"We organized ourselves in a line and tried to sweep southward, but people were getting shot up and we were running into ambushes and having to clear houses so that line just never really held all it could; it really turned into a meat grinder.
In the jungle you tend to see fleeting shadows and you see muzzle flash, but you rarely see the bad guy. You rarely see the enemy. But that wasn’t the case in Hue. I mean, you saw those guys; you saw them put the rifle on their shoulder and shoot at you. You see them everywhere.
We were using every one we had, and anything else we had. We needed a flow of replacements for wounded or killed. The new guys still had their airline boarding passes in their pockets.
I’ve never seen more shell-shocked and just plain exhausted troops anywhere in my life. There just never seemed to be an end to it. The more we killed, the more we found.
It was so grinding, so exhausting, that the only high you got, really, was the fact that you were alive for the next 15 minutes.
It was, I guess, the one battle that still haunts me because you saw so many things. I don’t think it was because I was naïve; I think it was because it was that brutal.” - Sgt. Dale A. Dye, War Correspondent attached with 2nd Bn, 3rd Marines, Hue City, Vietnam, Feb 13th, 1968. #war #huecity #vietnam #reality #stayzero #zerofoxtrot