Phase Line Green: The Battle for Hue, 1968

By Nicholas Warr

The bloody, month-long battle for the Citadel in Hue during 1968 pitted U.S. Marines against an entrenched, numerically superior North Vietnamese Army force. By official U.S. accounts it was a tactical and moral victory for the Marines and the United States. But a survivor's compulsion to square official accounts with his contrasting experience has produced an entirely different perspective of the battle, the most controversial to emerge from the Vietnam War in decades. In some of the most frank, vivid prose to come out of the war, author Nicholas Warr describes with urgency and outrage the Marines' savage house-to-house fighting, ordered without air, naval, or artillery support by officers with no experience in this type of deadly combat. Sparing few in the telling, including himself, Warr's shocking firsthand narrative of these desperate suicide charges, which devastated whole companies, takes the wraps off an incident that many would prefer to keep hidden. His account is sure to ignite heated debate among historians and military professionals. Despite senseless rules of engagement and unspeakable carnage, there were unforgettable acts of courage and self-sacrifice performed by ordinary men asked to accomplish the impossible, and Warr is at his best relating these stories. For example, there's the grenade-throwing mortarman who in a rage wipes out two machine-gun emplacements that had pinned down an entire company for days, and the fortunate grunt with thick glasses who stumbles blindly—without receiving a scratch—across a street littered with the dead and dying who hadn't made it. In describing the most vicious urban combat since World War II, this account offers an unparalleled view of how a small unit commander copes with the conflicting demands and responsibilities thrust upon him by the enemy, his men, and the chain of command.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Naval Institute Press
• Release date: Jan 15, 2013
• ISBN: 9781612512754

Nicholas Warr

Nicholas WarrPhase Line Green: The Battle for Hue, 1968, was on the Marine Reading list for over a decade and was a Featured Selection of the Military Book Club. He was a 2nd Lieutenant in Charlie One Five.

Book preview

Chapter One

A Conversation

with a

Dead Dog

14 February 1968, 1040 hours

The small room in which I stood was as empty as my soul. The room contained no signs of human habitation. It looked as though it had been abandoned long ago. I knew that its previous occupants had probably departed only a few days before I had arrived, having taken all their belongings with them. Now the room was merely a dim, dusty space: four walls, a rude wooden floor, and a badly stained ceiling. The only illumination in the room came from its three doorways, two of which were now permanently open, the doors having been ripped off their hinges. The room was the back one of two rooms that defined a little, nondescript house sitting about twenty-five feet back from phase line green, or Mai Thuc Loan (pronounced My Took Low-an) as the Vietnamese called it.

For the first time in many days, I was alone. My only company was the scratchy static and the staccato voices of radio traffic coming from the Prick-25 (PRC-25) that had been hastily strapped to my Marine Corps-issue backpack.

As a platoon commander for Charlie Company, First Battalion, Fifth Marines, I was unaccustomed to carrying the heavy radio, which, under normal circumstances, would be lugged around by a Marine radio operator. But nothing that had happened in the past two weeks could be considered normal. On the contrary, virtually everything that had happened recently could only be described—quite tamely, I might add—as completely abnormal.

At that exact moment, standing in the dim and empty room, I had become the most contemptible of human characters, a commander with no one to command. As of the previous day, 13 February 1968, the platoon of Marines that I had been commanding for the past three months, the group of young men called Charlie One, was history. Charlie One had been virtually destroyed on the street called phase line green, by a combination of a large force of determined NVA regulars and the rules of engagement established by American and South Vietnamese politicians.

Although my mind was filled with the horrors that had befallen Charlie One yesterday, I didn’t have time to dwell on them, since I still had a job to do. Charlie Company’s commanding officer, 1st Lt. Scott Nelson, had handed me the damnable Prick-25 and had given me the mission of moving up to this house to act as a company forward observer, or FO, for the sixty-millimeter mortar crews, in an effort to keep the NVA’s heads down as Alpha Company assaulted them across phase line green.

I guess Scott Nelson wasn’t too terribly worried about me, or his own problems were more important than worrying about a young second lieutenant who had just had his platoon wiped out. Or perhaps he gave me this assignment because he was worried about me. Whatever his motivation, he had come to me early that afternoon and had asked for my help.

Charlie One, Nelson had said, his struggling mustache quivering slightly as he spoke in his young but clear and forceful voice, Alpha Company is preparing to assault across phase line green in a couple of hours, and Charlie Company is going to provide a base of fire on their right flank. You know the ground on phase line green better than anyone else, and I’d like you to get up as close to their attack positions as possible to act as forward observer for the sixty-mike-mikes (sixty-millimeter mortars). I want to drop some sixties in on top of the gooks, just across the street in front of Charlie Three, to keep their heads down during Alpha’s assault.

