War of Numbers

by Sam Adams

  Lorrie made her delivery at about ten o’clock. I put aside the Post and transferred the thin sheaf of papers she had dropped in my in-box to the center of my desk. I read them slowly, hoping to solve the puzzle of how long the VC could bear the drain of deserters from their 280,000-man force. At approximately ten-thirty, I came to Bulletin 689.1

  It was only three pages long, and unlike most MACV bulletins—which normally dealt with several VC documents—Bulletin 689 concerned only one. Entitled the “Recapitulated Report on the People’s Warfare Movement from Binh Dinh Province,” it had been picked up (according to “capture data” on its right-hand margin) by a trooper from the U.S. First Air Calvary Division in the northern part of the province on 30 May 1966. The document itself was undated, but since it concerned the first quarter of the year, it had to have been written some time after 31 March.

  Whoever wrote the report first described the “general situation” in Binh Dinh, observing an “increase in American and satellite strength” there, and noting that the communist guerrillas, in addition to their military tasks, “performed civilian labor, evacuated dead and wounded …” and so forth, I pushed on to some statistics. These listed the number of guerrilla-militia in the province by type. I copied them down on a separate piece of paper, jotting in Vietnamese terms I’d learned from Co Yung earlier in the year: 3,194 village guerrillas (du kich xa); 11,887 hamlet guerrillas (du kich ap); 719 secret guerrillas (du kich mat); and 34,441 self-defense militiamen (tu ve). I added them up: 50,244.

  What? That seemed awfully damn high. I was familiar enough now with the MACV Order of Battle to know that of the 280,000-odd VC it listed, only 100,000 or so were guerrilla-militia. Why should Binh Dinh—one of forty-four provinces—have half of them? The obvious thing to do was to check the OB. I fished my copy (the 31 March edition, which I’d brought back from Vietnam) from my desk drawer, turned to its province listings, and looked up Binh Dinh: 1,446 guerrillas—no breakdown by type—and 3,222 self-defense militia, for a total of 4,668. Dumbfounded, I looked again at the VC total: 50,244. It was eleven times higher than the OB! Forty-five thousand extra VC in a single province! Good God!!!

  “Molly! Molly!” I shouted. “Look at this!”

  “What’ve you got?” she asked mildly. I vaulted to her desk, slammed down the OB and the bulletin side by side, and with my finger stabbed at the two sets of numbers.

  “Holy cow,” she said, “MACV sure missed the boat on that one. I wonder if it’s true for the rest of the country?”

  “Long An!” I cried. Shaking with excitement, I told her about Colonel Anh’s local estimate, 2,000, compared to the order-of-battle figure, still 160. “Christ, I’ve known that for six months,” I moaned. “Why didn’t I check the OB before?”

  “Maybe you better write something up,” Molly said. But I was already on my way out the door to the director’s special staff on Vietnam on the sixth floor. The person I wanted to see was George Allen, assigned to the staff after his tour in Vietnam had ended a month or two before. I barged into Allen’s office, and shoved the bulletin and the OB under his nose.

  “Christalmighty!” he exclaimed, adjusting his glasses as if in disbelief. “I knew the OB was screwed up, but I didn’t realize it was this bad.” It ought to be written up, he said, reminding me that the CIA was about to publish a big study on the war for Secretary of Defense McNamara. I should be sure and get the Binh Dinh document mentioned in the study.

  For the rest of the day I galloped around CIA headquarters like Paul Revere, hallooing about Vietcong guerrillas. The reaction was uniform: astonishment, and the realization that this was a terribly important finding that cried for further research. My last visit was to Dean Moor, back from wherever he’d been that morning. He was relatively calm, having been told about the document by Molly. Yes, I should write it up, he said, “but there’s no use doing it right away. We couldn’t get it out before tomorrow afternoon at the latest—and tomorrow’s a Friday. Nobody in Washington ever reads anything on weekends. Have it to me by close-of-business Monday.”

