Color 1968

By January 1968, the fighting in Vietnam appeared to have reached a stalemate. However, General William Westmoreland, the commander of U.S. forces, declared a new phase of the war in which "the end is beginning to appear." North Vietnam had different ideas. In mid-1967, the leadership in Hanoi began planning an offensive aimed at winning the war in one fell swoop. The Tet Offensive, which combined military action with a popular uprising, included attacks throughout South Vietnam, but the most dramatic and successful assault was the capture of Hue, the country's cultural capital. At 2:30 a.m. on January 31, 10,000 National Liberation Front (NLF) troops descended from secret camps and surged through the city of 140,000. By morning, all of Hue was in NLF hands except for two small military outposts. Both the country's leaders and politicians in Washington refused to believe the scale and scope of the NLF's presence. After tense and deadly days, Lt. Col. Ernie Cheatham finally devised a strategy to retake the city, block by block, in one of the fiercest urban battles since World War II. With unprecedented access to U.S. and Vietnam war archives and interviews with participants on both sides, Bowden recounts every phase of this decisive battle from multiple perspectives. The Battle of Hue lasted twenty-four days of bitter fighting, claimed the lives of ten thousand combatants and civilians, and was undoubtedly the bloodiest of the entire war. When it ended, the American debate was no longer about victory, but about how to withdraw. In Hue 1968, Bowden brilliantly reconstructs this pivotal moment in the American war in Vietnam.