War of Numbers

by Sam Adams

  “You’re in luck,” he told me. “Our Long An rep, Mr. King, just happens to be in the building. He’s up for the day from Tan An.” Tan An was Long An’s province capital, about twenty-five miles southwest of Saigon.

  Travis King walked into the office a few minutes later. He was a tall, smiling Texan in his late forties, with cowboy boots, a farmer’s straw hat, and the beginnings of a paunch. “I got a nice little Chieu Hoi center,” he told me. “You should come down and see it.” How about next week? “Anytime,” he said, “Just give a day’s notice so I can meet you at the airport. But you be careful out there. Somebody got sniped at the other day.”

  It wasn’t until late Tuesday that I was ready for the trip, and the next morning, 2 February, I checked into the Air America terminal at Tan Son Nhut. A pretty Vietnamese girl with bobbed hair and a white sweater stamped my boarding pass, and the pilot, the copilot, three other passengers and I climbed onto a Pilatus Porter, a Swiss-made airplane with a single turboprop engine and huge wings. The pilot pushed the starter button, the Porter belched and gave off a high-pitched whine. The copilot turned in his seat to say: “This is one crazy-ass flying machine. It stops on a dime.” The airplane took its place behind a line of camouflaged jet fighters waiting to take off from the main runway. Minutes later we were aloft.

  The ground below was soon typical Delta—shining rivers and rice paddies, with thick clusters of houses perched in between. We followed a causewaylike road—I guessed it was Route Four—spotted with tiny busses and trucks. After a short while the copilot, reading from a manifest, shouted: “First stop, Tan An. Mr. Adams, this is you.” Below was a small city, through which passed a river in one direction and Route Four in another. The airstrip looked to be a mile out of town.

  The Pilatus Porter rapidly lost altitude and speed, and shortly we were approaching the grass strip, about one hundred yards above it, but off to one side. Instead of landing, we shot beyond, then made a sharp U-turn toward the runway. “Whooppee!” the copilot yelled. The Porter went into a stall, drifted gently downward, gave a mild lurch as it hit the grass, and after no more than fifty feet, rolled to a halt. I jumped out, clutching an overnight bag. “Good luck!” the pilot bellowed. The plane took off. I looked around. The airstrip was deserted.

  “Jesus, the sniper,” I said to myself, and plunged toward a nearby bunker. From inside I saw the airstrip was ringed by puddle-covered fields, beyond which, about two hundred yards off, were some woods. Wishing I’d brought a gun, I wondered how long the sniper might take to wade from the woods to the bunker.

  Fifteen minutes later there was a squeal of brakes. It was a USAID pickup truck driven by Travis King. “Sorry to keep you waiting,” he said. “I got held up at the bridge.” I tossed my overnight bag into the back of the truck and we sped off for Tan An. Long An’s province capital was a hot, dusty market town filled with people, oxcarts, bicycles, and busses. We weaved our way through the traffic to a small two-story rowhouse on a side street just off the main square. “This is it,” King said, “USAID headquarters.”

  We went inside, walking through the standard big room with the obligatory ceiling fans, upstairs to a second-floor back porch where King filled me in on the Vietnamese I’d have to deal with: Colonel Anh, Long An’s province chief, who was forthright and cooperative; Lieutenant Chat, who ran the Chieu Hoi center (“Chat takes some getting use to”); and Co Yung,* who would be my interpreter. He’d recently hired Co Yung to work for Doctor Lowe, a volunteer from Utah, in bed at the moment with dengue fever. “You can have Co Yung until Doctor Lowe gets better.”

  I met Co Yung after lunch. She was about thirty-five, short, neatly dressed in white, her black hair in a permanent wave, and her face pockmarked, evidently from an old case of smallpox. King, Co Yung, and I left the rowhouse, strode down the side street (noisy with children, merchants, and blaring radios), and crossed the town’s main square (dusty, policed by chickens), detouring past a row of sun-baked armored red cars to a small boxlike structure at one corner. “This is the Chieu Hoi center,” said King as we entered the building, “those are the defectors,” he went on, pointing at eight to ten dozing Vietnamese in black pajamas, “and this is Lieutenant Chat.” A Vietnamese army officer bowed and smiled, revealing numerous gold teeth. “You’re in business,” King concluded; “Call me if you need me.” He made for the door, leaving me with Co Yung, Lieutenant Chat, and the somnolent defectors.

