‘Hue 1968’ Could Be the ‘Black Hawk Down’ of the Vietnam War

REVIEWS BY MARC LEEPSON

Mark Bowden’s Hue 1968 (Atlantic Monthly Press, 594 pp., $30) is one of the best nonfiction books on the Vietnam War I have read in years. Bowen is a former Philadelphia Inquirer reporter best known for Black Hawk Down, his 2010 bestseller detailing the disastrous 1993 U.S. raid in Mogadishu, Somalia. This time around Bowden shows off his sterling reportorial, analytical, and storytelling skills in a long, highly readable account of the pivotal Battle of Hue during the 1968 Tet Offensive.

With this book, Bowden joins a select group of journalists who created memorable, insightful examinations of the Vietnam War focused on one aspect of the conflict, but also containing illuminating analyses of the conflict’s bigger-picture issues. To wit: Neil Sheehan’s A Bright, Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam and Joe Galloway’s We Were Soldiers Once… and Young: Ia Drang: The Battle That Changed the War in Vietnam, co-written by Gen. Hal Moore—along with David Halberstam’s The Best and the Brightest.

Bowden’s book is an exhaustive, almost blow-by-blow recounting of the three-week-plus Battle of Hue. He tells this story well and accurately, relying heavily on interviews with men and women who were in the thick of things. Most of the witnesses are former American Marines and soldiers, but Bowden also includes accounts from one-time ARVN, NVA, and VC fighters, as well as the words of American and Vietnamese civilians caught in the deadly crossfire.

As Bowden points out, the American response to the surprise enemy takeover of Vietnam’s Imperial capital resulted in twenty-four days of urban warfare that caused more casualties on all sides than any other Vietnam War engagement. Official numbers vary widely, but as Bowden reports, as many as 14,000 civilians also died during the fighting. Most lost their lives from bombs and bullets during the chaos of the fighting in the city. But somewhere between 300 and 2,800 people were executed by communist troops because they supported the South Vietnamese government.

“It’s impossible to know for sure,” Bowden says of the vast discrepancy in the figures reported by North and South Vietnamese officials. “Without any doubt, the [communists] engaged in a systematic effort to find and punish those allied with the Saigon regime, just as that regime undertook its own reprisals when the battle ended.”

Two hundred and fifty American Marines and soldiers lost their lives in the fighting and 1,554 were wounded. The ARVN had 458 KIA and some 2,700 WIA. NVA and VC losses were estimated to be between 2,400 and 5,000. “Even by a conservative count,” Bowden writes, “the Battle of Hue resulted in over 10,000 deaths,” making it the bloodiest of the Vietnam War.

Bowden’s riveting, detailed battle narrative shows why so many were killed and wounded, and so many buildings destroyed or heavily damaged. He also weaves in bigger-picture issues, showing how the fighting at Hue was one of the war’s “defining events, and one of the most intense urban battles in American history.”

Although what happened at Hue did not end the war, it nevertheless “was the point at which everything changed,” Bowden writes. Soon after the fighting stopped, President Johnson announced he would not run for re-election in November and Commanding Gen. William Westmoreland was kicked upstairs to become Army Chief of Staff. Richard Nixon was elected president in November, Bowden writes, “mendaciously promising not victory, but a secret plan to bring the war to an ‘honorable end.’”

Bowden portrays Westmoreland’s leadership as bumbling at best and disastrous at worst. He thereby strikes a powerful punch against recent revisionist books that have tried to make the case that the general’s war-of-attrition strategy was not as disastrous as it has been portrayed by the overwhelming majority of historians and military analysts who have written about the war in the last four decades.

Bowden convincingly shows that Westmoreland got just about everything wrong in dealing with the 1968 Tet attacks, including his stubborn belief that the enemy’s main aim was to overrun Khe Sanh. “Hanoi had baited Westy with an imagined replay of [the disastrous 1954 French defeat at] Dien Bien Phu, all the while moving great numbers of troops under his nose for the surprise city attack of Tet,” Bowden reports.

As that played out, Westmoreland “continually and falsely assured political leaders in Washington and the American public that [Hue] had not fallen into enemy hands,” Bowden notes. “This refusal to face facts was not just a public relations problem; it had tragic consequences for many of the marines and soldiers who fought there.”

Westmoreland, from the beginning of the Tet Offensive, “denied that the enemy had won any significant ground in South Vietnam. He portrayed the [enemy’s] presence in Hue as no more than a few companies. At no point had he acknowledged that the city had fallen into enemy hands or that his men were fighting a monumental battle to reclaim it. Even as the fight stretched into its third week, Westy persistently downplayed it.”

Westmoreland, Bowden writes, deliberately misreported the facts of the battle (a “strategy of denial” with a “flair for minimizing failure” and “exaggerating success,” as Bowden puts it). What’s more, Westmoreland thought that things were going just swimmingly, “even as the death toll mounted in Hue, even as world opinion collapsed around him, and even as one after another his assurances about the battle failed. Never had a general so effectively willed away the facts.”

There’s much, much more in this excellent book, which is all but certain to be a deserved best-seller, the first dealing with the Vietnam War in more than a few years.

Howard Jones’ My Lai: Vietnam, 1968, and the Descent into Darkness (Oxford University Press, 512 pp., $34.95) is an exhaustively researched and well-written narrative and analysis of the My Lai Massacre, one of the darkest moments in American military history. Jones, a long-time University of Alabama history professor and the author of Mutiny on the Amistead, The Bay of Pigs and other books, has produced a thorough and, as he says, “balanced and accurate” analysis of the massacre itself, along with the event’s controversial and convoluted legal and political aftermath.

Jones spent more than ten years digging out the best secondary sources, oral histories, and official documents about My Lai. That research included interviews with eleven Americans and two Vietnamese who were there. That list includes the late Lawrence Colburn, a helicopter crewman who witnessed the incident and—with pilot Hugh Thompson and fellow crew member Glenn Andreotta—helped evacuate a group of women, children, and old men during the killing.

In his epilogue, Jones tackles the still hotly debated questions of why the massacre took place and whether or not it was a Vietnam War aberration or simply business as usual for U.S. troops in the warzone. Jones compares other massacres in Vietnam and previous wars, but concludes that My Lai was an aberration.

As for why Lt. William Calley and his men carried out the wanton killing and raping, Jones points to their character flaws. We “have to accept that there remains a crucial difference between William Calley and Hugh Thompson,” Jones writes. “Perhaps this difference involves ‘character’—however we define it. I would suggest it embodies a notion of decency that was most noticeably missing at My Lai. Thompson and Lawrence Colburn leave us room for hope because, unlike Calley (and others), they did not lose sight of ordinary human decency.”