Marines in Hue City: A Portrait of Urban Combat, Tet 1968

“As military historians go, Hammel stands among the very best. His 30-plus volumes dutifully record great Marine battle epics … In reading Marines in Hue City, Marine veterans of the battles of Fallujah, and other Iraq city fighting, will relate through the photographs included in this coffee-table-sized volume … Hammel does an outstanding job of combining the account of the battle with a bevy of new, never-before-published photographic images.”
Leatherneck

“Marines in Hue City tells the story of the four-week Battle of Hue with concise prose and many strongly evocative photographs. Many are official USMC photos; others are never-before-published pictures taken by individual Marines. It all adds up to an excellent account of one of the Vietnam War’s most pivotal battles.”
The VVA Veteran

Over decades of conflict in Vietnam, Hue, the former imperial capital, had been spared. But everything changed on January 31, 1968, the eve of the lunar new year--a national holiday long marked by a mutual ceasefire--when the North Vietnamese launched a massive offensive. In the cataclysm of violence that convulsed South Vietnam during the now-infamous Tet Offensive, Hue was overrun--and the only forces available to counterattack were a handful of Marine infantry companies based eight miles south of the city.

This photographic history chronicles the savage battle that followed as, for four excruciating weeks, the Marines of Task Force X-Ray fought house to house and street by street to retake the city so central to the Vietnamese culture and psyche. Through photographs taken in the heat of the action, readers will follow one of the wars most important campaigns, as ground gained is measured in painstaking inches and every alley, every street corner, every window might be the last.

Leatherneck, June 2007

“As military historians go, Hammel stands among the very best. His 30-plus volumes dutifully record great Marine battle epics … In reading Marines in Hue City, Marine veterans of the battles of Fallujah, and other Iraq city fighting, will relate through the photographs included in this coffee-table-sized volume … Hammel does an outstanding job of combining the account of the battle with a bevy of new, never-before-published photographic images.”

Military Book Club, April 2007

“This spectacular book is the first of its kind – an illustrated history of the fierce fight on the streets of Hue which contains over 200 amazing images! Marines in Hue City covers all phases of the battle, from the opening shots and the Marines’ arrival to the ‘six-block war’ and the seizure of the Citadel ... The real diehard MBC members will quickly take note of the detailed city maps of downtown Hue and the Citadel which provide overall context of the battle, and allows them to connect the book’s images with the battle zone. And in addition to describing all the tactics and weaponry used by the Marines, author Eric Hammel provides an extraordinarily detailed caption for every picture. Marines in Hue City is a multi-layered experience every ’Nam buff out therewill appreciate.”

The VVA Veteran, May/June 2007

“[Marines in Hue City] tells the story of the four-week Battle of Hue with concise prose and many strongly evocative photographs. Many are official USMC photos; others are never-before-published pictures taken by individual Marines. It all adds up to an excellent account of one of the Vietnam War’s most pivotal battles.”

Author’s Note

I spent more than a year in 1989 and 1990 compiling as complete a narrative history of the battle for Hue as time, money, and a publishing deadline would allow. I spoke to nearly a hundred participants in the 1968 battle, including all three U.S. Marine Corps battalion commanders, many Marine staff officers, five of eight Marine infantry company commanders, and scores of junior leaders and troops of every type. The result was Fire in the Streets: The Battle for Hue, Tet 1968. The Marine Corps liked the book enough to place it, year after year, on the Commandant of the Marine Corps’ professional reading list. I cannot guess how many Marines have read the book, nor how many I lectured on the topic of “military operations in urban terrain” over the years. Indeed, I delivered my lecture to Marines on the Marine Corps’ last urban battle on the eve of Operation Iraqi Freedom.

The intimate narrative I produced as Fire in the Streets still stands. This is not an effort to supplant it, nor even to supplement it in a substantive way. This effort is a vehicle to show what urban combat looks like, using Hue as a relevant example. If this book has a theme, it is urban combat per se. If you look at the photos accompanying this volume’s first chapter, then leaf through the pages with photos taken during the Hue battle, you will be struck at how similar many of them seem to be. If you then go online to http://www.usmc.mil and search the image archive there on such topics as “urban terrain” or “Fallujah,” you will be struck once again by the way poses tend to repeat from World War II to Korea to Vietnam to Iraq. It’s actually eerie.

I write military narratives to explain war to readers at a human level. Books with words have been a big part of my life, all my life. I put together one of them, 76 Hours: The Invasion of Tarawa, with 250 photos and created Bloody Tarawa. The idea was to deepen my own understanding of war—words and pictures together. Then I went heavier with photos and captions in Pacific Warriors and Iwo Jima. Here now, because I already did the story in words, are mainly pictures. I believe that this book, Marines in Hue, stands alone in telling a particular story, and an enduring story, about a particularly vicious aspect of war. But it also fits hand in glove with Fire in the Streets, and experiencing both together might be something you’d like to try. Either way, this is about the aspect of human existence that has haunted a veteran’s son from earliest memory: the face of war.

Eric Hammel

Northern California

Winter 2006

As Vietnam’s former imperial capital, Hue occupied a special place in the hearts of the Vietnamese people. Over decades of conflict, it had been spared the terrible effects of war. But that all changed on January 31, 1968, the eve of Tet—the lunar new year, Vietnam’s most important national holiday.

Tet had previously been marked by a mutual cease fire, but this time the celebrations and hopes for a happy new year were shattered. All of South Vietnam erupted in a cataclysm of violence as the North Vietnamese Army and the Viet Cong launched a massive military and political offensive. The American embassy in Saigon came under siege and Vietnam’s ancient capital city was captured nearly in its entirety.

The only forces immediately available to counterattack into Hue were two Marine infantry companies based ten miles south of the city. For the next four weeks, as the world looked on, fewer than two thousand U.S. Marines fought street by street and building by building, virtually without air support, to retake the symbols of Hue’s political and cultural importance. It was savage work. Ground gained was often measured in yards, with every alley, street corner, window, and garden adding to the butcher’s bill. In the end, the Marines retook the city, but scores of Americans and thousands of Vietnamese civilians died there. This pictorial is a testament to their will and their sacrifice.

Eric Hammel is a critically acclaimed military historian and author of more than thirty combat histories, including several others on the U.S. Marine operations in Vietnam, such as Fire in the Streets, the definitive narrative account of the battle for Hue City. He lives in Northern California.

The Vietnam War is often pictured as a jungle conflict, punctuated by American troops fighting in rural hut-filled villages. But in the 1968 Tet Offensive, the war spilled out of the jungle into the streets of Hue City. The battle for Hue became one of the most important of the war, a month of grueling house-to-house fighting through buildings and around civilians. The Marines in Hue City documents the intense urban combat in Hue with many never-before-seen photographs, including over one hundred in full color.

Eric Hammel is a critically acclaimed military historian and author of more than thirty combat histories, including several others on the U.S. Marine operations in Vietnam, such as Fire in the Streets, the definitive narrative account of the battle for Hue City. He lives in Northern California.