War of Numbers

by Sam Adams

  “You’re our roving analyst,” he said. “Rove on down to the library.”

  I did so, and, settling into an easy chair, plowed through the standard books on Vietnam. These included Vo Nguyen Giap’s People’s War, People’s Army, a Vietnamese communist’s account of how they had taken twenty years to defeat the French; Bernard Fall’s Street Without Joy, a Frenchman’s view of the same defeat; and Joseph Buttinger’s Smaller Dragon, a history of Vietnam, whose main theme was that the Vietnamese had been fighting the Chinese off and on for two millennia.3 By several days later, I had gained the strong impression that although the Vietnamese hadn’t much of a GNP, they were abnormally dogged. Also they seemed to detest foreigners. All very well, I told myself, that doesn’t beat four-hundred-and-six-to-one odds.

  Back upstairs in mid-August, I started work on VC morale. Not knowing how else to begin, I decided to use the same approach I’d employed on the Simbas. I fetched some three-by-fives and black boxes from supply, and commenced copying VC names from the latest cables. Two hours passed, and the Laotian analyst stopped by my desk. He was six foot four, slender, with slick black hair and a big nose. His name was Jack Ives.

  “What are you doing?” he asked.

  “I’m making out index cards on the VC,” I replied. “It seems to me that you can’t dope somebody’s morale unless you first find out who he is.”

  “Cheezil,” said Ives. He walked off, chuckling to himself.

  A short while later Ed Hauck came by with the same question. I gave him the same answer. “There’s something you should know,” he said. “Those names are aliases. The VC want to confuse us. Keep that up long enough and you’ll have a list as big as the Manhattan phone book with nothing but fake names.”

  “Maybe I should use another approach,” I said.

  “It’s up to you,” he said. But I couldn’t think of a fresh one at the moment. I read old Sitreps instead.

  A couple of days later—Wednesday, 18 August—I was still at a loss on how to decipher enemy morale when a fuss erupted on the other side of the cubicle. Phones were ringing off their hooks, and the two military analysts were talking loudly, rattling paper, and peering at maps. It had the look of a major flap. I asked what was going on.

  “The Marines have landed,” one of them said. “At a place called Van Tuong Peninsula, south of Danang. They’re after the First Vietcong Regiment.”

  “One of the VC’s finest,” I said, displaying my knowledge of old Sitreps.

  “That’s right,” he replied, “only this time the Marines actually seem to have found it. They’re pulling an Iwo Jima, John Wayne, the whole bit. No more of this jungle crap.”4

  Well, this seems as good a place as any to dig in, I told myself. For one thing, I knew a lot about amphibious operations. After college I’d spent almost three years in the Pacific as communications officer on a U.S. Navy attack transport, the U.S.S. George Clymer. While there, I’d been in on about twenty practice landings. A couple of times I’d led the assault boats into the beach.

  The military analysts said their out-box was all mine. I read the first messages, and it was like my good old days in the Navy. The command ship for the operation was none other than the U.S.S. Bayfield! I’d visited the Bayfield many times, once to inspect its communications division, then run by a young lieutenant, Dale Thorn, now a godfather to my son Clayton. The other ships were familiar too: the Cabildo, the Vernon County, the Point Defiance, the Talledega. I could all but hear the shout “Away all boats!” followed by the squeal of the ship’s davits as they lowered the landing craft into the water.

  The Marines called the landing Operation Starlight.5 Their Seventh Regiment had landed in amphibious tractors, line abreast, on “Green Beach” at 6:30 that morning, Vietnam time, one minute after sunrise, on schedule. A few minutes later, more of them jumped from helicopters onto “Landing Zone Red” a short way inland. For the rest of the day the Marines poured ashore, three thousand altogether, with eleven tanks, and eight little armored tractors called Ontos. Dozens of helicopters and jets flew overhead, while a cruiser and two destroyers (the Galveston, the Orleck, and the Pritchett—I knew them too) stood offshore, pumping in artillery shells.

