War of Numbers

by Sam Adams

  “Cut it out!” I said to myself; “that means four months from now there won’t be any left. Besides the whole damn province is swarming with guerrillas.” Clearly something was wrong. I made a note to ask the province chief, Colonel Anh, about it the next day. By luck I had an appointment to see him at nine o’clock in the morning. The appointment had been arranged by the newly assigned CIA province officer, Paul Anderson, whom I’d only just met.

  Anderson shook me awake at dawn. “Travis King told me you wouldn’t mind,” he said with a wide grin. He had a blond pompadour, blue eyes, and enormous shoulders—a Norwegian version of Li’l Abner. At just before nine, we were climbing the steps of Long An’s province headquarters, a handsome French-built structure shaded by trees. Anderson remarked that Colonel Anh was universally well thought-of, having fought with the Vietminh against the French in the earlier go-around.

  The colonel proved to be well built, stocky, and fluent in English. “How do you do, Mr. Adams,” he said. I stood by as he and Paul Anderson discussed Long An’s counter-terror team, a CIA-financed elite unit to fight the VC. A half hour passed before Anh turned to me. “Is there something I can do for you?”

  “Yes, sir,” I replied. “Could you tell me how many VC guerrillas and militiamen your intelligence people carry for Long An?” To avoid mistranslation, I repeated the question, using the terms du kich and tu ve. The colonel asked a nearby captain, who answered in Vietnamese. Colonel Anh translated: “Two thousand.”

  “Holy mackerel!” Anderson exclaimed. (I’d told him on the way over about the MACV order of battle holding of 160.) Colonel Anh asked me what the matter was. He shrugged when I told him. “As is so often the case, Saigon is in error. Mr. Adams, the next time you visit MACV, would you please tell them to correct their mistake?” Proud to have spotted the discrepancy, I said I would be happy to do so.

  For the rest of my time in Long An, I tagged behind Paul Anderson and his Vietnamese deputy, Lieutenant Lam. They showed me the “counter-terror team,” some fifty boyish-looking men, armed to the teeth; we visited the nearby village of Khanh Hau, the collection of hamlets described in Gerald Hickey’s classic study of Vietnamese rural life, Village in Vietnam;12 and we dined at a restaurant next to the river. I spent many hours talking to Lieutenant Lam. Gradually, he opened up. Late one evening over supper, Lam told me how much he hated the VC. They had killed his brother, he said.13

  My last swing through the province was in a silver-colored Air America helicopter, down for the day from Tan Son Nhut. Anderson and Lam were touring Long An’s district seats, and on the way to the last stop, Tan Tru, the pilot veered off course so we could inspect the big loop in the river, the so-called Right Testicle. Shouting over the chopper blades, Lam pointed out how the blocking force had trapped the VC in battle. There were bomb and artillery craters all over the loop. My only surprise was how anyone from the 506th could have survived.

  A few minutes later, we landed on a concrete slab next to a cemetery just outside the district seat. A black Army major named Foote, olive drab baseball hat set squarely on his head, marched us to Tan Tru, a Verdun-like enclosure of barbed wire, bunkers, and trenches set around a collection of dingy houses. Foote said that VC guerrillas infested the nearby countryside, and that Tan Tru often got hit by mortars. He showed us the district’s newly acquired television set, hidden beneath an immense pile of sandbags. (“Best-fortified TV set in the province,” he said proudly.) I asked him about the battle of the Right Testicle, just four miles off.

  “Helluva fight,” he said. “The 506th took it on the nose.” I guessed the battalion would be out of action for some time to come.

  “You didn’t get the message?” the major laughed. “I heard it this morning. The 506th’s up in the northern part of the province, up near Hau Nghia. It’s back up to T, O and E.” Back in Saigon the next morning, I told George Allen about the Long An Battalion’s quick comeback. “It’s not all that surprising,” he said, explaining that the communist army, often described as a pyramid, was more like an upward-pointing funnel. In a process called “upgrading,” the main forces drew men from the local forces, the local forces from the guerrilla-militia. There was a constant upflow of replacements, the villages and hamlets acting as a sort of giant boot camp for the higher levels. After the fight at the loop, VC headquarters in Long An had no doubt ordered the local villages to upgrade enough guerrillas and self-defense militiamen to make up the 506th’s losses. It probably reached T, O and E within a week. I told Allen about the MACV Order of Battle holding for Long An of 160, as against Colonel Anh’s of 2,000. That wasn’t surprising either, he said, since the OB had neglected the guerrilla-militia for years. Reminded of my promise to Colonel Anh, I left Allen’s office to telephone MACV’s Order of Battle Branch about the Long An miscount. Whoever answered the phone said that the new OB chief, Colonel Gains Hawkins, was away, but thanks for the information, he’d pass it on.