Nelson pointed to a spot on his 1:10,000 map and continued, I figure you can work your way up behind this courtyard wall, just behind the houses on phase line green. The wall will give you decent cover and still put you in a good position to call in the sixties. Take the spare Prick-25 and start directing fire as soon as you get into position.

What the hell, I had thought. I was tired of breaking down sixty-mike-mike ammo crates and tired of ignoring the sidelong glances of the mortar teams. Despite the horror of the previous day and my instinctive efforts to find shelter, to try to survive, I just felt funny hanging out in the rear. I rigged up my pack so that it rode on the back of the Prick-25, picked up Estes’s M-16, and took off in the direction of phase line green.

Although I was somewhat hindered by the combined weight of my still-full pack and the heavy Prick-25, I made steady progress, moving as quickly as possible from house to house, back toward the street that had been the scene of Charlie One’s destruction. I had to stay inside the buildings as much as possible, because this block was dominated by open courtyards, and the houses on the other, enemy, side of phase line green were all two-story structures, giving the waiting NVA soldiers excellent fields of fire.

I had arrived at this small house within a few minutes, entered through the rear door, and made sure it was empty. The house consisted of two empty rooms, both unoccupied. The small house’s front room offered little protection from enemy fire. The front of the house was lined with many windows, their glass panes long since shattered and useless, offering excellent visibility for the enemy and little safety for the Marines. And because it sat about twenty feet back from the street, occupants of the house had a poor view of the street. That was why it was empty.

Forcing myself to address the task at hand, I ventured a couple of quick peeks out the side door of the back room and then sat down just inside the empty portal, with my back against the wall, facing away from the enemy. Grabbing the Prick-25’s handset, I called in my first fire mission: Charlie Six, this is Charlie Five. Fire Mission, over.

The reply came immediately: Charlie Five, this is Six. Ready for Fire Mission, over.

I said, Six, this is Five. One round Hotel Echo, map coordinates 76202299. Request call shot, over.

Although I didn’t have a lot of experience calling in supporting fire missions, I did know enough to do four things right. First, I remembered to use the eight-digit map coordinate and not to use the reference points that we used to call in our own positions. If we were being monitored by the enemy, it would be very simple to break our reference point codes if we used them to call in fire missions. The enemy could start with the obvious impact point of the fire mission and work backward, reverse engineering our reference points.

Second, I knew that Hotel Echo is military jargon for H. E., or high explosive. If I had wanted a white phosphorus round, I would have asked for Whiskey Poppa, but this was definitely a Hotel Echo situation.

Third, I knew enough to call in a single first round, to make damned sure that the sixty-mike-mike gunners and I were coordinated. The maps we used in Vietnam were suspect at best. Although my new 1:10,000 map showed the actual locations of each house on the street, I didn’t want to make a rookie mistake and call in a fire for effect only to find out the hard way that the map coordinates were off by just a little bit. Our front line troops were very close to the enemy, within twenty or thirty meters, and I would hate like hell to call in a fire mission that ended up with friendly casualties. High-explosive rounds are very effective when called in correctly on the enemy. High explosives can screw up your whole day, however, if you don’t get it right.

Worrying about that aspect of my new job, my mind flashed briefly back to late November 1967, Charlie One’s Hoi An days. When I had first arrived in the Hoi An area, located about forty kilometers south of Da Nang, I had already heard of many incidents where young platoon commanders had called in supporting artillery fire during a firefight and, in the heat of battle, skipped the first spotter round. They called for an immediate fire for effect and accidentally dropped four or six or eight 105-mm or 155-mm artillery rounds on their own position, making a bad situation terrible.

So I had been extremely careful calling in my first artillery fire mission. Unfortunately, the results had become an often-told joke in Charlie One. Worse, it could easily have been a tragedy. It took place during my first month in country. I was learning the ropes, so to speak, and one of the most difficult challenges at that point was to make damned sure that I always knew exactly where we were, in case we needed to call in artillery support or other heavy firepower. This had been especially important in the Hoi An area, which was geographically dominated by rice paddies and low, rolling sand dunes. The area around Hoi An had very few distinctive terrain features that could be used as reference points to determine either your own or the enemy’s positions. Our 1:50,000 terrain maps were at least ten years old, and the trails and streams marked on them were often hopelessly incorrect.

To pinpoint our location, I called in a fire mission, asking for a single smoke round from a 105-mm battery, to be detonated at a map location that I had estimated to be at least one kilometer away from Charlie One’s location. The theory was that when I saw the smoke round detonate, I could point my compass at its location and then run a back azimuth to our location. I could then estimate our distance from the smoke round, thereby pinpointing our location on the map.

