Live on cspan 2s book tv. At this time id like to throw it over to our interview, Chicago Tribune film critic michael phillips. [applaus [applause]. Thank you, thanks for coming out today and its my pleasure to talk with mark bowden about his new book hue 1968. For those of you who dont know his resume, hes a National Correspondent for the atlantic, contributing editor vanity fair, a writer, and author of many books on subjects all over the literally all over the world, from colombia and pablo escobar, an account to dday, to the killing of usama bin laden, many subjects. Probably best known for blackhawk down, an account of the 1993 raid in somalia that led to twou. S. Army blackhawk helicopters being down over downtown mogadishu and the grueling 15hour result. And the new book, which is out this week from Atlantic Monthly press is a very different scope, id say, than blackhawk down. Its also being made into a mini series already. The thing hasnt been out three days, and the producer and director of whats going to be between eight and ten hours in the end, of this mini series is michael mann and he has said this, i like this description. He says, in marks book, there are no background people. People ab tracted into statistics or body counts. Theres a sense that everybody is somebody as each is in the actuality of their own lives. The brilliance of bowdens narrative, achievement of intervowing hundreds of people on all sides and making their human stories his foundation is why hue 1968 raises to the emotion emotional of for whom the bell tolls and on the western front. High praise. Bless him. [laughter] from partisan character, but thank you for sitting with us. My pleasure. Thank you for inviting me. Host can we talk a little first, just to kind of orient folks who may not be as familiar as they should be with the bloodiest of the vietnam war battles. I think thats controvertible. Right. Host i wonder if there were key misconception of the tet offensive that kind of helped focus your book five years in the making. Guest i was frankly the more i learned about this battle, the more surprised i was that it wasnt widely known and remembered. It is remembered within the military. People who are part of the military, the army or the marine corps are very familiar with what a terrible fight this was, but the general public, i think, in part never really understood exactly what happened in large measure because the commander, the military commanders in vietnam, general westmoreland and his staff so aggressively downplayed the tet offensive. They claimed that it amounted only to small scale attacks, which was true in most of the cities in South Vietnam, that were rapidly put down. Hue was definitely not that. It was an enormous battle that lasted 24 to 30 days involving u. S. Cavalry units and the United States marine corps, took a terrible toll on the citizens in the middle of the city, kind of trapped in the crossfire. So, its a battle, its kind of a rip in the fabric and civilization and terribly dramatic and ultimately, i think changes the world. This was an episode on that scale. Host 15 hours was the core sort of timeline in blackhawk down, this was as you say, up po to 30, 40 days. And things happen out of those margins, battles dont come out of nowhere and they dont end when they end. And tell me how that necessitated more of a different structure, more of a mosaic, if you go with that characterization. I think there is a similarity in the structure as i went about reporting blackhawk down and this in the same way. This was, as you mentioned, a much bigger scale and a much bigger challenge and i ended up speaking to a lot more people. But i try to build these stories from the ground up. Me, im far more interested as a writer in the experience of the individuals who were caught up in that struggle, either both american soldiers and vietnamese soldiers and civilians. One of the soldiers who was in this battle, by the way, was andy westin who is in the front row here, andy. If you want to stand up. Host stand up. [applaus [applause] and andy is one of Many Americans veterans who i interviewed. The great they think about andy was he was writing letters h almost every day so my narrative is full of these wonderful letters that andy wrote during the battle. Host lets read that first segment we talked about here. Hue is the Third Largest city, i believe. Sure, kind of like the chica chicago. Host not that weve ever been equated to a battlefield before, but lets this is an early part of the book and we should say the book actually begins, the narrative proper begins with one of many people we meet in hue 1968, which is the story of a north vietnamese villager. Ktmung. A 18yearold girl whose father has fought against the french, grandfather fought against the french. Her older sister was skilled fighting against the south Vietnamese Army and americans and she herself had been taken and interrogated and waterboarded when she was like 16 years old. So she was someone who had a very deep hatred of the south Vietnamese Army and the americans, who was completely committed to fight. I thought it would be an interesting way to introduce to american readers the story of the battle that we think of as an american. Host were so use today demonizing the enemy, especially in fiction, but not even nonfiction accounts of this war. So, this is a description of hue, and the tet offensive that took place around the Lunar New Year . Right, tet is the annual new years celebration. Its the biggest holiday in vietnam. In january, 1968, there were fewer than a thousand arvn troops stationed in the city and surrounding area and a smaller number of americans. As the holidays approached, a large portion of the former were looking forward to a long holiday furlough. In this peaceful city during tet, it was traditional to send cups and papers with lit candles floating down the river like flickering, prayers for health, for success, for the memory of loved ones, an i way or departed, for success in business or in love and perhaps for an end to the war and killing. It made a moving collective display of vast flotilla