Mourning Headband for Hue

June 9, 2014
First published in 1969, this searing eyewitness account of the fighting in the Vietnamese city of Hue during the 1968 Tet Offensive is republished here in a new translation with a long introduction and annotated footnotes. In late January of 1968, the 30-year-old Nhã Ca, a well-known Vietnamese writer living in the U.S., was visiting family in the beautiful former imperial city for Tet, the Lunar New Year holiday. On January 31, the first night of Tet, the North Vietnamese Army and Viet Cong invaded Hue, holding the city for nearly a month. Civilians were caught in the cross fire after American Marines and South Vietnamese forces counterattacked. Adding to the horror, the invading forces summarily executed as many as 2,800 men and women who worked for the South Vietnamese government and the Americans, or were otherwise suspected of being ideologically impure. Nhã Ca relates countless moments of terror she and her extended family members suffered and shares stories told to her by others who faced similarly dire circumstances. It’s an intimate—and disturbing—account of war at its most brutal, told from the point of view of civilians trying to survive the maelstrom.

June 15, 2014
Anguished eyewitness account of the devastation visited upon the civilian Vietnamese population just a month before the massacre of My Lai.The author was a well-known South Vietnamese poet and novelist then living with her husband and children in Saigon. She was caught in the middle of the Vietcong's Tet Offensive in early 1968 when she received news that her father had just died and promptly traveled to her native town of Hue, in central Vietnam, for the burial service. The next day, the Communists shelled the Buddhist town, terrorizing the population and waging horrific battles with the combined South Vietnamese Nationalist and American forces over many weeks. The author's narrative burns with firsthand accounts, her own and those of others who shared their stories, as they all were trapped in blasted houses, churches and makeshift shelters, wounded, starving, sick and overrun by the Communists and their squads of vengeful executioners. In an extensive introduction, the translator of this important work, first published in 1969, just over a year after the horrific events it chronicles, sets up the significance of the large-scale Tet Offensive for the Vietcong, who hoped the South Vietnamese would rise up and support them; the Communists were eventually driven back by the Nationalists and the Americans, leaving thousands dead and unaccounted for. Yet the author's work speaks for itself; it's a searing first-person account of the misery of war visited upon her family, neighbors and countrymen, caught in senseless, chaotic horror. The author does not portray the Americans as saviors; rather, in her narrative, they are young, clueless and, in many instances, scornful of this "small yellow-skinned nation" they know little about and so calloused to the sanctity of life that they amuse themselves by shooting at dogs.A visceral reminder of war's intimate slaughter.

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