Canter Bridge

There is more than one way to tell the story of the battle for Hue, an awful battle in an awful year of an awful war.

Mark Bowden’s Hue, narrated huskily by Joe Barrett with a voice that was created for this story, tells of Hue with the unrelenting insistence of tragedy. The author has distinguished himself as the author of military histories that bulge with empathy for all players. Hue is no exception, in fact this work may fairly be considered Bowden’s calling card.

Though there are villains aplenty in Bowden’s tale, General William Westmoreland stands head and shoulders above them all for sheer self-delusion and defiance of evidence from the field. As a result of Westie’s pig-headed refusal to accept that Hue was a real battle waged by a determined enemy with truly threatening capabilities, Hue took the lives of more American Marines, more ARVN troops, more Viet Cong and North Vietnamese regulars, and more civilians who had called the graceful provincial capital their home than any reasonable calculus demanded. This at least is Bowden’s story, told unforgivably and with due note of the pathos that clings to almost every anecdote of this three-and-a-half week conflagration.

Joe Barrett is a superb narrator of a tale that demands both the pathos and the incredulity that his voice brings to its task. Bowden has not majored on the loss of faith in the war that Hue nourished back home in America. His concern is for the grunt, for the Front volunteer, and for the civilian whose family has perished under American bombardment or the vicious Viet Cong/NVA purging. The author unfailingly tells his military tales from the ground up, piecing together the larger picture only when concrete human experience on the ground has been sufficiently honored. Barrett is his accomplice, riveting the listener’s attention on the sheer nonsensical agony of it all. Still, all that this tragedy would mean for American involvement in the war is but a stone’s throw away, as Bowden’s slightly a-kilter subtitle suggests.

There are, as I’ve noted, other ways to tell the story of Hue, 1968, some more sympathetic to Westmoreland and his ‘MACV’. But if you appreciate a well-told audio book where author and narrator work hand-in-glove, begin here.