Phase Line Green The Battle for Hue, 1968 by Nicholas Warr

A Review by Ken Rodgers

The Siege of Khe Sanh had already been going on for over a week by the time the Tet Offensive began. Some historians believe that the North Vietnamese commander-in-chief, General Vo Nguyen Giap, planned the Siege of Khe Sanh as a ploy to draw off firepower so that when Tet arrived on January 30, 1968, the NVA and Viet Cong onslaught on South Vietnam would swamp the American and South Vietnamese militaries.

I recall sitting in my fighting hole, shivering in the trench, hiding in my bunker as news flashed out of my old transistor radio about the all-out assault on South Vietnamese and American forces during the annual Vietnamese New Year which almost all Vietnam vets just call “Tet.” All around South Vietnam, North Vietnamese troops were attacking cities, towns, villes and outposts, some of them falling as we sat inside the Khe Sanh fire base and listened to the battles…our battle, as well as the ones described over Armed Forces Radio. The assault on Khe Sanh was frightening, and the news reports from AFR piled on the panic. Saigon, Danang, Kon Tum, Dong Ha, were just a few of the names that blared out from the speakers of our transistor radios.

Most frightening of all to me was the fall of Hue City, the old Imperial Capital and the symbol of Vietnam’s regal past and a symbol, too, of what we were fighting to preserve. A way of life based on a blending of east and west, or so we thought. So when Hue fell it seemed like a portent of what eventually came to us in Vietnam, defeat. But at the time that portent wasn’t nearly as potent as the thought of a general butt-whipping to all of the American forces in Vietnam in early 1968, and something deeper, the fear of my own death. Yes, my death was paramount, or to put it another way, my life. Nevertheless, the thought of defeat, that the awesome and unbeatable American juggernaut might be defeated bothered me a lot. It still does…this notion of defeat.

I digress. Day and night, when we weren’t dodging incoming or sneaking outside the wire to set up ambushes and listening posts, to charge out on perilous patrols, we listened to the radio accounts of the battle to take back Hue.

I had very little training in house-to-house combat. What I had experienced at Camp Pendleton prior to my trip across the pond to the Republic of South Vietnam made me think at the time: I hope I never have to do that. Going in on the bottom floor, up stairs, in closets, down halls, with the enemy hiding in there, well ensconced, well armed, dropping grenades on our heads, spraying us with AK-47s.

At Khe Sanh we took tremendous amounts of incoming and when we went outside the wire, the ensuing fights were brutal, savage, with bayonet charges and hand-to-hand combat. Hue was a different type of battle. Not in terms of courage and fear, cowardice and death, but in how it was fought.

In Nicholas Warr’s memoir Phase Line Green, The Battle for Hue, 1968, the events surrounding the fall of Hue and its eventual recapture are played out in intensely personal, vivid images. The war is intimate, not something alluded to in wall charts and maps by intellectuals and staff command officers. This is war shouted from the throat of the fighting man.

Nicholas Warr was a second lieutenant and platoon commander with Charlie Company, 1st Battalion, 5th Marines. His story begins when Tet begins, and Charlie Company is out in the bush between Hue and Danang. As the initial fighting begins, Charlie Company sits in eerie quiet as they listen to the war going on around them. This quiet allows us to meet Lieutenant Warr and the men in his command, men who will not survive much longer.

The 1st Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment was ordered to proceed to Hue and retake the citadel, the old imperial headquarters surrounded by thick walls; a city of tree-lined streets with substantial houses, all held by crack troops of the North Vietnamese army. This war would be house-to-house. The men of Charlie Company had never fought house-to-house.

They entered the old citadel and assembled on one side of a residential street, a place named by the Americans, “Phase Line Green.”

I will not let slip the details of what happens to Warr and the men of Charlie Company, 1/5, but I will tell you that this story rages, begs, pleads, screams, cries, hates, commands and exults on a visceral, intimately personal level. As a young enlisted man, I never imagined that officers thought and feared and hated like us, the snuffies who fought the war, but Warr shows us that officers and gentlemen react and act just the same as enlisted men.

This is war through the eyes of the grunt, on the ground, in the spine-rattling chaos that is combat:

“Doc looked over at me with despair in his eyes and said, ‘We gotta do an emergency tracheotomy; his windpipe’s crushed. I need a tube, something to stick into the opening when I cut into his windpipe.
‘
“I was stunned, stupid, unable to think or move. None of the Marines was any more help. Estes was dying on my lap, making feeble convulsive motions, and I couldn’t move.

“’Break down your .45, Lieutenant, goddammit. I can use the barrel as a temporary airway.'”

This story is fast-paced and compelling. You fall and stumble, hide and crawl with the men of Charlie Company, 1/5. Once I started this book, I couldn’t put it down. In some ways the combat was the same…the fear, the need to overcome fear, the need to not be a coward, the shaking and the tears…as what I had seen at Khe Sanh. Yet in other ways the combat at the battle of Hue City was foreign to me, like Fallujah in Iraq or cobblestoned European streets in WWII.

This story is about how it feels to see your comrades dead in the street thirty or forty feet away, and the inability to help them, retrieve them, grieve in the old honored ceremonial ways that allow us to put death in its proper slot. This story is about how it feels to assault across a frontier out of relative safety into the unknown region of death and mayhem.