  Feeling slightly uneasy still about Long An, I returned to my morale project. My first step was to call Rand’s defector specialist, Joe Carrier, to tell him about my Chieu Hoi profile. He had good news too, he said; his contact at the Ministry of Psychological Warfare had come through. Apparently the provinces sent a bio sheet on each defector to the ministry, but all that it had done with them so far was file them in a safe. The contact had agreed to smuggle the sheets to Joe. Pretty soon, Carrier said, he’d have a Chieu Hoi sample of several thousand, representing all forty-four provinces. I was happy to hear it. With a countrywide sample on the way, I could go on to something else.

  The most important “something else,” it seemed to me, was Leon Goure’s ratio of seven VC deserters for each VC defector. If it was anywhere near correct, the communists were already in hot water. I took the question of how to check Goure’s ratio to Joe Hovey, back now from his midtour vacation in the States. I’d been talking to Hovey a good deal lately and had found that like half a dozen others in the Collation Branch, Hovey knew quite a bit about the Vietcong. Their main problem was that no one had found a way to make use of their knowledge. Hovey had a red crew cut, baggy pants, and a row of ballpoint pens sticking from his shirt pocket.

  “Look at the captured documents,” he said. “Sooner or later you’ll find anything you want to know in the documents.” I borrowed a stack, and going to the next desk, started from the top. Frankly I didn’t expect all that much.

  I was dead wrong. Virtually the first one hit the nail right on the head. A VC directive entitled “Countermeasures Against Defectors, Deserters, and Traitors,” it stated that “desertion for the specific purpose of defecting to the enemy and betraying the fatherland [is] rare in comparison with desertion from other motives.” Rare! Exactly what Goure had been saying all along. The directive was all the more impressive for being from the so-called Central Office of South Vietnam (or COSVN), the communists’ headquarters for the bottom two-thirds of the country.14 That meant the desertion problem was widespread. The directive’s missing element was a ratio. Exactly how rare was “rare?” I read more documents.

  Another hit, also a directive, unfortunately lower-level, but giving a ratio: “Presently desertion is prevailing in various armed and paramilitary forces in the region. According to incomplete statistics, there were 138 deserters … [of whom] 5 defected to the puppet government,” meaning Saigon.15Godalmighty, I thought, that isn’t seven to one, that’s twenty-seven to one. A short while later, still another directive: “During a one-month period, one unit had 47 men desert to go home, and 2 defect to the enemy.”16 Twenty-three to one! The examples had to be atypical—if they weren’t, the bottom had dropped out of the VC army—but they suggested Goure was right: there were many more deserters than defectors. I went to George Allen’s office to tell him the news. “You’re on to something, Sam,” he said, “but for Christ’s sake be careful with statistics. There’s nothing wrong with them per se, but they’re only a tool, not an end in themselves. See how they stack up against other eviden
ce. If they don’t fit, something’s the matter.”

  I said OK, and read documents steadily for several days. There were no more ratios, but many references to desertion. The clearest came from VC unit rosters, the most extreme case telling of a VC weapons company (from the 269th Battalion of the Dong Thap 2nd Regiment in the Delta) which had had 20 men take off in just three months in late 1965.17 Since a weapons company T, O and E was 87, it was a staggering loss.

  By late February, I’d gone through every VC document in the Collation Branch. Tired of reading, I decided to hit the road. On Friday, 4 March, I caught the CIA’s morning courier flight to Danang, located in the northern coastal province of Quang Nam, then rated as among the least secure areas in the country.

