War of Numbers

by Sam Adams

  ADAMS: Yet MACV’s guerrilla estimate is sixty-five thousand?

  HAWKINS: Right.

  ADAMS: Well, if you’re not using Thanh’s speech, what are you using?

  HAWKINS: Field reports. Sixty-five thousand is a compilation of field reports. From the provinces. All forty-four of them.

  ADAMS: Can I see the field reports?

  HAWKINS: Course you can, Sam. (He handed me a thick bundle of paper.) And if I were you, I’d take a close look at them.

  That evening I went over the bundle sheet by sheet. It was the biggest mishmash of stuff I’d ever encountered. Some province reports sharply disagreed with enemy documents from the same area; others counted village guerrillas (du kich xa), but not the more numerous hamlet guerrillas (du kich ap); still others showed that the reporting officers didn’t know what guerrillas were. Fourteen three resumed the next morning.

  ADAMS: Colonel, your Quang Nam Province report put the guerrillas at forty-six hundred. Yet this VC document, only two months old, says there are eleven thousand two hundred. That’s sixty-six hundred more than the report. How do you account for the difference?10

  HAWKINS: We checked up on that one. It turned out the reporting officer didn’t know about the document.

  ADAMS: Oh. (The colonel had just zapped his own position.)

  HAWKINS: By the way, did you see that one from Darlac Province?

  ADAMS: The one where the reporting officer thought the local party committee belonged to the guerrillas?

  HAWKINS: That’s it! Isn’t that the damnedest thing you’ve ever heard of? A committee scampering around the hills with submachine guns. Now that’s what I call a committee. I tell you, our boy in Darlac doesn’t know his ass from his elbow. (Zap!)

  At which the colonel lit up a cigar. He still looked unhappy, but not nearly as unhappy as he had in the beginning. I studied General Godding to see if he understood what had happened. It was hard to tell.

  A day or two later, the colonel and I were arguing over service troops. He was busy outlining the numerous omissions in his own estimate, when the session broke for lunch. It’s nice to know who’s missing, I said to myself, but I wish I knew what Hawkins really thought. So far his only indication had been to tell Carver in Saigon that the CIA estimate of 75,000 was “a little” too high. His definition of “a little” came after lunch. At that time an Estimates staffer came barreling up to me and said breathlessly: “Jesus Christ! Guess what Hawkins told me in the cafeteria. He said he thought the communist T, O and E for service troops was 100,000 men.”11 The table of organization and equipment figure represents an ideal rather than actual number. Most armies, including our own, fight at a certain percent of T, O and E. Well, I recalled a study from Saigon which gave the Vietcong percentage. I ran downstairs and got the study from my desk. There it was: 70 percent.12 In other words, Hawkins thought the VC had 70,000 service troops, only 5,000 fewer than my own guess. Yet up at Fourteen Three—despite his scrupulous honesty over details—he was still upholding MACV’s “revised estimate” of 26,000.

  Of course the obvious question now was whether to confront the colonel at the conference table with what he’d said in the cafeteria. It was easy to answer: No. If backed to the wall, Hawkins would doubtless blurt out the truth, Godding would report him to Saigon, and a day or two later I’d find myself dealing with Hawkins’ replacement, who might not be as candid. That was the last thing I wanted. I’d come to think of the colonel as my most valuable asset at the conference. He was the only other person there who knew the evidence.

  Meanwhile I kept my boss, George Carver, abreast of the increasing wackiness of the military’s position. Carver was staunch. “Keep it up,” he told me. “This is turning into one of the biggest fights the agency’s ever had. Fourteen Three’s the talk of the executive dining room.” Not long after this conversation, Hawkins and I were discussing the proposed exit from the MACV Order of Battle of the Vietcong self-defense militia.

  I had mixed feelings on the matter. On one hand, it was clear the militiamen weren’t what you’d call ordinary soldiers. Relatively few carried guns, none wore uniforms, and their ranks included a modest share of teenagers, women, and old men. (The argument over shares was particularly frustrating because the only place which adequately described them was my own home guard study, which the DDI had killed in February.)