  The landing was unopposed. The Marines pushed inland, there was an ambush, and fighting became heavy. In 110-degree heat, through rolling countryside, rice paddies, and five-foot bush, the Marines rooted out Vietcong. Prisoners were taken, one belonging to the First VC Regiment. (“By damn, they found it!” one of the military analysts shouted.) Toward the end of the day a message reported that “escape routes were being sealed off.” The next morning the Washington Post headlined there were “2,000 Trapped VC.”

  Starlight was the first major American ground battle of the war. I followed it minutely until its end on 24 August. At the cost of fifty-one dead, the Marines had killed seven hundred Vietcong, according to a body count. More interesting was the capture of one hundred VC prisoners. I went down to the library to compare this figure with the number of Japanese who surrendered in the island battles during World War II. Samuel Eliot Morrison’s History of Naval Operations reported that at Tarawa, for example, the Marines had killed 4,500 Japanese, but captured only seventeen. The message was clear concerning VC morale. They were much more apt to surrender than the Japanese. I couldn’t help but recall that America had taken only three and a half years to get from Pearl Harbor to Tokyo Bay. Why hadn’t this occurred to Ed Hauck? I asked him what he thought about Starlight.

  “Sure put the whammy on the First Regiment, didn’t they?” Hauck said, and smiled. On that ambiguous note, I let the matter drop.

  Over the next weeks, I settled into a routine. After coffee, I’d read the New York Times and the Washington Post, and compare them to the Sitrep. How they stacked up depended on the subject. About the fighting, for example, the Sitrep and the papers said almost exactly the same thing. It didn’t take long to figure out why. Their information came from the same source: General William C. Westmoreland’s headquarters in Saigon. Westmoreland had run the headquarters—called the Military Assistance Command, Vietnam, or MACV, pronounced “Mac Vee”—since 20 June 1964.

  About Saigon politics, the Sitrep’s coverage was not only much better, there was a lot more of it. The Sitrep was so obviously superior to the newspapers that I asked Ed Hauck why. “There’s a lot of reasons,” he told me, “not the least of which is that the CIA station’s in bed with half of South Vietnam’s legislature. But the main reason is Molly. She’s been working on Vietnam off and on since 1951, when she learned Vietnamese down in the Foreign Documents Division. She probably knows more about Saigon politics than anyone else in Washington.”

  Concerning the Vietcong, the Times, the Post and the Sitrep were unfortunately alike. They didn’t have much on them at all. Occasionally there was a piece about an “invisible government,” or the VC’s ability to pop up where least expected, but most references to the Vietcong concerned their cadavers. I began to see what Ed Hauck meant when he said they had slipped through a crack.

  Now and again I’d zero in on an individual story. On 13 September, for instance, there was a piece called “The Brand New War,” by columnist Joseph Alsop on the op-ed page of the Washington Post. Alsop said that although the communists had beaten the French in 1954, and had been giving the South Vietnamese a hard time ever since, neither Paris nor Saigon had the resources to do the job. America had plenty. One hundred thousand U.S. soldiers were already in Vietnam, 100,000 more were on the way, and bases were going up all over the country. Operation Starlight was the kind of thing we could expect a lot of in the future. He concluded:

  The importance of this change that is now going on can hardly be exaggerated. It does not mean, alas, that the war is being won now, or will be won without a great deal of effort and sacrifice. But it does mean that at last there is a light at the end of the tunnel …6

  Knowing what Ed Hauck would say about this, I went over to Southeast Asia’s Cambodian analyst
to get a different opinion. He was hunched over a sheaf of cables from Phnom Penh like a bookie studying his tout sheets.

  “What’d you think of that Alsop piece in the Post this morning, Stanley?” I asked politely.

  “ ‘Light at the end of the tunnel,’ my ass,” he growled. And he gave me a look like I was a damn fool even to ask the question. I returned to my desk noting that Ed Hauck’s pessimism seemed to have infected other members of the branch. Naturally I didn’t tell Stanley that I tended to agree with Alsop.

