Word: citadel
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Also in Hué early in the week was Correspondent David Greenway. Moving with a Marine company at the Citadel, Greenway decided to go forward with a squad that was assigned to knock out a North Vietnamese army machine-gun post. As the squad reached a wall still standing amid the rubble, a Marine stood up to look through what had been a window, and an enemy soldier shot him through the neck. Greenway and a medical corpsman dragged the victim to the company command post, and once out of the line of fire, laid him down on a road...
...launched their general offensive, South Viet Nam was still a country taut with terror and riven by fire. In Hué, South Vietnamese and U.S. Marines were still engaged in the most desperate fighting of the war to drive the last of the North Vietnamese out of the ancient Citadel. At Khe Sanh, the pressure mounted on the waiting U.S. Marines, who underwent one of the most concentrated barrages of the war-1,307 rounds of shells in one five-hour stretch. Having promised to level Saigon in a "second wave" of attacks on South Viet Nam's cities...
...prolonged battle, once-lovely Hue remained the only city in South Viet Nam where the V.C. flag still flew. Ten days of bitter street fighting cleared -at least temporarily-the modern residential section south of the Perfume River, but the battle raged with full fury in the rubble-strewn Citadel, the early 19th century imperial fortress that holds much of Viet Nam's architectural and cultural treasure. As thousands of refugees huddled under a grey pall from countless fires, 1,000 U.S. Marines crossed the river to help the 2,500 South Vietnamese infantrymen and Marines fighting to recapture...
Their heavily entrenched quarry-some 500 regulars of the 6th NVA Regiment and Viet Cong units-seemed almost as much hunter as prey because of its formidable position. With their backs to the river at the Citadel's south ern end, the Communists fought from ramparts and arches protected by massive stone walls more than eight feet thick. Because of the Citadel's symbolic value to the Vietnamese, the allies first tried to retake it without the fire power punch of artillery and air strikes, but the dug-in Communists repelled wave after wave of assaults...
...allies held both bridgeheads. Boats thus became the main means of evacuation and supply, and each boat ran a gauntlet of NVA sniper fire. But at week's end the NVA pockets of resistance were slowly shrinking, and all of the city except a part of the Citadel had been seized by the allies...