The Fight For Hue From Critical Hit

Review by: Daniel Windham

In the early hours of January 31, 1968, the first night of Tet, North Vietnamese troops slipped into the old imperial capital of Hue. By dawn, their flag was flying over the Citadel. For months, President Johnson and General Westmoreland had been telling Americans the war was going well. It took 31 days of street fighting to take Hue back, and a lot of people at home stopped believing them.

Tactically, Tet was a disaster for the North Vietnamese. It still showed Americans the war wasn’t ending anytime soon. This is my second look at Critical Hit’s Cold War ASL games, after Dien Bien Phu. The Fight for Hue tries to put all that ambiguity into single-man and multi-man counters.

Getting It

The Fight for Hue is an ASLComp module from Critical Hit, released in 2016. It covers the fighting inside the Citadel and in southern Hue. Critical Hit sells it direct for $179.95. As usual, the link is at the bottom of the article.

You get a big historical map in several panels, special rules sheets, counter sheets for the Marines, the ARVN, the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong, and 15 scenarios. It isn’t a complete game. You’ll need the ASL Rulebook, plus modules with the Americans, the US Marines and Chapter G.

New Rules, Old Problems

Just like Dien Bien Phu, the rules are printed so they slip right into your ASL binder. My biggest complaint is the helicopters. Some scenarios use them, but there are no helicopter rules in the box. Dien Bien Phu has a pile of helicopter rules, and that’s the battle where they barely mattered.

So I borrowed the Dien Bien Phu rules to see how it works. A helicopter has to be landed to load, and you pay to land, to lift off and to land again. Then your Marines come down right on top of that concealed Viet Cong stack, or a dummy. Whether it can land in rough terrain is still a little unclear to me.

The North Vietnamese get their own sniper unit. It sets up hidden, and it fires on the old incremental IFT, so dig that chart out. That hero you’re so proud of had better stay out of its line of sight.

The Marines also get dogs. A dog doesn’t rout with its broken squad. It moves to the nearest friendly unit in Good Order instead, and it gives a -2 DRM to break concealment. That’s a neat touch.

The Viet Cong rules are where I’d simplify. They play as Partisans, which makes sense. Then you add hidden placement for part of their force and the Dare-Death rule, which comes from the Chinese in Chapter G. That’s a lot of small things to keep track of, and I’d like to see them trimmed in the next edition.

A Starter Kit Friendly Start

One of my gripes about Dien Bien Phu was that too many scenarios were complex right out of the box. The Fight for Hue doesn’t have that problem. Scenario 1, Tay Loc Tussle, is infantry, machine guns and support weapons. You could almost play it with the Starter Kit rules.

Made for TV, scenario 12, is the Marines taking the province headquarters and the prison on February 6, while a CBS crew filmed them raising the flag. The card even has a photo of Walter Cronkite. He was the most trusted newsman in America, and his reports from Vietnam got a lot of people asking questions about the war. My one gripe is that the scenario gives you a leader called Animal Mother, from Full Metal Jacket. I don’t think movies belong in ASL.

Marines, ARVN and the Viet Cong

The Marine counters are accurate for the time. They wear plain green utilities and carry M16s. You might expect camouflage, but in the city the Marines mostly didn’t wear it.

They’re missing one important leader, though. Lieutenant Colonel Ernest Cheatham turned the battle around in southern Hue. In Hue 1968, Mark Bowden tells how Cheatham dug through the 5th Marines’ footlockers for the field manuals on fighting in built-up areas and taught himself. His Marines stayed off the streets and blasted their way through walls instead.

The ARVN are 6-5-7s with morale 7 and a touch of camouflage. I’m glad Critical Hit didn’t make them easy-to-break pushovers. Some ARVN units, especially the paratroopers, fought very well, and these numbers show it.

The North Vietnamese are basically a reprint of the Viet Minh from Dien Bien Phu. The Viet Cong are different. They have no two-tone camouflage, since they were farmers by day and fighters by night, and they wear pith helmets. Their leaders carry the Viet Cong symbol, not the North Vietnamese one. The two didn’t always see eye to eye.

A Map That Fills a Wall

This map is huge. Mine covers most of a wall in my man cave. Some friends who’d only seen parts of it said it looked messy. To some degree, that’s what Hue looked like in 1968.

Hue went from a French colonial economy to one fed by billions in American aid, fast. Some things changed overnight, and some didn’t. So you get dirt roads next to paved ones, and stone buildings next to huts. North of town, it goes back to rice paddies.

The Citadel’s gates have their own rules, which fits a city that was fortified long before the battle. The moats have their own TEM. In the middle is the palace complex of the Imperial City, the ground both sides fought hardest over, where the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong set up their headquarters.

Thirty-One Days

The fighting split in two, with the Perfume River between. North of it was the Citadel, held by the ARVN 1st Division and its Hac Bao Company. South of it was the modern city, with the MACV compound and the Marines coming up from Phu Bai. This map shows the main attacks, a short chronology and where each scenario sits. The numbers match the scenario table right under it.

Blue markers are the fights where the Marines attack, teal ones are the ARVN, and red ones are the North Vietnamese.

Southern Hue

On the first morning, the Hac Bao Company held the Tay Loc airfield with a stockpile of M72 rockets, and the 1st Division held its Mang Ca headquarters. South of the river, the Marines of Task Force X-Ray fought up Highway 1 over the An Cuu bridge to reach the MACV compound. Rescue Mission and Fatal Charge are those first two days, including a costly try at crossing into the Citadel.

Then came the block-by-block fight. In Ontos Debut, two M50 Ontos, each with six 106mm recoilless rifles, go after the university buildings. Hue Block-by-Block and Made for TV carry it through to the province headquarters. By February 10, southern Hue was clear.

The Citadel

Inside the walls, the ARVN airborne battalions broke through to Mang Ca and started pushing back in First Step Back and Truong’s Troopers. In The NVA Strikes Back, the North Vietnamese counterattack the ARVN regiments in the west of the Citadel.

In mid-February, the 1st Battalion, 5th Marines came into the Citadel and fought down the east wall. Thrust into a Vacuum is their first push. Stalemate in the Citadel is the fight for the tower over the Dong Ba Gate. On February 24, the ARVN raised their flag over the Imperial City. The last fighting ended a week later.

Where to Buy

Critical Hit: ASLComp The Fight for Hue

Debriefing

Critical Hit got a lot right with The Fight for Hue. The counters are accurate, the ARVN get a fair shake, and the map captures how chaotic the city was. The helicopters and the Viet Cong rules still need work, and the movie leader has to go.

If you’re new, start with Tay Loc Tussle. It’s infantry and machine guns, and it’ll teach you the city before you call in the Ontos. Next up for me is the Korean War. Until then, check your rulebook and roll low.

Academy Out!

GET TO THE CHOPPA…!!!

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