  Not long after that I consulted with Molly. A slight, red-haired woman with a pleasant, angular face, she was so short her feet didn’t reach the floor when she sat at her desk, so she propped them up on an old Vietnamese-French dictionary. She had owned the dictionary since 1951, when the Foreign Documents Division hired her to translate captured Vietminh documents from Vietnamese into English. There being no such thing as a Vietnamese-English dictionary in those days, FDD had taken on Molly because she was fluent in French, and therefore could use their only Vietnamese dictionary, the Vietnamese-French one. I was consulting her about some terms she kept using in the Sitrep.

  “What’s the difference between a ‘militant’ and a ‘moderate’ Buddhist?” I asked.

  Unrolling a draft from her overworked typewriter, Molly swung her chair toward me (adjusting the dictionary with her toes as she did so), and launched into the most complex discussion of religious factionalism I’d ever heard. In a flat Ohio accent—her family was from Cincinnati—she first discussed the splits in the Buddhist hierarchy, then the schisms between the various pagodas, then the disagreements within the pagodas, and was well on her way to explaining that even individual bonzes were of two minds when I completely lost track. Also, she hadn’t answered my question. I repeated it.

  “When you cut all the weeds away,” she said, “a moderate Buddhist is one who’s on our side, and a militant Buddhist is one who isn’t.” And she laughed. That first encounter with Molly Kreimer was impressive. She knew one hell of a lot about Vietnamese Buddhists.

  By now I was getting a bad conscience about my morale project. My only conclusion so far about VC morale—that they were less fanatical than the Japanese—was hardly spectacular. Besides, I kept runing into the same problem. Just what is morale? If you consider everything that makes a person happy or sad, plucky or craven, the subject is boundless. A related problem was evidence. This had the advantage of being nearby. Evidence was arriving in Southeast Asia by the bushel basket.

  In late September I decided to attack the evidence problem head-on. Collecting as many reports as would fit on the top of my desk, I began sorting them out. Within a couple of days I had arranged the paper into three piles, each labeled with an index card. Under the first card, marked “Primary Evidence,” was a four-inch stack of reports sourced directly to the Vietcong such as captured documents, POW interrogations, and defector interviews. Under the second card, marked “Statistics,” was a similar pile, this one of account sheets from Saigon, counting such things as the weekly number of enemy defectors and POWs, or refugees from communist territory. Under the third card, marked “Everything Else,” was all the paper that didn’t belong under the first two. The third pile was so big I threw it away.

  I began with the captured documents. They were not originals, of course, but translations from the Vietnamese (in English, like everything else arriving in the cubicle, which explained why Molly’s dictionary had become a footrest). It took only an hour to read them, the vast majority being routine reports like VC company rosters, ordnance chits, and ID cards, which had little to do with morale. In fact, the only document I came across that clearly bore on the subject was a letter from a North Vietnamese private to his parents in Haiphong. He hated the army, his sergeant picked on him, and someone had stolen his flashlight, he wrote, sounding very much like an American GI. I went on to the POW and defector reports.

  It took me a short time to realize their bias. Clearly anyone who’s fallen into the hands of his enemies is either feeling bad, or that’s what he’ll tell whoever asks him. The misfortunes varied. Some VC said that they had malaria, others that they were scared, and still others that they had grown sick of communism. The single exception was a VC lieutenant who would only say to his interrogator that he (the interrogator) was a “dirty running-dog imperialist lackey.” Hard-core VC. I went on to the statistics.

  The first account sheet I looked at was a weekly Chieu Hoi report, Chieu Hoi being Vietnamese for “Open Arms,” the name of Saigon’s defector program. The report listed the number of VC soldiers to have shown up at government defector centers for a week in late August. The number was 211.

  WHAT? Two hundred and eleven? Once again my mind raced back to the Japanese experience during World War II. I racked my brain, and couldn’t recall a single instance, not one, of a Japanese soldier becoming a turncoat. Well, this had at last become interesting. Right away, I looked at the other Chieu Hoi reports for August. Two hundred and eleven wasn’t unique; it was an average! That meant that VC soldiers were defecting at a rate of more than 10,000 a year. The Pentagon’s factbook put the size of the VC army at just under 200,000.* In other words, Vietcong soldiers were turning traitor at an annual rate of 5 percent, or one man in twenty. It was absolutely phenomenal!