of hope, many thousands of tiny flames. They would wind down the wide water without sound, flowing past the bright lights of the modern city to the south, framed to the north by the fortresses high black walls. People would line both banks, to favor the spectacle, and sending their own offerings. It was the gesture of beauty and calm, of harmony between the living and the dead, an expression of vietnams soul placed far from the horrors of war. Not this year. Lets jump ahead to one other thing. Thank you. [applause] thank you. Host we meet many, many characters in marks book and one of them is his name is richard leffler. And i think in any good account of any war, you have the famous actors and the less famous. Your book deals with lbj, with westmoreland, Walter Cronkite among other media, figures who ended up, really kind of redirecting the american perception of the war, as a winnable, you know, exercise. And this is one of many, like the one we meet at the beginning of the book. This is one of many characters we didnt know until now. This now, were in the middle of the battle where its raging in the city. There was a steady roar of gunfire and explosions, but with the eclipse and intervals by the sound of a shell fired from one of the war ships anchored 15 to 20 miles east in the south china sea. The biggest of their guns were 16 inchers, which measured the width of the barrels bore. The gun itself was 50 times that long. It could hurl a projectile as heavy as a small car 25 miles. It would emerge in the general din as a low whistle that grew louder as it approached until it became a thing felt as much as heard, passing above the opaque ceiling of clouds like an airborne locomotive. The hurling projectile went with so much force it dressed on the eardrums. And when it hit the ground, even at a great distance, the earthquake shook, the walls crumbled. It felt i can liao like the end of the world for richard leftie leffler. Leffler was 18. He had no idea what was going on. He had never heard of tet or hue, which he pronounced hue instead of hue. He now knew nothing of ho chi minh. He could not kind r find vietnam on the map. And this was just something he was obliged to fight. Months earlier he had been a tough guy, small, scrappy or and tough so he thought. He was from a town by philadelphia the land rises steeply from the schylkill river. He was too young for a union job and too rambunctious and unruly for school. His father didnt work, he drank. With a blood of six his mother had more than she could cope with. Leffler ran wild. He discovered that a boy didnt have to be big to win a fight, just willing. The key was to fear painless than the other guy. This gave him, despite his size, a swagger in his neighborhood. Life had been shaping up just fine until the local magistrate, a barber, eid the is yourly teen dragged into his shop by the police between umpteenth time, with a snip of the scissors, you again, you have two choices, my man, they really want to put you in juvy. I have to put you in somewhere and just like that, lefty was a mari marine. [applause]. Guest inventory. Host thats good, thank you. I have to talk about the research because its a considerable undertaking. How do you map first of all, how did the experience on blackhawk down, among others, prepare you for, kind of hey, how do i map out. Who am i going to talk to about this that we havent heard before . It benefitted, i think, having written blackhawk down, with the realization, you dont have to understand the thing youre writing about before you start. You just need to dive in. And you begin talking to one person after another, after another, and over a period of time, you begin to form a kind of mental mosaic thats the story that you want to write. At a certain point, when you have the shape of the story, or in this case of the battle, in your mind, now you can begin directing your efforts towards the kind of people you have not yet spoken to, you recognize, for instance, most of this battle was fought with by marines in the city, but there was also a major fight outside the city fought by the first of the 7th cavalry, the u. S. Army troopers, of whom andy was one. At a certain point i real leased, i need to find the army guys who fought in this battle. And that process proceeds until and then you speak to vietnamese soldiers and i begin to form a very, i think, much richer idea of what actually happened. And in that you keep working like that, in this case, over five years until you actually feel that you understand something you want to write about. And how many trips to vietnam did you take . I took two trips to vietnam, each was two to three weeks long, but hired a fellow there, his name was denny and hue is a younger military officer, too young to fight in the war, but savvy finding retired generals and how to deal with the department of the. In working for me, plumbing the archives and looking for Historical Documents and memoirs, then he began interviewing on my behalf so when i came for the first time to hue, he had set up two and three interviews a day for a solid two weeks. So i would interview heavily during that time and come back with 40 or more interviews, which i would then have to have translated and transcribed and translated. So it was a laborious process, but i felt if i had the opportunity, which i did not have so much in blackhawk down. I did go to somalia and did i best i could to tell that side of the battle. Its difficult, mogadishu is an extremely violent and dangerous place. Vietnam, has become welcoming to travelers and journalists. I i had the opportunity and i felt i needed to take advantage of it. It was, you know, you keep chipping away at it like the thousand mile journey. Host did you get to the point in this book, maybe different than the other books, where you hit a wall on the research and that youre in a quagmire, maybe a vietnamlike quagmire . I didnt, maybe because ive been writing so long. When i was a newspaper reporter, and starting out. Often the stories would take me a day and i would think, gee, i have two or three days to work on this one. And an editor would