As a captain in charge of a Marine rifle company in early 1968, Myron Harrington earned a Silver Star and, a week later, a Navy Cross for bravery and leadership under fire in the city of Hu?, one the fiercest battlegrounds of the Vietnam War.
“We didn’t have any concern that we were being lured into a killing zone,” Harrington said in a later interview on the urban combat of Hu?, letting out a resigned chuckle. “The whole city was a killing zone, so we knew we were already in a killing zone.”
Harrington, 86, died Wednesday, Feb. 19, in Charlotte, North Carolina, his son, Mike Harrington, confirmed to Task & Purpose, though the retired Marine colonel and his wife of nearly 60 years, Ann, spent nearly all of their post-military lives in Charleston, South Carolina. Harrington’s death was first announced by retired Marine Col. Thomas Gordon, the commandant of the Citadel, the college in Charleston from which Harrington graduated in 1960. Harrington was a prominent member of the school’s community in the decades after he left the Marines, mentoring generations of students.
“I can say emphatically, I wouldn’t be a Marine today, or I wouldn’t have ever been a Marine, if it wasn’t for Col. Harrington’s personal intervention,” Gordon told Task & Purpose. “He just invested in all of us.”
Harrington’s two combat awards came within a single week at Hu?, when he was a 29-year-old captain. On Feb. 13, 1968, he led an assault on a massive stone citadel in Hu? known as the Dong Ba Tower, or the Arch Tower. Harrington’s Delta Company with 1st Battalion, 5th Marines began the assault with a force of 120, he later said. By the next day — after taking the tower, losing it to an overnight counter-attack, and retaking it once more at daybreak — Harrington said he had 39 Marines “still standing.”
Days after the Dong Ba capture, Harrington again led an attack on a final pocket of dug-in resistance inside Hu?’s urban fortress, braving direct fire to move between his men, directing artillery and mortars, and leading a final assault. The second assault broke a final line of enemy defense in the city, and earned Harrington the Navy Cross.
Harrington also held a unique spot in Vietnam history for his place in a series of iconic photos from Hu?. Over the course of the assault on Dong Ba, a news photographer snapped photos of Harrington and other Marines in a fighting position overlooking the tower, framed by two twisted girders that appear to form a cross. The ravaged landscape and ethereal image of the cross came to represent Hu?’s savage fighting and desolate landscape.
After leaving the military, Harrington gave historical interviews and presentations on the Dong Ba assault — several of which are the basis for this story — but rarely spoke of his own individual actions that earned the nation’s second- and third-highest valor awards within the span of a week.
That reticence extended to his family, said Mark Harrington, who followed in his father’s footsteps as a Marine officer after graduating from the U.S. Naval Academy. Mark said he could remember his father telling only one combat anecdote from Hu?, and he was unsure whether it was from the assault on the Dong Ba tower, or the second attack a week later that earned the Navy Cross.
While directing his Marines, Harrington told his son, he sent one platoon ahead of the others, and decided to join their assault, which would take heavy fire. He sprinted forward but could not find his men in Hu?’s rubble. He radioed and asked where they were.
From well behind him, a shouted voice called out from cover: “We’re back here, captain!” He had passed up his own troops.
Harrington’s humble nature, said Gordon, the Citadel commandant, was reflected in every part of his life.
“The colonel asked me to plan his final arrangements, and I’ve been busy doing that,” Gordon said. “He was a lifelong member of St. Phillips, which is an old congregation in downtown Charleston, and as we were having this conversation with parishioners there, some of the people didn’t know Colonel Harrington was a Marine. I mean, here he is, one of the top three decorated alumnus here at the Citadel and in Charleston, right? And people didn’t even know he was in the Marine Corps, just because of his humble nature.”
But it was in the rubble of Hu? — one of the defining battles of the Vietnam War, where 2,500 Marines took back a final urban stronghold of the Tet Offensive — that Harrington became a Marine legend.
From supply officer to Tet in 5 days
Born in Decatur, Georgia, Harrington joined the Marines after college and spent six years waiting to go Vietnam. When he finally arrived in 1967, despite being trained as an infantry officer, he was put in charge of a supply company in Saigon.
He called in a favor from a general, he said in later interviews, and was transferred to 1st Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment, or 1/5, where he was put in charge of Delta Company.
“I was very blessed when I took over Delta Company,” Harrington said in a video interview with the Witness to War website. “It was very combat-ready and full of combat veterans. Now, most of them were 18-, 19-years-old, but they were nevertheless combat-hardened veterans. And I came in as an absolute newbie.”
He would get the chance to prove himself almost immediately.
On his second day in command, Harrington took the company to a firing range, where he and his forward observers could train on calling in supporting fire from mortars, Marine artillery units and naval guns on ships just off shore.
As training rounds landed harmlessly, to the astonishment of Harrington and his Marines, a battalion of North Vietnamese infantry emerged from nearby jungle-covered hills, firing and charging. Pivoting from dummy rounds to live fire, Harrington called in fire on the enemy force until they retreated, suffering no casualties from his unit.