  At home that evening, I could scarcely eat or sleep, I was so busy thinking about Bulletin 689. Its ramifications were enormous. For obvious starters, it suggested that Vietnam was a much bigger war than we thought it was. Furthermore, there were all kinds of analytical side effects. At this time, all our other intelligence estimates about the VC were tied to the number in MACV’s Order of Battle: how much rice the Vietcong ate, how much ammunition they shot off, and so forth. If the OB collapsed, our whole statistical system would go along with it.

  My first act on Friday was to check in with Bobby Layton. He gave me a draft of “Will to Persist” so I could jigger around with its morale section. I did so, suggesting that the drain of deserters might not hurt the VC as much as I had originally believed because they had a much bigger army to draw from.2

  Also I asked Carver if I could highlight the implications of Bulletin 689 in the first part of “Will to Persist’s” summary, since McNamara was more likely to read that than anything else. Carver said no, the study was about to go to print, and besides my findings were only tentative; however, I could stick some caveats about Vietcong guerrillas in the body of the text.3 This seemed fair enough on such short notice. Layton footnoted the right passages, and I went downstairs to the Indo-China Division.

  Molly was waiting there for me with a wad of papers she had squirreled away from previous years. The first was an unpublished memo written by George Allen in October 1963, when George had worked for Ed Hauck. George’s memo complained that the guerrilla-militia estimate was too low even back then. The second was a Vietcong document dated 30 November 1965, which claimed they controlled six million people in South Vietnam (about double our own estimate for the same date!).4 This helped explain where the communists recruited the additional soldiers, and was an extraordinary piece of news in its own right. A third was another VC report, this one from COSVN headquarters, which suggested the communists had tried “to increase the guerrilla-militia strength … to 250,000–300,000 men” by the end of 1965.5 This last document gave me a rough idea of the kind of total we were dealing with. It was good to have a lid. In some of my wilder fancies the night before, I had gone much higher.

  For the rest of Friday and over the weekend, I tore through my document file. Among the first ones I read applied to Phu Yen, the province on Binh Dinh’s southern border.6 The MACV number for Phu Yen was almost as bad as its number for Binh Dinh.* There were several other provinces with estimates askew. I even came across one, Phuoc Long, where the order of battle was slightly too high.†

  The initial draft took shape on early Monday afternoon. As usual, I wrote the text first—carefully referencing the VC documents that had emerged from the files—and then the summary. Its wording was clear, but cautious. It said that enemy reports “strongly suggested” that MACV’s guerrilla-militia estimate of some 100,000 was “too low,” and that it should “probably be at least doubled.” Observing that the higher numbers “would help explain why the southern communists have been able to field an increasingly large regular army despite heavy casualties and a high desertion rate,” it suggested dumping the matter in MACV’s lap.7 (I had in mind its Order of Battle section chief, Colonel Hawkins.) Lorrie typed up the draft, and I gave it to Dean Moor, saying: “That phrase ‘at least doubled’ means it could be a hell of a lot more than double.”

  “Hold on a sec,” he told me. I stood by as he finished editing Tuesday’s Sitrep. Ten minutes later, he took up my draft, and (looking bored, I thought) read it. He made a couple of minor changes, and spun it in to his out-box). He said, “The front office’ll get it first thing tomorrow morning.”

  The next day I arrived at work in a fever of suspense. Surely the discovery of “at least” one hundred thousand extra Vietcong would cause a major convulsion. I imagined all kinds of sudden and dramatic telephone calls. “Mr. Adams, come brief the director.” “The president’s got to be told about this and
you’d better be able to defend your paper.” I wasn’t certain what would happen, but I was sure it would be significant because I knew this was the biggest intelligence find of the war so far. At least a hundred thousand extra Vietcong. Surely President Johnson would have to send a lot more soldiers to fight them. I envisaged him calling the director on the carpet, asking him why this information hadn’t been uncovered before.

  Nothing happened. No phone calls from anybody. At the end of the day, I approached Dean Moor about the memo. “It’s kicking around the front office,” he told me. My agitation grew as the scene repeated itself on Wednesday and Thursday. On Friday morning, Lorrie dropped a memo on my desk. It wasn’t a carbon but the original, with no comments on it at all—no request for amplification, no questions about evidence, just a routine buckslip attached showing the entire DDI hierarchy had read it.