call and say we need that story now. I developed a habit early on as a reporter, sketching out for myself the structure of the story that i was going to write, if i had to write it right now. And that often happenedment if i got more, or learned something more, it would change everything because every time you interview someone new, your understanding of the story is enriched and very frequently radically changed. So that practice of always having structure in my mind of what im going to write has carried out and invaluable to me in doing much longer projects. And i do, and im aware of reaching a point where i have to stop reporting if im ever going to write the thing. And so, generally, the progress is, in the beginning about 99 of my time is reporting and researching, and that somewhere in midpoint, im writing half the time and interviewing and researching half the time and in the end. 99 of the time is spent writing and im chasing down the last few things that i feel i really need to know. We dont want to wait until the very last 9. 3 minutes to hear from you. So if you have questions for mark, were going to you can line up behind that mic and well just, well hijack the conversation back, if the questions are uninspired. Okay . But they wont be, they wont be. I have to bring this up to part of the Atlantic Monthly press release on the publication of the book, notes that, you know, one of the norths huge miscalculations was the people of hue, indeed the people throughout South Vietnam would rise up to support the revolution. This, of course, echoes all through history, that sort of up to and including the invasion of iraq and i just wonder if you can talk at all how your interviews in vietnam, if there was any perspective that really, that you got from people that helped clarify that for you. Yeah, thats a good question, michael. You know, i found that most Vietnamese Civilians in South Vietnam, anyway, were trapped. They had a violent independence communist movement on one side that would take retribution against those who joined up or served or accepted the saigon government, the americanbacked government and most of these, especially People Living in the countryside, people with no education, they just wanted to be left alone to live their lives and they would have ultimately viet cong cadres would come into their villages and they would be people who would be executed or young men who would be taken to serve with them, or there would be arvn South Vietnamese troops or sometimes american troops, and we had pictures of American Marines torching homes and villages. One of the efforts was to clean people out of their ancesteral villages and herd them into what was called safe villages, which were essentially compounds, surrounded by barbed wire and fencing and i think anyone who understood the nature of vietnams culture, you know, youre making enemies of the very people who youre trying to help in that case. So, there were miscalculations by certainly by the americans and by the South Vietnamese, but as you mentioned, you know, i call them the song birds in hanoi, the propagandaists were just as bad and had every speculation that their movement was hugely popular and people would rise up and support them, when the people didnt, which did not happen in hue, nor did it happen in other places in South Vietnam, i think that engendered a great deal of anger and contributed to these purges and executions that took place during the time that the north vietnamese and viet cong owned the city of hue. There were no shortages. Host we wont be able to get to everybody in this round. The first question, quickly. Quickly, to what extent did you rely on the official military histories about the battle and engagement and how would you characterize the quality of those official histories . I did read them and i used them a lot. I think, you know, they were valuable, very often, in providing an overarching frame work for what happened. And they were generally, im thinking in particular, jack shuensons history of the war of vietnam was very good with details. Obviously the people writing these are not approaching the story in the same way that i am and theyre relying strictly on american accounts. Other books like the memoirs are william westmoreland, i found to be extremely unhelpful. He think he devoted all of about five sentences to the battle of hue, which to my thinking was the most serious battle fought by americans in the war. He from the beginning that hue had been taken and refused to see this battle as anything very significant. That persistence, you know, up until his death, he never really, i think, acknowledged what had gone on. And they were working off good military intelligence on that, but it was denied, ignored. On the first day, january 31st, there was a cia report that went to the president , i found it in Lyndon Johnsons papers at his library in austin, and so, it certainly would have been seen by general westmoreland, which said it was actually very accurate. It said that the city has been taken by the north vietnamese and the viet cong. Theres a small group of americans who are trapped in the southern part of the city and theres a small group of South Vietnamese soldiers trapped in the northern part of the city, but other than that, you know, this city has been taken. And that very day, general westmoreland is cabling to washington that there are no more than like 500 enemy soldiers in the city of hue, which was off by a factor of 20. And i might add, that this was not just a it was not a failure that was just sort after Public Relations problem or a communications problem. These young men, like andy, and marines were being sent and ordered to attack entrenched far superior forces. So a force of 300 marines, a company of marines was corded to attack the citadel, which is the big fortress, is the northern half of hue, that had thousands of north vietnamese and viet cong forces on the tops of the walls, at the ramparts and so, chuck meadows, captain chuck meadows led these men across the bridge, lost half of his company, in making this attack before he realized and radioed b