The unexpected enemy force, it turned out, was just a prelude. On Harrington’s fifth day in command, the North Vietnamese launched the Tet Offensive, quickly capturing several provincial capitals.
Most were quickly retaken. The last standing was Hu?. In February 1968, Harrington and 1/5 were sent to retake the city.
Hu? was a uniquely awful setting for an urban fight. Divided by the Perfume River, its northern half was built around the Imperial City of Hu?, a massive 19th-century fortress ringed by stone walls and built for defense. By the time the Marines arrived, the North Vietnamese had dug into nearly every inch of the fort with countless sniper nests and fighting positions hidden in the stone barricades and rubble.
The final hour of the 1986 movie “Full Metal Jacket” is a fictionalized retelling of a squad of Marines in Hu?, facing snipers, booby traps and shattered urban terrain.
“We were accustomed to jungles and open rice fields,” Harrington said in an official Marine history of the Hu? City battle. “And now we would be fighting in a city.”
Just to reach the outer perimeter of Hu?’s northern citadel, Harrington and his Marines ferried across the Perfume River in D-Day-style landing crafts and Navy Swift Boats, taking fire from hidden snipers.
At the front of the city was the Dong Ba tower, a massive stone emplacement that overlooked nearly the entire fortress. Two companies from 1/5 had tried to take it but had been pushed back. The job then fell to Harrington and Delta Company.
“When we went to the Command Post meeting with then-Maj. [Bob] Thompson, he explained everything that was going on and I got brought up to date with what was happening in the citadel area,” Harrington said in the Witness to War interview. “And he looked at me, and he said, ‘Tomorrow, Delta Company will take the tower.’ He didn’t say, ‘well, try to take it,’ or ‘I want you to go and see what you can do.’ He said, ‘you’ll take the tower tomorrow.’ And I said, ‘aye, aye, sir.’”
Assault on the Dong Ba tower
The assault on Feb. 15 began with hours of shelling, from both ships and Marine artillery units.
“We were able to move up, right up to the line of departure at the base of this tower,” said Harrington. “So I’m thinking, you know, this is going to be a piece of cake. All we gotta do is put the flag up. The artillery is taking care of it, and we don’t have anything to worry about. And in showing the greenness of my experience, I walked out in the middle of the street there, which was right next to the tower, and within about two seconds, the whole world erupted.”
Harrington and two other Marines scrambled to safety. One was wounded.
“For those of you who have been on the rifle range, it was like being at the 300-yard line when you’re firing rapid fire,” Harrington said in a presentation on Hu? at the South Carolina Confederate Relic Room & Military Museum.
The Marines quickly realized that the shells fired by the far-off ships had come in at a flat angle, with rounds flying harmlessly past the tower, and those that hit slamming flat into walls with little damage to defenders dug in beneath.
“All it really did was keep them up,” said Harrington.
However, the big guns offered one advantage: arriving like a “freight train” overhead, the noise of the giant shells covered the Marines’ advance, as did the constant fire of their own mortars.
“I think we used something like three- or four thousand rounds of mortar ammunition during the battle,” Harrington recalled in an interview. “But it was a very dense area. You really didn’t see the enemy until you were right on them, and they would be within 50 feet of you, and you were in a face-to-face confrontation. There were a thousand places that a rifle or a machine gun could be placed to fire at you that you just really had no awareness until they started firing at you where it was coming from.”
As the Marines advanced, Harrington called in artillery at danger-close range to his position, a prospect made even more dicey by the orientation of the battlefield.
“We were attacking into the guns,” Harrington told a History Channel documentary. “Normally, when you do artillery firing, you want the guns behind you so that you can call it well ahead of you and then bring it back towards you, so you can lessen the danger to your own forces. We were having the artillery firing directly at us, so we were calling the artillery within 50 meters in front of us.”
Harrington sent one platoon towards the tower and a second into a supporting building while moving between positions, constantly exposed to fire.
A key point of the assault came with a stroke of battlefield luck from a junior Marine, according to a history of the assault compiled by the Newseum. As the counterattack stalled, D Company Staff Sgt. Bob Thoms (known as ‘Cajun Bob’ for his thick accent, Thoms was also awarded the Silver Star for the Dong Ba attack) instructed Cpl. Selwyn “S-Man” Taitt to “grab every grenade he could get a hold of.”
Thoms meant fragmentation grenades, but the young Marine brought back a pile that included tear gas and smoke canisters normally used to mark targets for mortars.
But throwing all of them toward the North Vietnamese worked. Disoriented by the gas or perhaps scared that they were about to be targeted by heavy weapons, the enemy fighters withdrew, allowing the platoon to move forward.
The Marines eventually got inside the tower, killing at least 20 defenders — the total varies in different reports — while others fled. Six of Harrington’s Marines died in the initial assault, with close to 50 injured.
With the tower taken, Harrington immediately ordered the wounded evacuated, defenses readied and ammunition redistributed for a counter-attack he was sure would come.