The 105-mm smoke round detonated right above our heads, and the heavy, expended canister struck the soft ground exactly in the center of our hasty perimeter. It scared the shit out of me, and generated many uneasy sidelong glances from the Marines of Charlie One over the next few days.

Sitting in my open door inside that small house within the Citadel of Hue, within fifty meters of the enemy and knowing that friendly troops were very close to the intended impact point, I cautiously called in a single first round. The map coordinates were the location of a house just across phase line green that was, we hoped, a currently occupied enemy position.

The fourth thing I did right as I now sat within the Citadel was to ask them to radio me with the message, Shot, when they fired. A few moments passed, and then the familiar thunking pop of a sixty-millimeter mortar round being launched from its tube punctuated the sounds of sporadic small-arms fire that had been our background music throughout the day. My Prick-25 squawked the confirmation that this was a friendly mortar round. Shot, out.

The next five seconds slowed maddeningly and refused to tick off. Since the Charlie Company mortar positions were less than a hundred meters behind my position, the trajectory of this mortar round was nearly vertical. And, although our gunners were well trained and had a good reputation for accuracy, until the first round exploded, you just never knew where the damned thing was going to land. Waiting for those slow seconds to tick off, my still-numb mind perversely returned to the fire base at Phu Loc 6.1 relived the long nights of constant terror, of hearing the firing of incoming enemy mortar and rocket fire, and waiting for the inevitable explosions. I remembered the persistent, inescapable question: Would this be the one that would land right on top of my head, or worse, in my lap?

None of these thoughts prepared me for the shattering explosion that ripped apart the shrubbery just outside my door and threw violent chunks of shrapnel, dirt, and brush through the open door. The sharp, powerful flame from the high-explosive mortar round illuminated the dim room, and the concussion of the mortar round’s detonation shoved me away from the door and deafened my left ear. Instantly, dust, small chunks of dirt, and cordite fumes filled the small room.

Rolling back upright and without thinking, I looked out the door and immediately saw the sixty-mike-mike’s tailfin sitting in the middle of a newly blasted hole in the ground about two feet outside the door and slightly toward the street. I reached out the door and retrieved the explosion-hot tailfin with no difficulty. Tossing the tailfin gingerly back and forth between my hands like a hot potato, I then dropped it onto the floor between my legs and keyed the handset of the Prick-25 with my right hand. In a completely detached voice that I cannot possibly attribute to my real self, I said, Add fifty, fire for effect.

The Charlie Company mortar team answered immediately, confirming my adjustment, Roger, add fifty, fire for effect, and within moments they started pouring sixty-millimeter high-explosive rounds just across the street, right on top of the enemy positions. I told them to walk the rounds left and right and away from us, but not to fire anything closer than my initial adjustment, Add fifty, fire for effect. My adjustment dictated that they add fifty meters to the trajectory of the first round and start firing as rapidly as possible for as long as possible. The mortar team’s response was accurate and continuous over the next several minutes.

A few minutes later, Scott Nelson burst through the back door of my hide hole, took one look at me, and said, Jesus, Charlie One, what the hell happened here? Nelson was having as hard a time terminating my Charlie One call sign as I was, but I let it go without comment. In fact, I said nothing but simply handed him the sixty-mike-mike tailfin and pointed out the side door to the small crater, and he understood everything.

Nelson grinned at me and said, Jesus, that was close. Good shooting, though. The sixties are blasting away at the gook positions just on the other side of the street.

Never one to allow anyone to rest on his laurels for long, Nelson let me know right away that this was not a pleasure visit. He wanted me to get closer to the corner, so he pointed out the opposite door to a low wall surrounding a courtyard about fifty feet away. I’d like you to get over behind that wall and monitor the battalion frequency. Alpha Company is going to assault across phase line green in a few minutes, and I want you as close as possible.

I started to make some lame commentary about snipers and machine guns in the enemy positions in the second floors of the buildings just across phase line green, about their great fields of fire looking right down our throat, and about having to run across fifty feet of open ground to get to the questionable safety of the low wall. But from the look on his face, Nelson had pretty much decided that I was going over there, so I just nodded. He looked in my eye for a long moment and finally grinned again and said, Hey, no big deal. I’ll go with you. It’s not very far, and we’ll catch them sleeping up there. Ready?

We stood in the doorway for a moment, each of us grabbing the door jamb on our respective sides. Thinking, What the hell, over? we pulled ourselves out of the doorway and ran into the open courtyard.

If the enemy gunners were sleeping, they woke up very quickly, as the rate of fire increased with each long stride we took. Hellishly, inevitably, the scene ratcheted down into an agonizingly lethargic slow motion. It seemed like the faster we ran toward that low wall, the slower we went and the more the enemy shot at us. I was again trapped in a recurring nightmare of frustration, trying to run as fast as possible to avoid the NVA gunners’ fire, and feeling as though my feet were wrapped in concrete boots.

