Christmas in Vietnam: 12 Days of Darkness

Fifty-two years ago, the Christmastime night sky over North Vietnam was not an idealized, star-studded obsidian wonderland. Beginning on December 18, 1972, American B-52 aircraft delivered holiday death and destruction to Hanoi in one of the most intensive and lethal bombing campaigns of the Vietnam War.

On a cold December evening in 1972,  hunched against a frigid midtown wind, I dodged holiday shoppers, rushing to arrive on time at the corner of Fifth Avenue and 57th Street. I had a propitious rendezvous with Natalie and didn’t want to be late. Checking the clock shouldered by a wooden statue of Atlas high above the Art Deco entrance of my destination, I let out a visible breath of relief. I was well ahead of schedule. I lit up a cigarette and thought happily about the holiday season we were about to celebrate.

Natalie and I had decided to announce our wedding engagement on Christmas. We were meeting to pick out her ring. I had been home from Vietnam for nearly a year and a half. Everything we had hoped and planned for had been falling into place like treats tumbling from an Advent calendar. We couldn’t have been happier. When she arrived, we stepped inside of Tiffany’s where Natalie chose a ring of white-gold piled modestly with cut diamonds arranged in a snowflake pattern. Then we meandered to Rockefeller Center, our faces frozen in smiles.  

Like a heraldic beacon of hope, a bright moon glowed above the gayly decorated midtown streets. Intoxicated by its light, we both surrendered to a private laugh, imagining a jolly elf streaking across the New York skyline in a magical sleigh. Yet, half a world away, the night sky over North Vietnam was not the idealized, star-studded, obsidian wonderland we were enjoying. That same night, under that same moon, the city of Hanoi was busily visited by otherworldly aircraft which were anything but jolly and hardly imaginary.  

At the order of President Richard Nixon, a new bombing offensive over North Vietnam had begun on December 18. Before the New Year of 1973 would ring in, unrelenting waves of US Air Force jets dropped more than twenty-thousand tons of bombs in the most intense air offense of the Vietnam War—a bombardment that remains, to this day, one of the most staggering sustained air attacks in the history of warfare. Officially dubbed Operation Linebacker II, this year-ending campaign of death and destruction was the final major military operation carried out by the US during its Vietnam misadventure. It is remembered always by the Vietnamese as The Twelve Days of Darkness.

While Natalie and I were warmed by choirs of carolers, and the bright metallic ring of Salvation Army Santa bells at the skating rink, the people of Hanoi shivered in terror at the low-pitched drone of the B-52 Stratofortress bombers clumsily approaching with their lethal holiday greetings. Minutes later, came the blare of alert sirens and, inevitably, thunderous explosions felt as much as heard. Boom. Boom. Boom. Boom. The attacks lasted all night long. The result was annihilation.

BUFFs—Big Ugly Fat Fuckers—the bombers were impiously nicknamed. Nearly 130 of them flew from Guam and Thailand night after night, making more than 725 high-altitude attacks through December 29.  By nature, the B-52’s carpet-bombing attacks from 30,000 feet up were imprecise. Railroads and shipyards were their primary targets, but whole neighborhoods became collateral damage. The busy residential and shopping area of Kham Thien was the scene of hundreds of dead and wounded in one devastating attack which leveled more than 2,000 homes and buildings. At the city’s largest hospital, the Bach Mai Medical Center, twenty-eight doctors and nurses were killed. It took more than four days to dig out their bodies. 

The Christmas Bombing was not a surprise to the people of North Vietnam. As many as a half million had been evacuated from the Hanoi area in advance.  Bomb shelters were ubiquitous every few blocks throughout the city. Small ones could fit up to three people. Others were large enough for dozens. America folk singer Joan Baez took cover with other guests during the raids in an underground bunker at the Metropole Hotel. In the daylight, she sang protest songs to applause from her room’s balcony.

No shelter, however, could withstand the direct hits of a 500 pound bomb. Each B-52 carried nearly 100 of these high explosives. They killed, maimed and destroyed with monstrous blast waves. They spit forth high-velocity shrapnel—razor-sharp steel fragments—fatal to a distance of more than two city blocks. 

When the B-52s delivered their deadly bounty to Hanoi, there was no peace on that earth. Instead, the city trembled and cleaved open. Ramshackle villages were devoured. Modern office towers were razed to rubble. Residents were buried alive, torn asunder, vaporized by the cacophonous, bone-pulverizing blasts. 

In 1971, during Operation Lam Son 719, I safely witnessed 500-pound bomb attacks on the Ho Chi Minh Trail safely from Dong Ha near the DMZ, some 40 kilometers away. Though muffled by the distance, the vibrations of these explosions were nonetheless spine-chilling. I could only imagine the horror of being at ground zero. Those who have survived B-52 raids say the effect borders on madness. Control of bodily functions ceases and the mind silently screams for relief at any cost.

On Christmas Eve, Natalie and I made the rounds of our friends and relatives to share our happy news. We clinked glasses, drank toasts, showed off her sparkly, wintry bling. We blushingly received their congratulations. We basked in the comfort that our days, weeks and months of separation, worry, and fear during the war were behind us. 

We were oblivious, like so many others, to the desperate, life-or-death battle being waged by the people of Hanoi, fighting back against a murderously cynical attempt to break their will. They answered bravely, putting on an airborne light show of frantic anti-aircraft fire from 1,200 flame-tailed surface-to-air (SAM) missiles. They shot down more than two dozen aircraft, including fifteen B-52s. Nearly 100 US airmen were wounded, killed, captured or went missing. But these defenses were no match for the overwhelming volume of the attacks. The Vietnamese took a tragic pummeling. Somewhere close to 2,000 were killed on the ground, mostly civilians. If ever there was a nightmare before Christmas, this was it.

In 2018, when I returned to Vietnam with Natalie, we came face to face with a Christmas bombing time capsule on a casual walk through an innocuous Hanoi neighborhood of slender, French-inspired townhouses. In an urban lake no larger than a city block, lies the half-submerged wreckage of landing gear and the undercarriage from a B-52 bomber shot down on December 27, 1972. We were stunned in silence as we read the plaque which memorializes the site. It translates to “Dien Bien Phu In The Air,” a reference to the turning point battle that defeated the French in 1954. This was Vietnam’s Valley Forge, Yorktown, Lexington and Concord all in one.

This year, there will be a Christmas Eve midnight mass in North Vietnam’s Cathedral of St. Joseph, just as there was fifty-two years ago.  But this time, it will indeed be a Silent Night. The “Ave Maria” is certain not to be interrupted by the roar of attacking aircraft, the wail of air raid warnings, the deafening crash of high explosives.  Vietnam’s dark days are no more. Heaven and angels—and the people of Hanoi—will sing joyously this Christmas season.