hirty-two years ago, during the Tet Offensive, nowhere was the fighting more intense than in Hue, the graceful city astride the Perfume River, just five miles from the South China Sea.
The North Vietnamese contested every street and every block against the US and South Vietnamese forces, which were supported by artillery, air power, and even gunfire from ships at sea. All the while the flag of North Vietnam flew above the city, a taunting symbol that the American Marines longed to tear down.
Here is how US Marine Corps Captain Myron Harrington recalled the battle years later to Stanley Karnow for his book, ''Vietnam: A History'': ''Sometimes (the enemy) were only 20 or 30 yards from us.... After a while, survival was the name of the game as you sat there in the semidarkness with the firing going on constantly, like a rifle range. And the horrible smell. You tasted it in your rations, as if you were eating death....''
I spent several days with Captain Harrington's company as a reporter during the war. We had not seen urban fighting before. Military engagements had been in the countryside among thatched-hut villages and rice paddies, or in the rain forests and rubber plantations. This was street fighting reminiscent of World War II. Every advance was made over broken crockery, strewn furniture, and rain-soaked belongings amid the crumpled masonry of once-solid houses and the decomposing dead.
Hue was once the imperial capital of Vietnam before and during the French colonial period.
Early in the 19th century, the Vietnamese emperors built a palace here, a miniature copy of Beijing's. Before it stands a fortress with an enormous flag pole flying the red banner and yellow star of Vietnam.
Thirty-two years ago, that banner represented only the Communist North, and Hue belonged to the Republic of South Vietnam. But for most of February 1968, the flag of North Vietnam hung limply from this same pole in the drizzle of a Central Vietnamese winter, a gesture of defiance against the Saigon government and the might of the United States.
In the Tet Offensive, the Communist forces attacked up and down the country during an agreed-upon lunar new year truce.
The South Vietnamese and the American command branded the attack cowardly, but they had chosen to forget that one of Vietnam's legendary heroes, Nguyen Hue, had similarly attacked a Mongol Army from China during Tet, a route precipitated by the element of surprise.
The North Vietnamese understood the symbolic value of holding Hue for as long as they could, despite their losses, but eventually the Marines captured the city, replacing the flag of North Vietnam with the old imperial yellow flag with the red stripes that represented the Republic of South Vietnam. That flag would fly over Hue for seven more years of war until the final collapse of the South. But after Tet, the US essentially abandoned hope of winning and began withdrawing its troops.
I was shot before the Marines reached the flag pole, and did not see the flag that flies there today torn down. I was carried to a small helicopter pad outside the city and flown away with bullets hitting the sides of the aircraft to a field hospital nearby. There I was left in the rain with the other lightly wounded while the overworked American surgeons practiced triage - treating those who could be saved first, making comfortable those who were going to die, and leaving people like me for last. All about us lay the wounded - Vietnamese and Americans, civilians and soldiers, some crying out and others grimly silent. The surgeon who finally operated on me was in a white-hot fury that the bombardment was causing so many civilian casualties, and that Americans were being treated better than the Vietnamese.
Today Hue bears little resemblance to the dust, cordite, and death-filled city that I knew in those long days and nights. The imperial palace has largely been restored. The red lacquer pillars in the throne room, where US Marines hung their hammocks in another hour of peril for Hue, now look as they must have when the last emperor reigned. Vietnamese couples stroll hand in hand.
New buildings have sprung up among the cleared rubble, and I cannot now find the street on which Harrington's company took so many casualties. I watch instead a Vietnamese film crew shooting a scene on the palace grounds. An actress, of a certain age, dressed in a traditional mandarin dress, is lip-synching a sentimental Vietnamese song.
Greenway was wounded while attempting to rescue a dying Marine in the battle of Hue, and was later awarded a Bronze Star with a Combat V by the Marine Corps.