I started giggling. I don’t know why. I just couldn’t help myself. There was nothing funny about any of this, but a bad case of the insane giggles took hold of my mind and refused to release me. The giggles probably saved my life, because they bent me over double. I was still running as fast as I could, however, neck and neck with Scott Nelson, when something tugged at my back, and I started to stumble and turn. Laughing, choking, stumbling, and finally crash-rolling to the ground, I scrambled the last couple of feet to the safety of the wall.

Winded but temporarily safe from enemy gunfire, Scott Nelson and I took inventory of each other for a few minutes as we caught our breath. The enemy gunners were shooting the hell out of the wall and surrounding area, but the Charlie Three Marines were returning their fire and the Charlie Company mortar team was still raining high explosives on them as well. The wall turned out to be thicker and more protective than it had seemed from a distance, so we were pretty safe in our new position, as long as we kept our heads down.

Scott Nelson caught his breath first. He looked over at me and asked, You okay, Charlie One? That was freaking unbelievable. What the hell were you laughing at, anyway? Nelson persisted in calling me Charlie One, and I didn’t make any effort to correct him.

I grinned for a moment myself and said, I have no idea, Skipper, I just couldn’t help it. I really did have no idea what had started the laughing fit, but I knew why I was grinning now; we had made it across, and neither of us had been hit. Yeah, I’m fine. Thanks for the company.

Nelson stayed with me for a few more minutes while I dialed in to the battalion frequency and made sure that the Prick-25 was in good operating condition. Then he took one more look in my eyes and said, Okay. Keep your head down, and check in with me every hour or so.

With that, Nelson gathered up his bulky frame and took off across the open ground back toward the house we had just abandoned. The enemy gunners opened up on him again right away, and dust kicked up at his feet from the impact of several AK-47 rounds, but he was just too damned fast for them. Scott Nelson was a two-hundred-pound giant, but he could really move fast when he needed to!

I spent the remaining daylight hours of that day, 14 February 1968, hunkered down behind the low but protective wall, constantly monitoring the battalion and company radio nets. My only company for the rest of the day was a dead dog. Its bloated body was several feet further down the wall and I had not noticed it at first. Soon after Scott Nelson left, however, the unmistakable scent of death wafted across my nostrils and drew my attention toward the remains of this unfortunate animal.

The dog hadn’t been dead more than a couple of days, because it wasn’t completely bloated like many other animals I had seen that had cooked for days on end in the relentless Vietnam sunshine. The terrible heat and humidity of Vietnam caused their bodies to swell to two or three times their normal size, forcing their legs to stick out stiff and straight. The overall effect of this postmortem process made them look like obscene pincushions. In this case, the smell of death emanating from the dog, although not very pleasant, was not intolerable, and the dog was not a pincushion yet.

Upon closer inspection, I found that I was not the first person who had visited this dog after his death, because he had a plastic C ration spoon sticking out of his mouth. This was someone’s idea of dark humor, I supposed, but I did nothing to change the scene. Somehow it looked right, and if you had eaten more than a few C ration meals, the humor was inescapable; this dog had obviously been done in by some bad Ham and Lima Beans. Ham and Lima Beans, or Ham and Lunkers, or Ham and Mutherfuckers, as they were often called, were universally reviled as the worst C ration meal ever.

I looked over at the dog and said, Hey, dog, what the hell happened, over? Didn’t anyone teach you about Ham and Lunkers? Shit, man, you should have listened to your squad leader. My mind was in a place that allowed for this kind of conversation—no, that required this kind of conversation. It was a diversion from the previous day of horror, and as long as I was having a conversation, I wasn’t thinking about any of that. I sometimes think that without that dog to keep me company during that long and hellish afternoon, I would have lost my mind, gone totally bonkers. I might have even started shooting Estes’s M-16 at the enemy positions. Because the hell that Charlie One had endured the previous day was happening all over again. Alpha Company had started their attack across phase line green, and they were being slaughtered.

As the cycle of death on phase line green began once again, my mind went into a sort of hibernation while my external self went through the motions of living in a combat zone. Ignoring the dead dog for a while, I mentally traveled back in time to the night when it all had changed.

Chapter Two

The

Longest

Night

31 January 1968

An entire generation of Americans remembers exactly what they were doing on the morning of 7 December 1941. Another generation remembers exactly where they were when they heard that President Kennedy was assassinated. Like them, for every American serving in South Vietnam at the time, 31 January 1968 is a date that will "live in infamy.’’ During the late night hours of 30 January and the early morning hours of 31 January, another generation of Americans was shocked to learn that the world as they knew it had been changed, dramatically, literally