said. “I am fully reconciled to the fact that I’m glad we didn’t make it in.”

The Battle of Hue was a technical victory for the South and its American allies, as the North Vietnamese were eventually driven out of the Citadel. But the Tet Offensive was, by all accounts, the point at which the resolve to win began to erode for the American government and its public.

It was finally clear that the enemy was willing to sacrifice more to unite its country than the U.S. was to keep it apart.