Word: wall
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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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...
...what a company commander called a "brick-by-brick fight" to drive the North Vietnamese forces from the Citadel. Finally, when allied troops had shrunk the Communists' ground to three fortified pockets, South Vietnamese soldiers, flanked by a company of Black Panther Rangers, shelled a hole in the wall guarding the most important redoubt-the Imperial City-and swarmed in. They found only a handful of defenders left...
...that allied forces had to learn by doing. During the four weeks that they had clutched the city, over 2,000 North Vietnamese soldiers and Viet Cong had holed up hard-behind the foundations of crumbled buildings, among the jagged battlements of the Citadel's six-mile wall, in darkened houses and inside the secondary wall of the imperial city. Enemy sharpshooters trained their scopes on the allies from Hué's highest spots; machine-gunners picked wide-angle vantage points; and mortar fire struck everywhere, like an infernal rain...
From a crescent-shaped position along the west wall, the enemy was able to keep a steady stream of supplies and reinforcements flowing into the Citadel. At week's end this position was threatened by allied forces advancing on the Citadel from the west. For mobility within the city, the Communist troops found a second, more cunning conduit. They crawled through sewer lines beneath the city that led up to street level behind allied lines. Time and again, Communist mortar and rocket fire slammed into the advancing U.S. armor. Sometimes a tank lurched, then treaded wildly through brick walls...
...Leathernecks, taking grim note of each setback, only pressed the enemy harder. Sharpshooters with high-powered scopes hunkered down behind battlements in "secure" sections of the Citadel wall, squeezing off occasional rounds at moving targets. As they waited out the weather for air cover or rested for their next push, the unshaven, dust-covered Marines sipped endless cups of powdered coffee, occasionally breaking out a liberated magnum of French champagne to accompany their C rations...