USS Hue City (CG-66)

USS Hue City (CG-66): Named for the Hardest Fight in Vietnam

Commissioned on 14 September 1991, USS Hue City was named for the Battle of Hue, fought from 31 January to 3 March 1968 , 26 days of the most brutal urban combat in American military history since the Pacific island campaigns of World War II. When the North Vietnamese Army and Viet Cong launched the Tet Offensive on 31 January 1968, more than 10,000 enemy forces seized the ancient imperial city of Hue and systematically executed thousands of South Vietnamese civilians they identified as government officials, soldiers, teachers, and anyone else on their lists. Marines and Army soldiers fought street by street, room by room, to retake the city.

The Battle of Hue killed 216 Americans and wounded more than 1,300. The enemy lost more than 5,000 killed. The city was recaptured, but it was physically destroyed in the process, and the images of the battle contributed to the domestic political collapse of support for the war. The Marines who fought at Hue did everything right militarily. The strategic outcome was determined by forces far beyond the street-level battles they won.

Naming a warship Hue City was an acknowledgment that military excellence and political outcome are not the same thing, and that the men who fought at Hue deserved their name on a fighting ship regardless of what happened afterward.

USS Hue City served in the Atlantic Fleet with multiple Mediterranean and Middle East deployments through the 1990s and 2000s, consistently operating in the Navy's most contested operational theaters.

Tactically Acquired's USS Hue City (CG-66) collection honors the Marines who fought street by street in 1968 and the Navy crew who carried their battle into the modern fleet.