I was trying to remember when Tet occurred.

The Viet Cong were finished as a fighting force after it was over, and they never took to the field in any measurable way after that. Also, the North Vietnamese Army never tried such a bold and audacious attack again. If NVA commander Giap's plan was to defeat the US military in the field, he failed miserably, including in the attack on the US embassy in Saigon by VC irregulars. But I'm not sure he didn't have a longer-term purpose in mind, for all that.

As well, the attack on the Marine Corps base at Khe Sahn (which was actually a misdirection ploy by the North Vietnamese to pull US forces out of the more protected areas in the South) was going on at the same time, and it too ended in whole NVA divisions being destroyed as effective fighting units.

Though both were military defeats of the North and its allies in the South, the Viet Cong, they ended up being strategic victories for them over the long run, however, and for a number of reasons. Tet was where Walter Cronkite declared the war "unwinnable" by the US, for starters. Most people watching the goings-on in South Vietnam, who'd been largely either indifferent to the war or at least mildly supportive of it up to that point, slowly began to turn away from its prosecution.

It wasn't until Richard Nixon basically air-bombed the North, especially in Hanoi, back to the negotiating table in Paris, using immense bomb loads delivered by B-52s, that any real end to the war could be visualized by the US, which at that point was more interested in a "peace with honor" than anything else.

Given the length of the war and its seeming intractability, it's easy to see why that might have been the case.

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"Politics is just show business for ugly people."

Spent a year in the SRV--lived in Hanoi in the old Cuban 'advisor' compound--leading the Accountability effort to find and bring back home those we left behind there. This was a hard job but very rewarding. As CDR of DET2 JTF-FA i was a principle member of the US Ambo's Country Team. Huge learning curve for me coming out of wholly tactical assignments in the Army

Many trips down to Hue City to negotiate with provincial officials in that area to set up pending recovery efforts. The Citadel is HUGE. What a terrible fight that must have been for those Marines. You can still see bullet pockmarks and signs of the battle all over the Citadel



The hardest recovery mission tho was a USAF Capt who was on a OV-10 shot down in the middle of a giant mangrove swamp down below Vung Tau. What a shit hole. We worked for months with immense effort to quite literally drain a part of a swamp in the middle of bum fuck no where Vietnam



But we got Capt Long and we brought him home finally. Even got his Aggie Class ring



take good care

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Steve

Awesome work

I wanted to volunteer for JTF Full Accounting but my work/deployments never lined up.

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All I Wanted Was A Pepsi, Just One Pepsi

Team Zoot, Team Zoot Mid-Atlantic

It was a honor and one of the assignments i look back on with a sense of having done something really good

FWIW. We had no dedicated med support. Eight of us lived in Vietnam full time and we had rotating med support. So while i was there we had a IDC Chief come support us out of Pearl. So i named him the COD [detachment] (as apposed to COB)---since he was the senior enlisted present in the detachment at the time. He really liked that. Great medic

/r

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Steve

Thank you so much, Steve, for doing what you did to help bring our honored dead back home where they belong. The nation owes you a debt.

Bravo Zulu, sir.

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"Politics is just show business for ugly people."

Thanks but just doing what i was there to do.

While there at DET2 my 2IC was a tremendous Marine Maj. We both got copies of Hammel's "Fire in the Streets" and spent several days--when not busy with official duties-- walking about Hue City trying to figure out what had happened where. My limited experience in fighting in cities is solely from a medium sized shit hole up in Saladin Prov, Iraq. Fighting in such a large urban area--let along trying to retake something as immense as the Citadel is just mind boggling to me. Hats off to those Marines that tackled this job. So I will just drop in a few other of the pics i have on file from that area of Hue City and the Citadel

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Steve

I'm halfway through Mark Bowden's Hue 1968 book. The Marines measured victories by the block and didn't gain headway before they brought in leadership that understood house to house fighting. And they started using these bad boys...

Are you an Aggie? If you have more to the story, I'd like to share it in a Corps group I belong to. It'd be much appreciated. I bet I could find some backstory from the group and some might appreciate finding closure for their buddy.