  I boiled into Dean Moor’s office. “What the hell’s going on here?” I asked. “Don’t those people upstairs know what this means?”

  He said: “If I were you, I’d make another stab at it. But not today. Remember about weekends. Have it to me close-of-business Monday.”

  Once again I spent the weekend at CIA headquarters. On the theory that the numbers were covered well enough for the time being, I concentrated on describing exactly who these “guerrillas” and “militiamen” were. After looking at my notes from the Long An Chieu Hoi center, I wrote that guerrillas served in the villages or hamlets, that most carried rifles, and that they often acted as replacements for “regular Vietcong formations.” (This last thought stemmed from my recollection of the fast comeback of the VC 506th Battalion after the battle of the Right Testicle.) As for the militia, I wrote, they “dug trenches, burrowed tunnels” and “were expected to defend their hamlets as best they could when the enemy arrived.” “This is sometimes hard to do,” I explained, “because they are at the bottom of the logistical ladder,” and therefore poorly armed. I left intact the memo’s opening that the guerrilla-militia strength “should be at least doubled.”

  New draft in hand, I reported back to Dean Moor, as requested, on late Monday afternoon. This time he took the draft right away, and edited it with a pencil. The first casualty was “at least doubled.” He replaced it with the phrase that the guerrilla-militia strength “should probably now be placed at around 200,000 …”8

  “Damnitall, Dean,” I said, “how do you know it’s around ‘200,000’? I already told you ‘at least’ could mean a hell of a lot more than that. If you ask me, it is a hell of a lot more than that.”

  He said: “They didn’t accept the first draft. Let’s try it this way.”

  “But that’s crazy,” I complained. “This isn’t a numbers game. There’s a war on. These people are shooting at us.”

  “I want this memo to get out,” he replied; “I think it’s important.” Lorrie typed it with “around 200,000,” and the memo winged back to the front office.

  By now, I was getting mad. The Sitrep normally made a fuss each time MACV found a new regiment, and here I’d discovered the numerical equivalent of at least fourteen VC divisions, and the only mention of it to leave the building so far was in the rear pages of “Will to Persist.” My spleen flew mostly at the DDI front office, but also now toward Dean Moor. I might mention here that he was none too popular with the other analysts, most of whom clearly preferred their ex-bosses, Ed Hauck and R. Sams Smith. In fact one such analyst wanted to quit the agency,* and a couple of others were casting about for ways to leave the division.

  For the rest of the week, I worked on the numbers. No new documents had come to light, so I constructed a simple equation. It went like this. If there were so many guerrillas and militiamen in the provinces on which we had documents (such as Binh Dinh, Phu Yen, and Phuoc Long), then their strength in the provinces for which we lacked documents must be x. I got some astronomical x’s before deciding to shoot for the minimum. That is, I concluded that the Vietcong had reached their minimum goal for 1965 of 250,000 guerrilla-militia.

  There were two other events on Friday. One was really a nonevent. It was the nonreturn of my memo by the front office. Which is to say, five more days had passed without a word from upstairs as to its disposition. The second event was in my eyes more important. An announcement circulated in the Indo-China Division that the following week Dean Moor was going on vacation. That meant my acting boss was Molly.

  On Monday I stomped up to the seventh floor to look for my memo. Nobody seemed to know where it was. At length a front office secretary meekly suggested that I ought to check with Elaine Delaney. Elaine Delaney was the workhorse of the production staff, and could generally be depended upon to know where any piece of paper was at a given moment. I asked her about my memo.

  “You mean the one that’s been driving every one around here nuts?” Elaine Delaney asked.

  “I think that’s it,” I said.

  She led me over to a safe, and pulled from it a manila folder marked “Indefinite Hold.” Inside the folder was my memo. I took it out and went back downstairs.

  I sat down to edit. The first thing to go was the vacationing Dean Moor’s “around 200,000.” Back came the old wording, “at least doubled.” Then, on the supposition that if I had to pull a fast one on the division chief it was dumb to go by halves, toward the end I inserted my real conviction: “It would appear from the foregoing analysis that the Vietcong (guerrilla-militia) strength should be carried at least as high as 250,000. It may, in fact, be even higher.” In other words, I upped Dean by 50,000, and gave notice of possible raises to come. Confident in the evidence, I went to Molly for permission to go forward.