  On the other hand—as was equally clear—Vietnam wasn’t what you’d call an ordinary war. As various reports had shown, one-fifth of our casualties came from the militia’s favorite weapon, mines and booby traps, the militia made up a good chunk of our Chieu Hoi statistics, and they doubtless showed up regularly as cadavers for MACV’s body count. As I said to Hawkins: “Dammit, Colonel, if you count them when they defect, or when they’re dead, why can’t you count them when they’re still alive?” I had in mind a variation of Carver’s “solution” in Saigon of taking them out of the military order of battle but leaving them in Fourteen Three as part of its manpower estimate. They were still there, the estimate adding up to about a half a million.

  Hawkins said: “There’s a lot to what you say. Maybe we can work something out.” I figured he’d have to cable Saigon for instructions.

  Apparently he did so, because the air was shortly filled with high-level messages from Vietnam denouncing the VC militia. The first one came in on Saturday, 19 August, addressed to George Carver. Its author was Robert Komer, whom earlier in the year President Johnson had sent from the White House to Vietnam to become Westmoreland’s chief of pacification. In the message, Komer first noted that Fourteen Three still numbered the militia, mistakenly, he said, since they were “low-level part-timers.” Then he came to the point: “MACV is determined to stick to its guns [on getting rid of the self-defense militia], and you can well imagine the ruckus which will be created if it comes out—as everything tends to on Vietnam—that the agency and MACV figures are so widely different. Any explanation as to why will simply lead the press to conclude MACV is deliberately omitting the self-defense in order to downgrade enemy strength.… Will you please help straighten out this matter which is of concern to the whole top level here.”13

  More of the top level checked in on Monday morning: first, General Creighton Abrams—Westmoreland’s number two—his cable addressed to Earl Wheeler, head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who sent it on to the CIA.* Abrams said he wanted to make clear MACV’s “command position” over Fourteen Three vis-a-vis the communist militia: drop them. If they stayed in the estimate, he explained, the resulting sum would be “in sharp contrast to the current overall strength figure of about 299,000 given to the press here … We have been projecting an image of success over recent months,” he went on, and if the higher numbers were to become public “all available caveats and explanations will not prevent the press from drawing an erroneous and gloomy conclusion … All those who have an incorrect view of the war will be reinforced and the task will become more difficult.”14

  Shortly thereafter, a cable arrived from Westmoreland himself. He said: “I have just read General Abrams’ [message], and I agree … No possible explanations could prevent the erroneous conclusions that would result. Warm regards.”15

  I gathered up the three messages (Komer’s, Abrams’, and Westmoreland’s), and went to George Carver’s office. Carver said: “I thought I’d be seeing you this morning. Well, don’t worry about these. This is the CIA, and we will not, I repeat not, drum the militia out of the estimate just to please the press.” Carver began shaking his head. “But what really surprises me about these cables, really astounds me, is not what they say—I’ve heard variations on the theme for years—but the fact that they have put it in writing. Make sure you keep copies.” I said OK, and took the cables to show them to George Allen.

  Allen hadn’t read them yet. He did so now, and began cussing. Between cusses, he quoted from the cables: “command position … image of success … erroneous conclusions … incorrect view of the war.” The one that annoyed hi
m the most was “command position.” He said: “Now who the hell does he think he’s commanding? The VC?” George slipped into an imitation of Westmoreland talking to a Vietcong general: “Now I’m sorry, general, but you’re only allowed to have two hundred ninety-nine thousand soldiers. That’s it. No more’n two ninety-nine. Now go out there and do your best.” He became Allen again: “If he can command the size of the VC army, why can’t he command it to get out of the country? I notice Westy’s been having some trouble on that score lately.” At which he crumpled one of the messages into a ball and threw it against the wall.

  “George,” I said, “that’s my only copy.” I took the message from the floor, where it had bounced, smoothed it out, and went into the hall towards my own office. The secretary, Theresa Wilson, was laughing. “They sure got to him that time,” she said. I stuck the three cables into a folder and put the folder in a safe.