  Right away there was a problem. Despite her title as “interpreter,” Co Yung knew little English. She was fluent in French, however, of which I had the high school variety, and we spoke haltingly in that language. Realizing that mine wasn’t good enough to interview defectors through Co Yung, I decided to work from the files. The center’s walls were lined with boxes, apparently containing dossiers. I said to Co Yung in French: “Ask Lieutenant Chat if we can look at those boxes.” She did so. Chat shook his head: No. She tongue-lashed him in Vietnamese. He shook his head again: Yes. Led by Co Yung, two VC defectors and I carried four boxes each back to the USAID rowhouse, thence to a small cottage in back. The defectors put the twelve boxes on a big wooden table in the cottage’s main room, then left. Yanking the string of the ceiling fan, Co Yung said: “Commençons.”

  We commenced. She emptied the first box on the table, and skimmed through the papers. They were in Vietnamese, of course, which she translated into French. I wrote what she said onto a legal-size pad of yellow paper, translating as much as I understood into English. Soon she began to ask what such-and-such a word was in English. I’d tell her, and henceforth—to my amazement—she used English. Sometimes I’d ask her what something was in Vietnamese. She’d tell me, and I’d write it down in a notebook.

  The first box took almost an hour to get through. Like the other boxes, as I was to find, it concerned one person. For all the time we spent on him, he didn’t amount to much: a part-time VC courier, apparently a civilian. However, the other boxes were about soldiers. Co Yung and I sorted out the military terms as we went along. For example:

  YUNG: This one belongs to the auto-defense.

  ADAMS: That’s self-defense in English. What’s the Vietnamese?

  YUNG: Tu ve. (And she wrote it down for me with the proper accent marks.)

  A second example:

  YUNG: This one’s a guerrilla.

  ADAMS: Same word in English.

  YUNG: Du kich in Vietnamese.

  The examples were typical. Most of the first twelve defectors were either “guerrillas” or “self-defense” militiamen, belonging to a sort of VC home guard, whose job, it seems, was to defend VC territory. After much passing back and forth of notes—in French, Vietnamese, and increasingly in English—we finished the twelfth box at 6:00 P.M., quitting time. Lieutenant Chat’s defectors fetched the boxes back to the Chieu Hoi center. “La même chose demain,” I said to Co Yung. “It shall be my pleasure,” she replied in English. We parted, me going to the rowhouse for an early supper and bed.

  As I lay in the dark, listening to the nightly skirmish start up a mile or two out of town, I thought with satisfaction that at long last I was finding out who the defectors were. Okay, my data base was only twelve, but that was twelve more than anyone else’s. I went to sleep not knowing that I had taken the first step on a path that eventually led to the most far-reaching intelligence discovery of the Vietnam War.

  Publisher’s note: After the CBS-Westmoreland trial Adams intended to rewrite his book to include some of the new information which had emerged during the three-year legal struggle. The following passage, a kind of author’s aside, was intended as part of this effort, but it remains unique—no others had been completed when Adams died.

  [Until this point, what I have written has been entirely autobiographical, describing what I heard or saw at the time. The following five paragraphs deal with events that took place simultaneously out of my hearing and sight. I found out about them after resigning from the CIA.]

  Oblivious to the doings in
Tan An, the main overseers of the war were gathering at United States’ Pacific headquarters at Camp Smith, Hawaii. It was President Lyndon Johnson’s first meeting with General William Westmoreland in the general’s role as America’s commander in the field.

