War of Numbers (18 page)

He replied: “But this gives us a start. If we catch one of the agents, we’ll know more about the organization than he does. Maybe he’ll think we know everything and tell us the rest. Leastways that’s the theory. It doesn’t always work out.”

The printers ran off the study, its 125 pages bound in a sullen gray cover, on Monday, 31 July 1967, right on schedule.
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It was in the nick of time. On the same day, George Allen, who was filling in for Carver during one of the latter’s unexplained absences, told me that Colonel Hawkins was getting ready to leave Saigon to attend the next session of Fourteen Three, due to convene shortly. I had mixed emotions. On the one hand, Hawkins’ honesty was doubtless better than Fowler’s harrumphs. On the other, I was daunted by my now having to carry the entire load on the numbers. My main backer at the meetings, Bobby Layton, had a new assignment. Earlier in the month, he had gone to Saigon to join the Collation Branch. Naturally, the DDI would be no help whatsoever. Methodically pumping out Sitreps, it still had no one working full time on the VC —and no one, as usual, who knew anything much about the order of battle. Annoyed at these now-ancient
gaps, I wrote a memo to Carver suggesting that the agency form a “Vietcong Study Group.” I gave it to Mary Ellen on 2 August.
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“Thanks,” she said, and tossed it in his in-box, where it landed on a paper I’d written in mid-May.
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The May paper had complained that the DDI still wasn’t reading captured documents.

Fourteen Three reassembled a few days later. I climbed to the seventh floor fifteen minutes early in order to say hello to Gains Hawkins. He was already in the conference room. We shook hands. He looked tired, I thought, probably from jet lag. The meeting was called to order by a new chairman, James Graham, a board member who’d recently transferred from the DDI front office. Why he’d taken over from General Collins as Fourteen Three’s boss was unclear; perhaps the general was on vacation. In any case, it didn’t matter. Graham was one of the front office people who had backed me up in my fight with the State Department over the rise of Tshombe in the Congo. “Screw State,” he had said in effect. I supposed he’d take the same attitude towards MACV—assuming it was warranted.

“Gentlemen,” said Graham, “we’re going to have a slide show. Colonel Hawkins has just completed several new studies for the MACV Order of Battle Section, and he wants to tell us about them. Somebody douse the lights.” The room went black. There was a blast of light on one wall. The first slide wobbled to the center. It read:

Headquarters
United States Military Assistance Command, Vietnam
Vietcong Strength Study

As the slide wobbled off, I caught a glimpse of George Fowler. His head was on his chest and his eyes were closed. When the next slide appeared, Colonel Hawkins began to read from an accompanying text. He spoke rapidly and was hard to follow. The slides were a maze of numbers and charts. I couldn’t see my pad in the dark, and therefore couldn’t take notes. A dozen had come and gone, when something caught my eye. I called out: “Colonel, could you leave that slide on for a minute, please? I’d like to copy it down.”

He said: “I figured you’d call me on that one, Sam. Of course you can.”

I went to the wall, and in its bright light transcribed the display. The slide show continued for another half hour. The lights went on, and there was a coffee break. I looked at my notes. This is what they showed:

Previous Estimate

Revised Estimate

Clearly, the two “estimates” were MACV’s current order of battle and its proposed new one.
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I went over the categories one by one. First the regulars: no change. Well, Fourteen Three hadn’t argued about regulars, although I was beginning to have doubts. I’d lately come across several small combat units, such as sappers (a kind of commando), which weren’t listed in the OB. However, not wanting to pick nits, I decided to leave them alone. Service troops: up 1200.
What?
Less than a month ago, Funaro’s cable from Saigon had reported that Colonel Hawkins thought that Fourteen Three’s then-current figure of 75,000 service troops was only “a little” too high. Seventy-five thousand is “a little” higher than 26,000? Cut it out. Something funny was going on. Guerrilla-militia:
My God!
Everyone after the hyphen, the self-defense militia—whom Nguyen Chi Thanh
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had put at 150,000—had marched out of the OB without so much as a bugle call. And not to Carver’s “nonmilitary” shelf, either, but to oblivion. Then there were the pre-hyphen troops, the guerrillas. Only
65,000?
Hawkins had told Funaro 100,000 a month ago, and General Thanh had said 180,000 a year before that. Again, it was
awfully damn peculiar.
I skipped over the
political cadres to look at the totals. That was it! They are what had caught my eye!
The totals were virtually the same.

Immediately I suspected foul play. It looked to me that someone at MACV headquarters had picked the new sum to coincide with the old one, in order to fool outsiders—presumably the press—into thinking the VC strength estimate was the same as ever. And then someone else, most likely from the OB Section, had taken the new total, and jiggering with the components,
worked backwards.
Who was the “someone else?” Colonel Hawkins? At just this point Mr. Graham said: “All right everybody, back to work. Coffee break’s over.”

I studied the colonel as he resumed his seat at the conference table. I saw my first impression about his being “tired” was wrong. His face was as bleak as I’d ever seen a face. I also saw, for the first time, that he wasn’t alone. Sitting to his right was an Air Force brigadier general. I asked a neighbor who it was. The neighbor said: “General Godding. George Godding. He’s deputy J-2” That meant he was chief assistant to General Philip Davidson, Westmoreland’s new head of intelligence. Aha, I thought: Hawkins is on a short leash.

For the next ten days—or so it seemed to me—Fourteen Three was in almost continuous session. The discussion was now entirely about numbers, with Hawkins and me the main disputants. It was a strange affair from the start. For example:

ADAMS
: Colonel, I suppose you remember that General Thanh’s speech of April 1966 where he said there were a hundred eighty thousand guerrillas. We talked about it in Honolulu.

HAWKINS
: I do seem to recall that, Sam, and I guess you know about Bulletin 4530.

ADAMS
: Bulletin what?

HAWKINS
: Forty-five thirty. It’s not a speech, but an accounting document. Also dated 1966. It lists a hundred seventy thousand guerrillas, at least that’s what it says here. Now that seems to pretty much confirm General Thanh, doesn’t it?

The colonel handed me the bulletin.
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I’d seen it before, but had mislaid my copy. It
was
an accounting document (it subdivided the
guerrillas by area), and it certainly backed up General Thanh’s speech. But hell, I was the one arguing for Thanh’s speech, not Hawkins. The discussion continued:

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?
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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.”
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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.
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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.”
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