I am--sort of

West Point '82 undergrad
TAMU '92 grad school

i am off to airport this morning and will be offline this week as i've gotta go get re-certified on a system prior to this coming Afghan deployment. i can type at ya this coming weekend if you'd like more details?

take good care

/r

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Steve

Bravo, Sir, very impressive.

One of the things that sticks w/ me in reference to Hue is an interview I read once w/ Stanley Kubrick about filming FMJ ~ which might be the only Vietnam War film of similar stature to feature mostly urban combat vs the more ubiquitous jungle/rural setting. I don't recall how much of it was in the original script as envisioned, but Kubrick mentioned the good fortune to have access to some shitty housing projects that were slated to be demolished anyway, so a much more realistic set kinda fell into his lap rather than trying to create artificially dilapidated bldgs and rubble from scratch. It's kind of a lost episode of the war to those of us who mostly only grew up w/ it in movies. I'm well aware of many events from reading about them, but visualizing urban vs jungle combat when the avg younger person thinks of 'Vietnam' is kinda foreign.

How many ducks can you carry on a motorbike? That guy looks like has has a hundred. And they all look happy.

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They constantly try to escape from the darkness outside and within
Dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good T.S. Eliot

I was raised as a young Navy hospital corpsman/"special operations technician" E4/E5 by several senior Navy corpsmen and Marine Corps SNCOs (E7s and E8s), all of whom had significant special operations/special warfare experience in Vietnam. A few of them had been in Hue with 2/5 and other Marine Corps infantry battalions. It was really the first time they'd done true house-to-house combat.

The ones that had been there would just shake their heads when asked about the fight and remark that it was like nothing anyone had ever seen. The number of folks in the Navy and Marine Corps that understood house-to-house back then was limited at the time.

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"Politics is just show business for ugly people."

More on the fighting in Hue City 50 years ago this month:

In this photo, US Marines are shown advancing, February 22, 1968. These Devil Dogs were from Lima Company, 3rd Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment (3/5). They're using walls and buildings as effective cover from enemy fires. Pop smoke (grenades), move to cover. Pop smoke, lay down fire to suppress enemy gunfire, move to cover, and so on. The enemy fought hard but they were rolled up time and time again by superior maneuver tactics.

Marines clearing houses and buildings and other structures ran up against a far more difficult task, at least until they learned to adapt their tactics to the situation as it presented itself.

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"Politics is just show business for ugly people."

The fight for Hue City on February 3, 1968. This photo depicts a Marine M67 'Zippo' flamethrower tank on the move, advancing up a street during Operation Hue City (photo taken by SGT W.F. Dickman, USMC).

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"Politics is just show business for ugly people."

Thank you Steve!
I was stationed just down the road at Phu Bai from Dec '71 through Dec '72. Got a little hairy in the spring during the Easter Tet offensive. I was with the 138th Aviation Radio Research Group (Army Security Agency). We had to be evacuated during the month of April because of the offensive. Moved us to Bin Hoa. Moved back to Phu Bai in May and had to rebuild everything. Total mess.

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18x Ironman, 3x Hawaii
US Army (Ret.), Vietnam Vet ('71-'72)

I've flown into Phu Bai many times on fixed wing and Vietnamese AF Mi-17s. it's nothing like when you were there. There's a whole cottage industry in the SRV built around taking returning US veterans and taking them out to their old battlefields to tour--in many cases the tour will link you up with the local Vietminh (VC) that fought against you! NVA is more problematical as they came down from the North so not readily available locally to battlefield tour reunions. There is "ZERO" animosity. Every where i went----and I went everywhere from the Chinese border provinces down to the very bottom of Vietnam--they love Americans. It's a beautiful country with very family oriented lovely industrious people. If it wasn't so expensive to get there i'd take the wife back to see many of the beautiful places and people i encountered there. The beach at Nha Trang is better than Panama City beach in terms of white sand and water--and none of the touristy kitsch crap you get on the redneck riviera

thanks for your service too!

take good care

/r

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Steve

The Vietnamese distrust the Chinese, and that's putting it mildly. So I can see us ending up with a naval base back at Cam Ranh Bay, even, if we really get all snuggly with them. It'd be a counterbalance to ChiCom ambitions in the South China Sea. We just have to get around that whole Vietnam communist government thing, is all. ;-)

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"Politics is just show business for ugly people."