  “I have a lot riding on you,” the president told the general. Westmoreland thought Johnson looked worried and intense, uncertain exactly what course to take in Vietnam. That was why they were there: to make basic decisions on the war. Among those present were Robert McNamara of Defense; Dean Rusk of State; Earl Wheeler, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; Walt Rostow, soon to head the National Security Council; and President Thieu and Prime Minister Ky of South Vietnam.5

  There was a series of formal briefings, one by Westmoreland’s chief of intelligence, the J-2, Brigadier General Joseph McChristian. Yes, McChristian said, things are better than they were a year ago; but don’t get your hopes up any time soon. His briefing had so few bright spots that another of Westmoreland’s generals—William DePuy, the J-3, chief of operations—interrupted to say that surely McChristian was overlooking many signs of near-term progress. The high-level audience listened raptly as the two staffers had it out. Although their dispute might have seemed the usual one between operations (traditionally upbeat), and intelligence (often glum), Westmoreland was far from disagreeing with McChristian.6 When Johnson asked him in private how long he thought the war might last, Westmoreland answered: “Several years.”7

  Nonetheless the conference had a solid result. Until then, Westmoreland had fought the war in Vietnam without formal orders on strategy. He got them at Camp Smith. Drafted by a deputy to McNamara, dated 8 February 1966, stamped “Top Secret,” and approved by President Johnson, the orders concluded: “Attrite, by year’s end, [the communist] forces at a rate as high as their ability to put men in the field.”8

  Westmoreland was to fight a war of attrition, its object to grind down the enemy until he gave up. America had fought, and won, earlier wars of attrition: the Civil War for one, World War I for another. General Westmoreland took the orders back with him to Vietnam. He was to carry them even into retirement at Charleston, South Carolina. There, many years later, when a researcher asked him what his wartime strategy had been, Westmoreland referred him to the February 1966 “instructions,” the ones he received at Camp Smith.

  My next session with Co Yung was just like the first one. She dictated from one side of the wooden table, I wrote notes from the other, while the overhead fan continued its slow revolutions. As the hours passed, our pace quickened. Safaris of box-bearing Chieu Hois came and went. I gave each box its own number: no. 16 for Private Liem’s, 261st Infantry Battalion, twelve months with the VC; no. 21 for Assistant Squad Leader Ut’s, village guerrilla, thirty-three months with the VC; no. 60 for Recruit Mam’s, six days with the VC (he’d previously deserted Saigon’s army, having cut off a finger).9 With Co Yung’s English improving rapidly, we kept at it until Doctor Lowe got better from dengue fever. After that I caught her at odd moments, using most of my spare time to rewrite notes and travel around the province.

  My first trip was with Travis King. He was doing his “daily rounds,” he said, in this case trying to persuade the Vietnamese to put up a school house at Thu Thua District’s seat, about five miles to the north by crow, perhaps twice that by USAID pickup. We careened over the narrow, winding dirt track to Thu Thua at about sixty miles an hour. (“Doesn’t give the VC time to set up an ambush,” he said.) When we got there, he went off to talk to the district senior advisor, while I asked another advisor, a potbellied black sergeant called McCrae, what he thought about VC morale.

  “Don’t know about your end of the province,” he said, “but up at my end they’re feeling pretty good.” McCrae said that local guerrillas had the run of the hamlets thereabouts, that they collected taxes even in Thu Thua itself (“about fifty feet from where we’re standing”), and that they had little trouble keeping their province units up to strength. “Like last month we heard that the VC Long An Province Battalion, that’s the 506th, had five hundred men in it. Hell, that’s damn near T, O and E.” (T, O and E stands for “table of organization and equipment,” military jargon for full complement.) When King was done talking about the school, we drove back to Tan An just in time for Doctor Lowe’s daily swing through the province hospital. The doctor invited me to come along. I thanked him and went.

  The hospital was a two-story stuccoed building with high ceilings, stinking pissoirs, huge cauldrons of steaming rice, and many beds, all taken. I followed Doctor Lowe, Co Yung, and two Vietnamese interns from bed to bed as they read fever charts and checked dressings. Seeing that many patients had leg wounds—some legs were gone altogether—I asked the doctor why. “Land mines,” he told me. “The whole goshdarn province is seeded with land mines and booby traps. Mines and booby traps are our biggest medical problems around here, except maybe malaria.”

  Not long after my visit to the hospital I had a seemingly unrelated experience, this one involving the VC Long An Battalion, the 506th, the same one that Sergeant McCrae had said was near T, O and E. It took place while I was waiting for lunch on the rowhouse’s back porch. One of Travis King’s sidekicks—Mr. Graessle, an ex–Los Angeles cop who advised the South Vietnamese police—burst upstairs shouting: “They just caught the VC in the Right Testicle.” He explained excitedly that the Right Testicle was the nickname of the easternmost of two big loops in the river ten miles south of Tan An, in Tan Tru District, and that the South Vietnamese army had trapped the VC Long An Battalion by blocking the neck of the loop. “Now we can clobber the bastards by air!” Graessle exclaimed. As if to underline his statement, six U.S. Army helicopters roared over the porch traveling south. Higher up I could see some Air Force jets going the same direction.

