THE PROBLEMS:

Throughout the battle for Hue, 216 American troops, mostly Marines, were killed as they fought house to house. The communists fought hard, "grabbing them by the belt buckle," as they described their strategy--that is, staying as close to the American lines as possible to prevent artillery strikes. The North Vietnamese army listed 2,400 killed, while South Vietnam recorded 452 soldiers dead. Although the communist forces were eventually forced to abandon Hue, their ability to hold on to the city for as long as they did undermined the Johnson administration's claims that an American victory was in sight.

Duc recalls that while many in Hue were unhappy with the American presence in Vietnam, the residents largely welcomed the American intervention in the battle, which drove off the communists from the city until their ultimate return in 1975. "The Americans were the saviors in that particular case, saving the city and saving others," he says, adding that Hue was a center of scholarship and debate that tended to shun both foreign interventionism and communist totalitarianism.

Claims of mass civilian killings by the communists in Hue have been shoved under the rug in Vietnam. The Vietnamese government only vaguely admits to "mistakes" committed during the battle and fiercely refuses to characterize the events as "massacres," as is common outside Vietnam. The first reports of such killings originated from U.S. government studies conducted in the immediate aftermath of the battle. Mass graves were discovered around the city--many for victims of the crossfire and bombings that flattened Hue, while other people were found bound and executed, in some cases evidently buried alive. The official South Vietnamese estimate for extrajudicial killings carried out by the communists was 4,856, while Douglas Pike, a U.S. foreign service officer who documented the battles, estimated 2,800.

Mark Bowden, author of the 2017 book Hue 1968: A Turning Point of the American War in Vietnam, the most authoritative history of the battle, says he estimates about 2,000 killings took place in pre-planned "purges" of citizens working for the southern regime, though he believes the true number will never be known. "Certainly, everyone I interviewed, people who fought for the Viet Cong or North Vietnamese army or civilians--no one denied it had happened. The only dispute seems to be over how many," Bowden says.

In a country marred with a 2,000-year history of bloody wars against foreign invaders, the fratricidal nature of the killings made the communists "much more cruel than ISIS," says Truong Van Quy, a 74-year-old Hue resident who makes his living teaching guitar. [...]

Nguyen Quang A, the communist turned dissident, contrasts the Vietnamese government's unwillingness to acknowledge the past with the long reconciliation following the American Civil War. Such healing, he points out, takes time even in democratic societies--"still there are problems" between the northern and southern United States, he says.

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