By the third day, as we realized liberation was not imminent, our spirits fell. Our anticipation was replaced by anxiety and boredom. We could sometimes see NVA soldiers and groups of refugees moving along the streets, but we never left the house, both to avoid being noticed and to avoid the bullets and occasional mortar and artillery rounds that fell in the neighborhood.

Sometimes, when the shelling became intense, we would move to the relative safety of a closet under the stairwell leading to the second floor. Fortunately, that is where we were when a large shell hit the house. The roof and walls of the second floor were largely blown away, making a two-story house one story. We were shaken but unhurt.

My greatest fear was not artillery but a knock on the door by Communist cadre members, who I guessed (correctly) would be out organizing the city’s inhabitants and looking for enemies. That knock never came. Subsequently, it was discovered that in the initial stages of the occupation the cadres were instructed to leave French residents alone. (France was perceived as being opposed to American involvement in the war.)

Albert Istivie and the French priests who had taken me in had no way of knowing this, of course; and, in any case, this benign attitude toward Albert and the priests would have changed had the Communists discovered that they were hiding an American. It was extraordinarily brave and generous of them to take me in.

Meanwhile, other American civilians in Hue were not so lucky. After the battle, the body of my friend Steve Miller was found in a field behind a Catholic seminary that had been used as a prisoner collection point. His arms had been tied behind him and he had been shot in the back of the head. Steve Haukness was never found. We assume he was killed somewhere outside of the city.

I was very worried about Tuy-Cam. As a U.S. government employee, she would be in grave danger, I knew, if she was discovered.

Indeed, my fear was well justified. During the occupation of Hue, there were some 2,000 documented cases of execution and mass murder of Vietnamese civilians whom the Communists saw as enemies. They included government employees, politicians, teachers, intellectuals, business people and religious leaders, as well as U.S. government employees. Although cadre members came to her house, since Tuy-Cam had been working in Da Nang before the offensive, she apparently was not on the hit lists for Hue that had been carefully compiled in advance of the attack.

Finally, on the morning of February 8, liberation was at hand. I heard American voices coming from a couple of blocks away. I climbed to the rubble of the blown-away second floor and saw them–honest-to-God U.S. Marines, cautiously moving our way.

They reached the house in a quarter of an hour. When I introduced myself, the sergeant said: ‘Oh, yeah! They told us there might be some sort of VIP hiding around here. I’d better call the captain.’

Soon, the company commander, Captain Ron Christmas, arrived. (Captain Christmas, one of the heroes of the Battle of Hue, went on to a distinguished Marine Corps career, retiring as a lieutenant general.) After giving him all the information the Frenchmen and I had about the situation in the immediate area, we had some of the Marines wrap me in a blanket and carry me out as if I were a wounded Marine. This was so the neighbors would not see that the priests had been hiding me.

I had invited the priests to leave with me, but they declined, saying their duty was to stay and tend to the spiritual needs of their flock.

When I saw Albert several days later, he told me that they had gone out the next day to look after refugees gathered in a nearby church. On the way back they were stopped by some VC, who shot the refugees and took their jeep. Albert buried the refugees in the backyard of Father Cressonier’s house.

The Marines took me to the MACV compound, and from there I contacted the CORDS office in Da Nang. My superiors there told me to come to Da Nang on the next available helicopter, which turned out to be the following day.

After a bit of recuperation in Da Nang, I was anxious to get back to Hue to look for Tuy-Cam. I had learned before leaving Hue that the area where her house was located was still firmly in enemy hands but would probably be cleared sometime in the next few days. My bosses told me not to return, since the battle was still raging (it would continue until February 24), and that I would not only be in danger but also in the way.

This was perfectly logical but emotionally unacceptable. I knew my way around well enough to go to the air base and hitch an unauthorized ride on a chopper to Hue.

When I got off the chopper on the morning of February 14–Valentines Day!–at a makeshift landing pad the Marines had cleared near Hue University, I noticed a group of Vietnamese civilians nearby. As I approached them, Tuy-Cam suddenly emerged, hurrying toward me. It was a powerfully emotional moment, since neither of us had known if the other was still alive.

Tuy-Cam and her family had managed to get to safety the day before, and she had come to the helicopter pad to get a flight back to Da Nang. The family had stayed at home for the first eight days of the occupation, with her two brothers–the ARVN lieutenant and the air force academy cadet–hiding in the attic of the family home. They had been visited daily by VC cadre members and NVA soldiers demanding food, but the brothers were not discovered.

Fighting in the area later intensified, however, and NVA troops began digging defensive positions along the railroad just behind the house. With mortar and artillery rounds falling closer and closer, the family decided to flee, along with some other refugees from the neighborhood. The group got as far as a pagoda just west of the city. There, they encountered VC cadre members. The two brothers were ‘arrested’ and taken away, never to be seen again. A friendly monk who knew the family hid Tuy-Cam under the altar. After the VC left, the family returned to Hue.

Following our reunion at the helicopter pad, Tuy-Cam and I flew back to Da Nang and I made a quick trip to Quang Tri. Three days later, I went back to Da Nang and picked up Tuy-Cam and some supplies for her family, and the two of us again returned to Hue.

As we moved around the more or less secured parts of the once-beautiful city during the next few days, we were deeply moved by the scenes of death and destruction all around us. Trinh Cong Son, a Vietnamese songwriter-poet and native of Hue who was there during the battle, expressed his feelings about these scenes this way:

The bodies of the dead float on the river.
They lie exposed in the fields,
On the housetops of the city
And in the winding streets.

The bodies of the dead lie lonely
Under the roofs of the pagodas,
In the aisles of the churches,
On the floors of the deserted houses.

The bodies of the dead lie all around, in those cold rains.
Alongside the bodies of the old and weak,
Lie the bodies of the young and innocent.
Which body is the body of my little sister?

For our survival, we are everlastingly grateful to Albert Istivie, Fathers Cressonier and Poncet, Venerable Chon Thuc (the monk who hid Tuy-Cam at the pagoda), and to the brave U.S. Marines and South Vietnamese 1st Division troops who fought and eventually won the Battle of Hue City. During that battle, for which the 1st Marine Regiment received the Presidential Unit Citation, 142 Marines were killed and 857 wounded. The South Vietnamese armed forces suffered 384 killed and 1,830 wounded. Enemy losses were estimated at 5,113 killed. Some 2,000 Vietnamese civilians were executed by the Communists, and many hundreds more were killed in the ebb and flow of combat.

Tuy-Cam and I were married on March 16 at the consulate general in Da Nang, and we left Vietnam two weeks later.

After more than 30 years, we are still happily married. Although we had 21 more years in the Foreign Service and several exciting adventures, there was nothing–thank God!–so intense and memorable as our days in Hue during the Tet Offensive.

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This article was written by J.R. Bullington, Jr. and originally published in the February 1999 issue of Vietnam Magazine.

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