  Fourteen Three met twice more that week. There were some additional minor slippages in two of the categories. The slippages, which I felt were unnecessary, had begun to mount up. A recent draft put the communists at “between 400,000 and 500,000 men” instead of the usual “around half a million.” At the end of the second session Mr. Graham said: “Gentlemen, this estimate’s been going on all summer. We’re beginning to get stale. Therefore the word’s come from up top to knock it off for a couple of weeks, so we can catch up on other work, go on vacations, or whatever else. There’s one thing we seem to agree on; the war will still be going when we get back. We’ll give you a call as to the time of the next meeting.”

  It was fine by me. Fourteen Three was already vying for the first place as the longest-lived estimate in agency history, and I’d been working six- and seven-day weeks roughly since Christmas. Eleanor was in Mobile, Alabama, visiting her parents. I straightaway caught the southern flight out of Dulles in order to join her. No sooner had I arrived at her parents’ house when the phone rang. It was George Carver. “Sam, come back up. We’re going to Saigon to thrash out the numbers.”

  I had become suspicious. “We won’t sell out, will we?”

  “No, no, we’re going to bite the bullet,” he said. I flew back to Washington the next morning to find that our scheduled departure wasn’t until the third of September. That gave me a full week to get ready. I could use it. Having been tied up more or less constantly with Fourteen Three sessions, I’d fallen behind on the documents. MACV’s Document Exploitation Center had just published its seven thousandth bulletin—a lot of water had gone over the dam since Bulletin 689—and there were several subjects which needed reviewing. Chief among them were the Vietcong service troops.

  In a way, “service troops” was the most annoying category in Fourteen Three. In each session, it had lurched slightly downwards, so that the original 75,000 had dwindled to 50,000 in the latest draft. I knew much of the slippage was my own fault. My two main arguments had been too amorphous. The first depended on MACV’s omissions. For example, as Colonel Hawkins had observed, his estimate of 26,000 totally excluded the district level. Now the VC had 240-odd districts, each with medics, signalmen, couriers, and so forth; the question was—how many? I couldn’t supply an answer. I could only point at holes. My second argument was logic. The communist regular army was a fairly complex outfit. The man from NSA had agreed its communications net was far-flung and efficient. American doctors who had toured captured VC hospitals had found them surprisingly good. And captured weapons were normally in a state of high repair. All this suggested a vast back-up system for the men who did the fighting. Again the questions, how many? My only evidence was a single document. It showed that in one province, VC Can Tho, the communists had about as many service troops as they had combatants. A single low-level document doesn’t carry much weight in a forum like Fourteen Three. Hence the cuts.

  Knowing what to look for makes research easy. I went through the MACV bulletin collection at the rate of a thousand a day. At the end of the seventh day, I had come up with references to five provinces and twenty-eight districts. They showed beyond doubt that the Can Tho example was a good one. Its ratio of service troops to regular combatants held firm at one to one.* At this time MACV’s Order of Battle carried 120,000 “regulars.” Thus the real service troop number was closer to that than it was to the 50,000 in Fourteen Three. As for MACV’s 26,000, why, it was absurd.

  And I found something else, potentially more important, which I hadn’t been looking for. Most of the “references were actually Vietcong provincial and district rosters, listing so many men in x infantry battalion, or so many in y ordnance depot. They showed lots of other soldiers, too: “sappers,” “special action,” “combat engineers,” and “scouts,” mostly belonging to small units. I’d noticed such units absent from the OB before, so I checked up on each new one. Not one was listed in the OB. But these are the communists’ elite troops, I said to myself, and went down the hall to see if Major Blascik felt the same way. “Man for man,” he said, “they’re probably the best soldiers in the world.” (High praise from Blascik, who was a Green Beret.) After some simple math, I guessed their countrywide total at around ten thousand. Were there other holes as well? For the first time, I began to suspect that the OB seriously understated the “regulars.”