  It was easy to see why, because that Sunday I accompanied the CIA’s local province officer on his helicopter rounds of Quang Nam’s western districts. The trip was the most exciting I’ve ever taken, partly because of the pilot’s novel way of avoiding anti-aircraft fire. First he’d hover at five thousand feet, then plummet to his destination, revving the blades to full speed at the last moment in order not to smash into the ground. Stomachs in our throats, we’d jump off the chopper and scramble for the nearest tree, and he’d zoom back up to wait for us. At one district, mortar shells were landing in the middle distance. At another a skirmish was in progress. Everywhere there was the sound of gunfire. As the helicopter bobbed and weaved back to Danang that afternoon, I realized I’d forgotten to ask anyone about VC morale.

  My rounds through Danang City during the week were tamer. At a U.S. Marine interrogation facility, a Captain Floyd Plowman showed me some statistics he’d compiled on VC prisoners.18 And at an old French colonial headquarters building, I fortuitously ran into MACV’s Order of Battle chief, Colonel Gains Hawkins—the one who was away when I’d called about the Long An guerrilla miscount. I told him about it now, and he thanked me profusely in a Mississippi accent, saying that he’d already talked over the guerrilla-militia problem with George Allen. “Soon as I get settled in we’re going to take a fresh look at the entire OB,” he explained, cheerfully flicking a cigar. “Right now, for example, we’re sweating some new North Vietnamese regiments supposed to have come down the Ho Chi Minh Trail.” He’d be back in Saigon shortly, he said; I should look him up.

  Early on 10 March I flew north once again, this time to the city of Hue. It was an eventful day. That morning the communists had overrun the nearby Special Forces camp at A Shau, and the Hue citadel was a beehive of activity, the various intelligence agencies trying to find out exactly which units had done it. (By coincidence, I encountered Colonel Hawkins again in the citadel.) And that evening something called the Buddhist Struggle Movement broke out. Apparently Saigon had fired the local South Vietnamese corps commander, General Thi, upsetting the local bonzes so much that they began to riot. Wishing Molly Kreimer were around to explain what it was all about, I returned to Saigon a few days later.

  The rest of my TDY was a mix of tear gas and captured documents. The tear gas blew in from street riots, the Saigon bonzes having decided to emulate the ones up north. The documents were those I read at MACV’s Combined Document Exploitation Center (or CDEC), which processed and translated them. I reviewed every one in the center, gathering several more enemy rosters. They had the same message as before: the VC army was losing lots of men to desertion. Eventually I flew with a satchel of documents back to CIA headquarters at Langley, reporting to its sixth floor on 2 May 1966.

  The Southeast Asian Branch was now completely immersed in the Buddhist Struggle Movement. Hue and Danang had fallen to the Buddhist clergy, and Molly’s typewriter was a blur of keys. (She nonetheless took time to tell me what was going on.) Strangely, Ed Hauck seemed listless. The rumor was that the branch was due for reshuffling, with him coming out on the short end. Concerning Vietnam there was a deep air of pessimism, not only in the branch but in the entire CIA.

  In the general gloom, I shone as a ray of hope. No one at CIA headquarters had paid attention before to VC deserters, because the main source on them, the documents, were almost entirely neglected. The good news traveled fast. Admiral William F. Raborn—who had taken over from McCone for a year as director—called me in to brief him and his deputies about the enemy’s AWOL problem. The briefing was a boffo hit. Right after it, I was told that R. Jack Smith (new head of DDI, having replaced Ray Cline) had called me “the outstanding analyst” of the research directorate.

  But as usual, there were skeptics—particularly Molly Kreimer and Ed Hauck—who had learned over the years that good news was often illusory. So to be on the safe side, Admiral Raborn decided to send a “Vietcong morale team” to Saigon to see if my news was really true. The team consisted of myself, acting as “consultant,” and four agency psychiatrists, who presumably understood things like morale. The morale team landed at Tan Son Nhut in June.

  The psychiatrists had no better idea than I’d had, when I started, on how to parse the Vietcong mind. One of the psychiatrists said, “We’ll never get Ho Chi Minh to lie still on a leather couch, so we better think up something else quick.” They decided to ask the CIA men from the provinces what they thought about enemy morale. After a month or so of doing this, the psychiatrists went back to Washington convinced that, by and large, Vietcong spirits were in good shape. I went back with a new batch of rosters showing a high desertion rate.