  “Why not,” she said, with an air of amusement. “I’ll worry about Dean.” (Molly wasn’t being disloyal to Dean Moor. She was simply telling me that if there was a rap to be hung over the memo, she’d take it.)

  On Tuesday morning I stomped back upstairs, jaw set, and tilted forward, like Ulysses S. Grant entering the Wilderness. My first encounter was with the Asia-Africa area chief, Waldo Duberstein. Normally affable, Waldo had big ears sticking straight out from a billiard ball head, and a booming voice. He boomed: “It’s that goddamn memo again. Adams, stop being such a prima donna.” In the next office, an official said that the order of battle was General Westmoreland’s concern, and we had no business intruding. This set me off. “We’re all in the same government,” I said, “if there’s a discrepancy this big, it doesn’t matter who points it out. We’re at war.” Altogether I made a half dozen stops. The DDI chief, R. Jack Smith, was too busy to see me.

  On Thursday, 8 September 1966, eighteen days after I’d written the first draft, the DDI agreed to let a version of it out of the building.9 Elaine Delaney called me to the seventh floor to explain some peculiar restrictions. It was to be called a Draft Working Paper, meaning that it lacked official status; it was issued in only twenty-five copies, instead of the usual run of over two hundred; it could go to “working-level types” only—analysts and staff people—but not to anyone in a policy-making position (to no one, for example, on the National Security Council) and only one copy could go to Saigon, care of the MACV Order of Battle Section. At this last restriction, I breathed a sigh of relief. Colonel Hawkins would get it. The official selected to carry the memo to Saigon was George Fowler who worked for the Defense Intelligence Agency at the Pentagon.

  If on Tuesday morning I had resembled General Grant entering the fray, by Thursday afternoon, I felt worked over by Lee’s lieutenants. The next morning I asked Molly for a vacation to recuperate. “You deserve one,” she said.

  My wife Eleanor, my son Clayton, and I went to West Tisbury on the island of Martha’s Vineyard, where we were able to rent a house at the last minute. For two weeks I paced the sands, pondering the order of battle. I returned to Langley on Monday, 26 September and asked Dean Moor, also back from vacation, if I could write a major paper on the guerrilla-militia. He said OK. If he was mad at me for changing the strength memo behind his back, he d
idn’t say so.

  I had more good news a couple of days later. A Lieutenant Colonel Robert Montague, military aide to a Mr. Komer of the White House, had seen Bobby Layton’s cautionary footnotes about more guerrillas in “Will to Persist” and had called George Carver asking what they were all about. Carver sent Montague a copy of my strength paper, explaining that the DIA courier George Fowler was already back from Saigon with the message that MACV had started a top-to-bottom review of all its order-of-battle holdings, including those for the guerrilla-militia. This meant not only that Colonel Hawkins was in gear, but that at last the White House had a copy of my paper. I made a mental note that it was George Carver who had sent the memo to the White House, not anyone from the DDI front office.

  Straightaway I laid into the Vietcong home guard. Determined to find everything available about it, I screened the CIA archives, and even went down to the Washington office of the Rand Corporation on Connecticut Avenue to reread Rand’s stock of interviews with the VC. However, my first big step forward came from an article in the rear pages of the 7 October edition of the New York Times.10 It compared American casualties in World War II with those in Vietnam. In the former conflict most GIs had fallen to shards from artillery shells, and very few to grenades, mines, and booby traps. In the latter, artillery wounds were much rarer, while those from grenades, mines, and booby traps were commonplace.*

  Right away I thought of my trip with Doctor Lowe through Tan An’s hospital, and its many patients with feet blown off or legs missing. Asked about them, the doctor had replied: “Land mines. The whole goshdarn province is seeded with land mines. Those and booby traps.” Then I recalled Co Yung’s research into the Chieu Hoi dossiers. They had told her that among the militia’s main duties was to lay mines and booby traps. My own notes showed most militiamen carried a couple of grenades. I put two and two together. They came to this: despite its lack of sophisticated weapons, the self-defense caused many of our casualties.