War of Numbers (14 page)

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.
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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 didn’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.

So far, so good. What I needed now was someone who could tell me about mines. No one in 5G44 had served with the military in Vietnam but I remembered somebody who had. He was in George Carver’s office, a Special Forces major named Donald Blascik. I went to the sixth floor to talk to Major Blascik. In Vietnam he had run an outfit of South Vietnamese irregulars in the Delta. He was about six feet tall, had a close crew cut, and smoked a pipe.

He said: “Don’t talk to me about booby traps. That was the story of my life down there. They were all over the place, in all shapes and sizes. For instance, the Malayan gate—a bent sapling with a spike that could skewer you if you sprung it; punji sticks—sharpened bamboo sticks tempered with fire and smeared with cow dung to give you an infection; grenades with trip wires, spike traps, and so on. Mines and booby traps caused half my casualties near the Cai Cai River.” I asked Major Blascik what effect they had on his operations.

He replied: “We call it the ‘pucker factor.’ The ‘pucker factor’ means you spend most of your time on tiptoes, trying not to step on mines. Believe me it’s difficult to do your job well—pursuing the foe and suchlike—if you always have to watch your feet.”
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I asked him whether some mines were worse than others.

He said: “That’s a hard one to answer. They’re all bad. Let me tell you about the ‘toe-popper.’ The toe-popper is a fifty-caliber machine-gun shell filled with gunpowder and rusty nails with a primitive priming device sticking out of the top. It won’t kill you, it’ll mangle your foot, enough to take you out of the war. A lot of my men were setting off toe-poppers, so I decided to do something about it. I put out the word that I’d pay fifty piasters [official rate 118 to the dollar, black market somewhat higher] apiece for them. The first couple of days I got only a few; then people saw I was serious, I was actually laying out the money. From then on the toe-poppers arrived by the basketload. There were so many they became a storage problem. Finally I took one of the later ones apart. It was filled with sand. Subsequently I found out that when the VC discovered toe-poppers were worth fifty p’s each, their finance section set up a cottage industry to make them for me. Dozens of little old
ladies pouring spoonfuls of sand into machine-gun shells for my personal benefit. I hate to think how much money I spent for those dud toe-poppers.”

My research into Allied wounds ended at Marine Corps headquarters, at the Naval Annex to the Pentagon. An old gunnery sergeant just back form Vietnam told me: “How you lose your personnel depends on your location. Up on the DMZ [the Demilitarized Zone, bordering North Vietnam], why it’s like it was in the Pacific. Nobody lives there, you’re fighting regulars, so you don’t lose many men to mines and booby traps. But in populated areas, Danang for instance, you’re up against the ankle-biters. Mines are their main weapon, and that’s what chews us up. Hold on a minute. I got figures to prove it.” He showed me an official Marine Corps report for June 1966.
¹²
The report indicated that most Leatherneck casualties occurred around Danang, and that 60 percent of them came from mines and booby traps. Two and two still made four. The guerrillas and militiamen (the gunnery sergeant’s socalled ankle-biters) were doing us a lot of harm.

Meanwhile my estimate for the Vietcong home guard continued to grow. Since the only other CIA man who knew anything about it was George Allen, I asked his opinion. He said: “More than two hundred fifty thousand? It wouldn’t surprise me a bit. MACV’s been jacking around that number for almost four years.” I asked George what he meant.

“For all practical purposes, the order of battle started up in February 1962,” he told me. “That’s when an Army lieutenant colonel named Bill Benedict and I went to Saigon to help come up with the numbers. The one we arrived at for the guerrilla-militia was just over one hundred thousand. It was based on good evidence, too, a document from Nam Bo (the VC term for the “Southern Department,” or southern half of South Vietnam), and our figure was accepted. Well, Bill and I came home in March, and by November, America was officially winning the war. The trouble with the OB began early the next year. The head of MACV intelligence, the J-2, went in to Westy’s predecessor, General
Harkins, and said ‘General, we’ve been finding a lot more VC regulars in the form of regiments and battalions, and we’re going to have to raise the order of battle.’ Harkins said ‘Godammit, you can’t do that; we’ve been killing the bastards right and left. We should lower the OB, not raise it.’ They settled on a compromise. The J-2 got his extra regulars. Harkins got a lower OB. They did it by deducting guerrillas as they added battalions. This happened twice—once in early 1963 and once again later in the year. By October, the guerrilla-militia were down to seventy thousand. In my view, they were growing as fast as the VC regular army.”
¹³

“How did MACV get away with it?” I asked.

He said: “Because we couldn’t prove otherwise. Our last document was the one from Nam Bo, and it was dated 1961. Ironically, the hero of the story is Westmoreland. The first thing he did when he took over from Harkins in ’64 was kick the number back up to one hundred thousand. Obviously he didn’t kick it far enough, nobody’s looked at it ever since, and now Westy’s in the same bind as Harkins, only worse. But there’s a big difference between then and now. Now we have documents coming out of our ears.” At about this point Don Blascik dropped by George’s office to tell me he was about to visit Saigon. Was there anything I wanted? “See how Colonel Hawkins is coming along,” I said.

The first clue to Hawkins’ progress hit my desk about a week later—Monday, 7 November. It wasn’t from Blascik (who had reached Saigon), but from MACV’s advisory detachment in Quang Tin Province, the one south of Danang. Apparently on receiving my strength memo from George Fowler, the colonel had sent a flier to all forty-four provinces asking for their estimate of the VC home guard. Quang Tin’s was the first response. The response was detailed, breaking out the guerrilla-militia both by district and by type. I added up the numbers: 17,027.
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Then I looked at the OB for Quang Tin: 1,760—one-tenth the local estimate!

“The genie’s out of the bottle,” Molly said; “You better tell the front office.” I wrote a short paper, for the first time speculating—on the
strength of what George Allen had told me about the strength manipulations in 1963—that General Westmoreland might try “to prevent a mass influx of new bodies” from entering the lists. One way to do it, I said, was to drop the self-defense militia from the order of battle. This was inadvisable, I warned, since the militia’s main job was to sow mines, which caused a fifth of our casualties.
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Dean Moor sent the paper to the seventh floor without change, and a short while later it returned with a buckslip showing that everyone upstairs had read it. Again there were no substantive comments. I was getting madder.

Two days later Don Blascik chimed in from Saigon. According to his cable, he hadn’t seen Hawkins, who was away, but he had talked to Hawkins’ deputy, a Lieutenant Colonel Clark. Clark had said that the OB Branch had sent a team around the provinces to see what was known about the guerrilla-militia. The answer was not much. (Quang Tin being an exception.) Most provinces didn’t even know what the home guard was, and furthermore, they were not getting from Saigon the VC captured documents that might have told them. Clark said that Hawkins had also asked each of South Vietnam’s four corps headquarters to come up with a “fast-and-dirty estimate” of guerrilla-militia. Blascik described their answers: “IV Corps caveated its report with the statement that its estimate was not even a speculative guess. II Corps reluctantly gave a figure five times higher than the existing II Corps … estimate. [The Marines] refused to reply. Other results were not in. At this juncture and after great inward reflection, Clark indicated that the CIA estimate of at least 250,000 ‘probably represented a low figure.’ ”
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I ran over to Molly to show her Blascik’s cable.