Though the jungle fighting of the Vietnam War has been closely examined, the in-city, house-to-house combat characterized by the Battle for Hue during Tet 1968 had never been covered extensively before the publication of this debut by now-well-known Vietnam War chronicler Keith William Nolan.

It was an agonizing struggle to wrest the entrenched and well-supplied enemy from the Imperial City. Block by block, house by house, United States Marines achieved that difficult objective, exhibiting the courage, daring, and camaraderie for which they are renowned. It was a brutal month-long fight, epitomizing the difficulties the "grunts" endured throughout the war.

Nolan dismissed the negative stories and disparaging charges made against Vietnam veterans in general - drugs, desertion, unnecessary and wholesale slaughter - and set about interviewing veterans of the fighting at Hue, studying the available literature and researching the archives in order to present an accurate picture of "what the American grunt went through in Vietnam."