  On the afternoon of Saturday, 2 September 1967, I stuffed the documents into a black briefcase, and went home to pack. That night I telephoned my father—routine for such occasions—to warn him that my fourth trip to Vietnam was about to begin. “Don’t get yourself shot,” he said, “and say hello to Ellsworth.” I promised I would. “Ellsworth” was Ellsworth Bunker, our new ambassador to Vietnam. He had once been my father’s partner in the small Wall Street brokerage firm of Butler, Herrick and Marshall.16

  I drove to Dulles airport the next morning, and by the evening of 4 September had reached a tiny room in the Dai-ichi Hotel in Tokyo. There was a knock on the door, which I opened. It was my old boss, Ed Hauck.

  “Ed! What are you doing in Tokyo?” I asked.

  “It’s my place of exile,” he said. “They were going to send me to Elba, but maybe they figured I’d find a boat.”

  Hauck was the DDI’s representative to the Tokyo Station, it turned out, and there wasn’t all that much for him to do. We talked about the war. I told him that his original forecast that the communists would win it (which he’d made on my first day on Vietnam) didn’t look as goofy as I thought at the time. In fact, because of my work on the order of battle, I’d begun to agree. He was full of praise: “Fourteen Three must be a lulu. We’ve been hearing about it for weeks. Even in Tokyo! You’ve got the whole damn intelligence community in an uproar.” We went down to the bar for a drink. The maitre d’ tried to overcharge us for a bowl of peanuts, but Hauck faced him down. He was fluent in Japanese.

  A couple of days later I flew to Thailand, bought Eleanor some silk, and on Friday, 8 September, caught Bangkok’s morning flight for Saigon. The plane touched down briefly at Pochentong airport outside Cambodia’s capital of Phnom Penh—there were some Russian-built MIGs parked at the end of the runway—then it flew over Vietnam’s War Zone C (as advertised, “the face of the moon,” pockmarked with craters) before finally landing at Tan Son Nhut in the early afternoon. I drove to the embassy, and instead of checking in right away at Collation, asked for an appointment to see Ambassador Bunker. It was granted at once. A receptionist led me to a large air-conditioned office with drawn curtains. Bunker rose from behind his big desk to shake hands.

  “I’m Pete Adams’ son,” I said, by way of introduction. (My father’s real name was Pierpont, but everyone, himself included, called him “Pete.”)

  “A pleasure to see you again,” said the ambassador, recalling that we’d met some years back at my father’s brokerage house. He was friendly, tall and slender, with white hair, an aquiline nose, and slightly droopy eyes. A white triangle of a handkerchief stuck from the pocket of his dark blue suit. We swapped pleasantries for about five minutes. As I was leaving, he said: �
�Give my very best to Pete.” It was the first time I’d encountered one of the Vietnam war’s principal figures—except, of course, those from the CIA.

  At ten o’clock the next morning, I arrived at MACV headquarters to attend the order-of-battle conference, scheduled to start at 10:30 A.M. The headquarters was a sprawling structure nicknamed Pentagon East. Colonel Hawkins met me at the front door.

  “What you got in that damn briefcase?” he asked.

  “Wouldn’t you like to know,” I said. He laughed. We walked side by side towards the conference room. I told him about the missing sappers, which I’d guessed at ten thousand. “Believe you’re a little high,” he said; “on the other hand, maybe not.” His face regained its bleak look.

  The conference room was medium-sized and austere, centered by a big U-shaped table. On one side of the U sat the CIA delegation: George Carver, myself, Dean Moor (now a firm backer, but unfortunately no help on the evidence), and an Estimates staffer named Bill Hyland, who had taken over the job of superintending the various drafts of Fourteen Three from Bobby Layton. Facing us on the U’s other side were Colonel Hawkins and several other Army officers, apparently from the Order of Battle Section. From the head of the U pointed Westmoreland’s big guns of intelligence. I recognized only one of these: General Godding, Gains Hawkins’ escort at Langley. Carver whispered the identity of the rest: “The bald one in the middle is General Davidson, the J-2: that fat colonel over there is Charley Morris, head of Production (that’s their DDI); the short one is Danny Graham, chief of MACV Estimates; and the general sitting next to Davidson is Winant Sidle—he’s head of MACV’s Public Relations.”17

  “Public relations?” I said. I was about to ask what the dickens a PR man was doing at an order-of-battle conference, when the meeting came to order.