  Just then King arrived, and we went inside for a lunch of crabmeat salad. “The 506th is in deep trouble,” he said, to a series of distant bangs. “Those sound like five-hundred-pound bombs.” I spent the rest of the afternoon working on notes and listening to explosions. The next morning a U.S. Army advisor from the small MACV compound down the street told me that 156 VC soldiers had died in the fight. “A damn good count,” he said. “I eyeballed most of the bodies myself, and if you throw in the wounded, the 506th ought to be sidelined for quite a while.” I found out afterward that the South Vietnamese had dubbed the battle “Operation An Dan 14/66.”10

  A day or so later my notes were more or less in order, the Chieu Hoi sample being 146, Long An’s entire defection take for the last four months. I decided that rather than do more of Lieutenant Chat’s boxes, I’d try to make sense with what I had. This meant putting together a profile of the average VC defector—describing such things as how long he’d been with the Vietcong and where he stood in the organization. The defectors’ standing seemed to me particularly important (were we getting honest-to-goodness VC, or just the hangers-on?), so I’d picked up from Saigon several intelligence studies on the VC in order to bone up on their organization. These included MACV’s “Glossary of Viet Cong Terminology,” and its “Enemy Order of Battle,” or OB for short. The OB listed the number of enemy troops by province and by type, but most interesting for my purposes, it said who they were and what they did. By reading the OB and other studies, I began to get a fair idea of what the communist army looked like.

  They showed that the VC army was organized like a pyramid with three layers. The top layer consisted of the so-called main forces, heavily armed soldiers formed into big units such as divisions and regiments. The middle layer consisted of the so-called local forces, well-armed battalions and companies run by the provinces and districts. (The Long An 506th was a typical local force outfit.) The bottom layer consisted of the so-called guerrilla-militia, which acted as a home guard for VC villages and hamlets. I had a lot of notes on the bottom layer types from the Chieu Hoi files.

  My notes showed the guerrillas—most of them armed with rifles—were of two types; village guerrillas (du kich xa),
who defended entire villages, a village being made up of several hamlets; and hamlet guerrillas (du kich ap), who defended the hamlets themselves.* The hamlet guerrillas were backed up by the self-defense militia (tu ve)—usually equipped with grenades—whose main jobs were to stand guard, dig trenches and tunnels, and lay mines and booby traps. (I guessed it was the militia who filled Doctor Lowe’s hospital with leg wounds.)

  Then, having sorted out the organization, I began on my VC defector profile. Here’s what I found: Of the 146 defectors, just short of 90 were VC soldiers, the rest were part of the communists’ civilian structure. Of the almost 90 soldiers, only 6 had belonged to the VC main and local forces, the rest being evenly divided between guerrillas and self-defense militiamen. The average VC defector was young (around twenty), low-ranking (normally a private), and had been in the Vietcong organization for a little less than a year.

  So there it was—the result of almost two weeks’ work. Not much on its surface, but quite a lot when looked at from a distance. It showed first—what I’d expected—that most VC defectors were low-level and relatively inexperienced. But most important it showed that there were defectors, honest-to-God ones, bona fide members of the communist army as defined by the official United States order of battle. I was particularly struck that during this one four-month period, Long An—one of forty-four provinces—had more than 80 guerrillas and militiamen defect to the government. If Long An’s experience was valid countrywide, it was one hell of a drain on the VC army.

  At this point I asked myself the next obvious question. OK, 80-plus guerrilla-militia had defected in the last four months in Long An. How big a dent did this put in Long An’s VC home guard? This was something I could check. The MACV Order of Battle listed the guerrilla-militia by province. I flipped to the back of the OB to look up Long An. I found it, and my finger tracing along the page, read these numbers: 100 guerrillas, 60 self-defense militia for a grand provincewide total of 160 guerrilla-militia.