Eighty thousand Vietcong troops had attacked 36 out of 44 provincial capitals, 64 of 242 district capitals, 5 of 6 autonomous cities, and numerous hamlets and villages.4 Much of Hue, the nineteenth-century capital of Vietnam under the Nguyen dynasty, was seized by Communist forces, who systematically massacred at least 2,500 “class enemies”—mainly South Vietnamese military and political officials and their relatives. It would take U.S. Marines weeks of hard house-to-house fighting to dislodge the Vietcong from their final stronghold in Hue’s Citadel, built in the style of Beijing’s Forbidden
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