Nicholas Warr tells us about rage, and not just about rage at the enemy, but the political machines that manage battle, and not to the benefit of the snuffies slugging it out. And of course, the rage against generals and presidents and senators is a focused rage, it seems to me, but also aimed at us, the American public, for our lack of commitment and patience, as we sat (and sit now in the current conflicts) in our houses while the few died and the rest enjoyed largesse at the warriors’ expense.

And related to this lurks the memory of the thirty year period after Vietnam when the warriors who carried the battle to the enemy were shunned. I was once told, “You guys couldn’t whip anybody.” This in reference to the men who fought in Vietnam, to me and my Marine brothers, both at Khe Sanh and Hue City. What made, and still makes, that phrase like a bitter lump of burning shrapnel trapped in my gullet is the fact that in a huge majority of the battles fought in Vietnam, American forces came out the victors. Yet our country lost the war. And it lost other things, too, like innocence and optimism. And we are only now beginning to hear the multitude of stories out of the Vietnam experience; decades later, when the Vietnam vet is suddenly popular, when he is thanked belatedly for his service to his country. Fifty years on.

You can find out more about Nicholas Warr, Phase Line Green and Warr’s other books here.

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We are just weeks away from the forty-fifth anniversary of the beginning of the Siege of Khe Sanh. I think about the siege every day, but I don’t always think about the weeks immediately before its commencement.

After being relieved by India Company, 3rd Battalion, 26th Marine Regiment on Hill 881S the day after Christmas, 1967, Bravo Company went down into the perimeter of the Khe Sanh Combat Base and took over their old lines on the east and southeast ends of the perimeter in what was called Gray Sector.

While in Gray Sector, we filled sandbags and filled sandbags and filled sandbags. We must have been taking a lot of photos, too, because in the course of creating the film, we came upon a fair number of photos that were taken in the time between vacating 881S and moving into Gray Sector.

Besides filling sandbags, we dug trenches, beefed up hooches, built fighting positions, sometimes ran ambushes at night as well as listening posts. And…we filled sandbags. When we weren’t doing that, or going on patrol, or sleeping and chowing down, we stood watch.

Marines from Second Platoon, Bravo Company, Gray Sector, Khe Sanh Combat Base

Some of us had transistor radios that we played at night and listened to Armed Forces Radio. They played a lot of great tunes back then. The types of tunes then were often different than what warriors listen to now, echoing the cultural changes we have undergone since 1968. The country music wasn’t as slickly rock-and-roll as it is now, and the rock they played in 1968 was mild compared to what was to come as well as what I hear on the radio these days. They played a lot of soul music, too, which is a far cry from the hip hop young warriors probably enjoy today. Though the music may be different between then and now, I suspect listening to it in either era aroused similar emotions…longing, sadness, but also a sense of hope, that you just might make it home to be with friends and family doing the things you love to do.

Some of the music I remember was “Happy Together” by The Turtles and “I Just Stopped in to See What Condition My Condition Was In” by the First Edition which had Kenny Rogers singing the lead before any of us really knew who he was. We heard “Ode to Billy Joe” by Bobbie Gentry and “The Letter” by the Box Tops. We heard Wilson Pickett, and Martha and the Vandellas, and Dianna Ross and the Supremes, and James Brown and Lou Rawls singing about Chi-town’s “hawk.”

One of our favorite songs back then was Otis Redding’s “Sitting on the Dock of the Bay.” We used to try and sing along and I can only imagine how that sound carried over the concertina wire barriers, across the bamboo thickets and into the hidden posts of our enemy. Even now, when I hear that song, it takes me back to the trenches. It takes me back to the men I served with, a lot of whom are gone and as I think of them, I get misty and something catches in my craw.

When we listened to Otis singing, we tried to dance and boogaloo around the trenches and the bunkers while we puffed on Salems and Camels (which we were not supposed to be smoking on watch, or listening to music either, because we were breaking light and sound discipline). More than once, the duty NCO or Officer of the Day would come by and if we didn’t catch on to his imminent arrival, we’d get our butts chewed out.

When we figured out our singing wasn’t so hot, we’d let Danny Horton take over. Man, he could warble tunes as well as any of those folks we listened to. B J Thomas songs were his staple and he really liked “California Dreaming” by the Mamas and Papas. When he was singing, it took me back to my southern Arizona home and my friends, and sitting around the front room with my mom and dad talking. It made me remember sweet spring nights when the orange blossoms saturated the dark. It was a link to home, it was…how can I describe it…almost magic.

Dan Horton at Khe Sanh

After January 21st, we turned the radio down, or turned it off, because by then the war was way too up-close and personally serious, although I do remember hearing Hanoi Hannah taunt us when one of those who owned radios chose to turn her on. We also listened to the news and heard about how bad we had it at Khe Sanh.

And it was bad. It was bad all over Vietnam that late Winter and Spring of 1968. Maybe we knew that, but all we really knew was what we were enduring. And the radio was our tether to the outside, to Otis Redding and “California Dreaming.”

Speaking of California Dreaming, We are taking BRAVO! on the road in March and April. As of now, we have tentatively talked about screenings in Chico, Sacramento, San Francisco, Fresno and the Camp Pendleton areas of California, and beyond to Reno and Las Vegas in Nevada, and Moscow, Idaho.

If you are interested in bringing the poignant sizzle of BRAVO! to your area as an educational or fund raising event, you may be interested in hosting a screening of the film. If so, please contact us so we can talk about what is required.