  In a state of high excitement, I ran down to the archives in the agency basement, and pulled every Chieu Hoi report for the last two years. I compared them week by week, month by month, and year by year. Then, to see whether the defector figures simply kept pace with other types of VC losses, I compared them to the number of VC reported killed. An extraordinary story emerged. Not only was the defector rate growing fast, it was growing much faster than the number of Vietcong dead. For example, between August 1964 and August 1965, VC dead had about doubled. But for the same two months, VC defectors had almost quintupled. In other words, the more VC we killed, the more there were, proportionately, who wanted to quit. Therefore, if the war expanded (and the ratios stayed the same), the communists would eventually find themselves with a huge defection rate.

  Double-checking the figures, I wrote a memo to this effect. It was carefully worded, with a chart for the numbers. The secretary typed it up, and with some trepidation—knowing his bias—I handed it to Ed Hauck. It was just as I feared.

  “Statistics,” he smiled. “McNamara dotes on statistics, but I’ve never been able to make head nor tail of them.”

  “OK, I know how you feel,” I replied. “But look at the trend. Let’s grant the numbers are inaccurate, probably even padded. But the increase is too big to be explained away by that. Five times higher than before. Five times. Why?”

  It was a good question, and Ed Hauck knew it. He reread the memo, and studied the chart (once even looking at it upside down). “Maybe you’ve got something,” he said, furrowing his brow. “Try it out on Molly.”

  “I’m not much on numbers,” Molly said as I sat down by her desk. Holding it like a dead mouse, she read the memo, saying under her breath, “I don’t know about that,” “Golly,” and “Hmm.”

  “Now you cut that out, Molly,” I told her. “I know they’re statistics, but you’ve got to face up to what they mean. Why has the number quintupled? How do you explain it?”

  Molly also knew it was a good question. She thought for a while and said, “The communist army used to be all volunteers. Now they’re using the draft. Maybe the draftees are taking off as soon as they’re out of basic.”

  “It’s a good point, Molly,” I said. “I’ll put it in my memo.”

  “Maybe you’ve got something,” Molly replied. “Try it out on Dick Lehman.”

  I called for an appointment, and went up to the seventh floor. Lehman had the same reaction as Molly and Ed. “But you’re right,” he acknowledged. “There’s a lot more defectors than there used to be.” He agreed to publish the memo.

  The printers ran it off the next morning. Wednesday, 20 October 1965, under the title, “Vietcong Morale: Pos
sible Indicator of Downward Drift.”7 Filled with caveats about inaccurate statistics and containing Molly’s caution about Vietcong draftees, it pointed out (in a very low key) that the upward trend of defectors was simply too big to be overlooked. But there was a disappointing footnote that Lehman had stuck to the bottom of the first page after I’d left the seventh floor. It said the memo was “experimental,” that although “comments were invited,” it was being circulated “only within the CIA.” Slightly annoyed, I asked Ed Hauck why it wouldn’t leave the building.

  “The military’s taken a lot of gas over cheerful numbers,” he explained pleasantly. “Lehman doesn’t want the agency in the same boat.”

  I passed Thursday and Friday waiting for comments. None came. A few days later, and for the first time, I actually saw someone reading “Downward Drift.” It was the DDI representative, George Allen, back at headquarters for consultation. He was in the cubicle seeing Ed Hauck, whom he’d worked for in 1963.

  “This increase in defectors is damn interesting,” Allen told me, as he flipped through the paper. “Look me up if you ever get to Saigon.”

  That was it, the only reaction to my first morale memo. I decided to leave morale for the time being and work on the Sitrep. “A tour of the trenches,” Ed Hauck said as he gave his okay. The two military analysts were glad to see me. Now, at last, one of them could go on vacation.

  Ed Hauck’s gloom on the war may have been misplaced, but not his observation about the Sitrep. Once you started working on it, there was no time for anything else. Skimming the mail (much less reading it) took until one o’clock in the afternoon. It took another three hours to put together a story for the next morning’s edition. The best thing to be said for the job was its four-in-the-afternoon deadline. At least we worked something like regular hours.