  Back at Langley, I finished writing my memo on VC morale. Since the White House and Pentagon liked statistics, I had long since decided to express my message numerically. Taking my now-respectable collection of rosters—some from big units—I made an equation. It went like this: if A, B, and C units (the ones for which I had rosters) had so many deserters in such and such a period of time, then the number of deserters per year for the whole VC army was x. No matter how I arranged the equation, x turned out to be a very high number. I could never get it below 50,000. Once it even rose above 100,000. In other words, I had arrived by a different route at the same ballpark as Leon Goure with his ratio of seven deserters for each defector.

  The significance of my finding and Goure’s was immense. The latest MACV Order of Battle (June 1966) put enemy strength at approaching 280,000. Other reports indicated that we were killing, capturing, and wounding VC at the rate of 150,000 a year. If to these you added 50,000, 80,000, or even 100,000 deserters—well, it was hard to see how a 280,000-man army could last much longer.

  There were two main problems with my finding. The first problem was the usual one; the old hands didn’t believe it. The second problem was relatively new; I didn’t believe it myself. To begin with, I’d seen or heard the war raging unabated from one end of Vietnam to the other. Furthermore, I trusted the opinion of the CIA men in the field who had told the psychiatrists of the Vietcong’s resilience. And finally with the Saigon government in a state of near-collapse from the Struggle Movement, it somehow appeared unlikely that the VC were falling apart at the same time. I decided to reexamine the logic that had led me to think that the VC were headed for imminent trouble.

  I saw my logic had three main premises. Premise number one was that the Vietcong were suffering very heavy casualties. Although I’d heard all the stories about exaggerated reporting, I tended now to discount them, because the heavy losses were also reflected in the documents. Premise two was my finding that the enemy army had a high desertion rate. Again, I believed the documents. Premise three was that both the casualties and the deserters came from an enemy force approaching 280,000. Perhaps this was the problem. The Long An discrepancy came immediately to mind, as well as the quick recovery of that province’s 506th Battalion after the battle of the Right Testicle.

  While I was weighing these thoughts, the rumored reorganization had occurred for the CIA’s Southeast Asia Branch. The branch had combined with China-Asian Satellites into a new “Indo-China Division” on the fifth floor. Ed Hauck had been whisked to a post overseas, the boisterous R. Sams Smith to a job outside the building. The
only old hand left was Molly. The new Indo-China Division chief was the supposed optimist, Dean Moor.

  I told Dean Moor about the Long An miscount and the 506th, and asked if I could look into enemy manpower. He said it was OK with him as long as I turned in an occasional item for the Sitrep. “Fine,” I said, and decided to have another look at the captured documents. At this time the documents—the same ones put out by MACV’s Combined Document Exploitation Center in Saigon—were collected in so-called bulletins. I went down to the agency archives, xeroxed their entire stock, came back upstairs, and began reading. By 17 August 1966, I had reached bulletin number 688.

  *Co means “Miss.”

  *Long An’s administrative structure is much like that of the state I was born in, Connecticut. My father’s house was in Redding Ridge, part of the township of Redding, which is part of Fairfield County. Here are the rough equivalents:11

  Connecticut Long An

  state province

  county district

  township village

  town hamlet

  4 BULLETIN 689

  MID-MORNING OF THURSDAY 18 August 1966 was quiet. The dozen or so analysts of the newly formed Indo-China Division were in the first stages of pounding out the daily Sitrep. The division chief, Dean Moor, was away. Molly was less busy than usual, the Buddhist Struggle Movement having lost steam with the arrest of General Thi, the I Corps chief. Likewise the military analysts had slim pickings; the VC had set off a routine bomb in Hue, killing twenty-six civilians, and the Australians had just launched a search-and-destroy mission in Phuoc Tuy Province called Operation Smithfield. I read the Washington Post, waiting for Lorrie, the division secretary, to deliver my mail. As main recipient of captured documents, I was her last stop—and for good reason. The documents were at best several weeks old, and therefore unsuited to the current Situation Report.