It did, at 4 a.m. Marines in the tower initially withdrew, but Harrington rallied a response, retaking the position by mid-morning.
A Navy Cross in a second assault
In the last decades of his life, Harrington gave many interviews and public talks about the Dong Ba tower assault, for which he received the Silver Star. In each, he highlighted the bravery of his Marines and downplayed his own role.
A week after that fight, he led his Marines on a second assault, this one against a final fortified series of walls and gates on the city’s southern perimeter. For that firefight, on Feb. 23, he earned the Navy Cross.
But if Harrington ever spoke about the second assault, there is little record of it online, nor with historians who interviewed him or even his own family.
Charleston historian Fritz Hamer collaborated with Harrington in a presentation at the Charleston Relic Room museum in 2023. Prior to the event, Hamer tried to interview Harrington about the Navy Cross, a medal second only to the Medal of Honor.
“I asked him several times about his awards and he almost wouldn’t talk about them,” Hamer told Task & Purpose. “He would skirt over them. He focused on leading his men, especially at the citadel, to retake it, and, you know, regretting the loss of several of his men. And that’s about all I could get out of those interviews.”
Mark Harrington said his father would “talk about with anybody, he just won’t tell you what he did. Whenever we talked about Vietnam, it was always the funny stories, you know, like not having any water. And so there was water in a cistern, and they drank from that, and then — yikes! — they got to the bottom of it, and there was a dead frog.”
Rather than talk about himself, said Mark, his father always focused on the bravery of the Marines in his command.
Harrington’s Navy Cross citation makes clear that on Feb. 23, 1968, just a week after the Dong Ba tower, Harrington was again at the front of his Marines, “attacking a well-entrenched North Vietnamese Army force that was occupying a fortified section of the wall surrounding the Hu? citadel. As the Marines maneuvered forward, they began receiving a heavy volume of small arms, automatic weapons, mortar and antitank rocket fire.”
The citation says that Harrington moved between platoons, directing their maneuvers and calling for fire support from mortars and artillery. He then personally led the final charge. The battle, which involved several companies of 1/5 taking different objectives, was the final major clash in Hu? City. Harrington and Delta Company were pulled out of the city less than a week later.
A Cross in the wreckage
At the height of the fighting in Hu?, a news photographer for Stars & Stripes joined Delta Company. He snapped several photos of Harrington and other Marines in a fighting position beneath the Dong Ba tower. Over the foxhole is wreckage from a building, with two girders that appear to form a cross.
The picture circulated internationally as a symbol of Hu?, though Harrington did not see it until decades later.
“To have that cross just right there in the middle of it gives you a real spooky feeling afterwards to see that, because as I was going through that battle, I knew there was something else there protecting me,” Harrington said. “And 32 years later, I see that picture, I see that cross, and it’s incredible.”
Harrington commissioned a Pennsylvania artist, Bryant White, to paint a landscape based on the photographs, which he titled, “If there’s anything close to hell, it had to be Hu?.”
Harrington served 30 years in the Marines. In 1984, he was sent to Beirut in the aftermath of the 1983 barracks bombing that killed 241, commanding the final units tasked with shuttering the Marine presence there.
After retiring in 1991, Harrington and Ann — the two met when Harrington was assigned as the aide de camp for Ann’s father, a Marine general — moved to Charleston, where Harrington became the director of the Trident Academy, a school in Mount Pleasant that catered to students with special needs (according to his son, Harrington always said he had been considered a “mediocre” student because his temperament was ill-suited to traditional classrooms). He also immersed himself in the Citadel, guiding the Naval ROTC program, serving as chairman of the school’s Board of Visitors and acting as a mentor for generations of future Marine officers, said Gordon, the commandant.
“Once we graduated, he stayed in close contact with us and throughout our career,” Gordon said. “So when I was a company commander down in Parris Island, he would come down and he would talk to my recruits. Later when I was in the War College, he would come up and talk to the students up there. He was at my retirement after 30 years in the Marine Corps and I was there, you know, in his room in hospice before he died.”
Harrington, Gordon said, ranks as one of the school’s three most decorated alums, along with Army helicopter pilot Capt. Hugh Reavis Nelson, a posthumous recipient of the Medal of Honor for actions in 1966, and Army Brig. Gen. James Mace, who was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross in 1968.
But, said Gordon, Harrington would want to be remembered differently.
“He wanted his legacy not to be on his personal valor on the battlefield,” Gordon said. “He wanted his legacy to be those leaders that he invested in.”
His commander in combat, though, had no trouble summing up his junior officer. After the initial assault on Dong Ba, Maj. Bob Thompson — the commander who had unequivocally ordered Harrington to take the tower — spoke to a senior enlisted Marine from D Company about the captain’s performance.
“I was talking to his gunnery sergeant the next morning,” Thompson later told an interviewer. “He called me over to the side, and he says, ‘you know, my captain was magnificent last night.’”
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