War of Numbers (37 page)

11.
From my notes, made at the time.

12.
See Gerald Hickey’s
Village in Vietnam.

13.
And Lieutenant Lam almost certainly killed a great many VC. A later name for his counter-terror team was the “Provincial Reconnaissance Unit,” (PRU) generally considered by far the best government formation in Long An. I believe Lam appears in the eleventh photograph following p. 134 in Race’s
War Comes to Long An,
but I’m none too certain. For a description of the PRU’s activities, see Race, p. 212n, 213, 231, and 238. On p. 265, Race notes that the government programs best adapted to Long An “all shared a common organizational parentage in the Central Intelligence Agency.”

14.
From my notes, quoting an agency FVS report dated 9 February 1966.

15.
From my notes, quoting MACV document CDEC Log #01–1504–66.

16.
From my notes, quoting an agency FVS 12,625 dated 9 February 1966.

17.
From my notes, quoting MACV document CDEC Log #02–1174–66.

18.
My notes on Captain Plowman’s reports reveal that in his statistics for the four-month period ending in February 1966 showed that US Marines in Vietnam had picked up 2,344 Vietcong suspects. Through interrogation it was found that 16 belonged to the main and local forces, 48 were guerrillas, and 48 were self-defense militiamen—that is, close to the same ratios that I’d found among defectors at the Long An Chieu Hoi center.

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ULLETIN
689

Notes

1.
MACV Combined Document Exploitation Center Bulletin 689, of 19 July 1966 (date of issue by CDEC). Note that the Bulletin took a full month to make its way from the Tax Building in Saigon to Room 5G44 in Langley.

2.
Layton’s memo to Smith, dated 18 August 1966, was entitled “Vietcong Guerrilla and Militia Strength.” It noted that the then-current guerrilla-militia estimate had “come to be used more by convention than conviction,” and that Bulletin 689 suggested that the office estimate was “too low, perhaps grossly so.”

3.
CIA’s “An Analysis of the Vietnamese Communists’ Strengths, Capabilities, and Will To Persist,” 26 August 1966. The last-minute caveats about the guerrilla estimate appear in the text (section II, paragraph 5, p. 2, 3), and in a footnote to Table IV-5 of Annex IV.

4.
MACV translation report, CDEC Log Number 04–1354–66, issued on 29 July 1966, p. 2.

5.
MACV translation report, CDEC Log Number 01–1593–66, issued on 7 February 1966, p. 8.

6.
MACV, CDEC log number 04–1371–66 of 29 April 1966.

7.
Draft paper, “The Strength of the Vietcong Irregulars,” 22 August 1966. “Irregulars” was one of the many variations of “guerrilla-militia.”

8.
Draft paper, “The Strength of the Vietcong Irregulars,” 29 August 1966.

9.
CIA Draft Working Paper, entitled “The Strength of the Vietcong Irregulars,” 8 September 1966.

10.
New York Times,
7 October 1966, p. 16.

11.
Based on notes of my conversation with Major Blascik of 10 October 1966. Ex-Marine Corps Captain Philip Caputo, who served in Vietnam in 1965 and 1966, has also commented on the subject. “We were making history: the first American soldiers to fight an enemy whose principal weapons were the mine and booby trap. That kind of warfare has its own peculiar terrors. It turns an infantryman’s world upside down. The foot soldier has a special feeling for the ground. He walks on it, fights on it, sleeps and eats on it; the ground shelters him under fire; he digs his home in it. But mines and booby traps transform that friendly, familiar earth into a thing of menace, a thing to be feared as much as machine guns or mortar shells. The infantryman knows that any moment the ground he is walking on can erupt and kill him; kill him if he’s lucky. If he’s unlucky, he will be turned into a blind, deaf, emasculated, legless shell. It was not warfare. It was murder.” From Philip Caputo,
A Rumor of War,
(New York: Holt Ridnehart and Winston, 1977, p. 288.) Another source: “I think the most terrifying feeling is knowing you are going through a mine field, because it’s kind of like being in the dark, knowing there is a step there, and afraid to walk. You have to almost force every foot down because your knees just don’t want to react. Just that type of emotion—every step of the way.” The source was Lieutenant William L. Calley, Jr., (convicted of murder for his participation in the My Lai massacre of March 1968) as told to Hearst reporter Patrick Sloyan, in 1971. Shortly before the massacre, Calley’s platoon had lost several casualties to mines and booby traps. Correspondent Seymour Hersh, whose reporting on My Lai won him the Pulitzer Prize, has pointed out that more than 80 percent of American casualties in the My Lai area were caused by such devices.

12.
“Operations of U.S. Marine Forces, Vietnam” (Fleet Marine Force, Pacific, June 1966, p. 8.)

13.
Based on notes of my conversation with George Allen, undated.

14.
COMUSMACV report number 6–075–7739/66, 18 October 1966.

15.
Internal CIA paper, “Vietcong Irregular Strength,” 7 November 1966.

16.
CIA cable, Saigon Station to CIA Headquarters, 9 November 1966.

17.
Based on notes of my conversation with George Allen, undated. In another conversation, Allen told me that the person who hired him from DIA was Richard Lehman.

18.
Defense information report 6–075–8866–66, 4 November 1966.

19.
MACV CDEC log number 09–1509–67 contained in Bulletin 7216, of 13 September 1967.

20.
I made no record of this conversation. However, later on the same day, I related it to a fellow DDI analyst, who unbeknownst to me, jotted down what I said. The analyst later gave me the notes, which form the basis of this passage in the book. Still an agency employee, the note-taker, who became very prolific, is hereinafter referred to as the DDI analyst.

21.
Internal CIA paper, “The Strength of Vietcong ‘Main Force Support Personnel,’ ” (another name for “service troops”) 2 December 1966. On file with the CIA Inspector General.

22.
Internal CIA paper,
“New York Times
article Concerning VC Defections and Desertions,” 18 December 1966. On file with the CIA Inspector General. The paper points out that VC desertions came out of a force of 600,000, rather than out of the 280,000 then listed in the OB. On 21 November 1966, the DDI analyst recorded my mention of “600,000” VC on that day. The analyst noted it was “very Catch-22.”

23.
CIA cable, CIA Headquarters to Saigon Station, 13 December 1966.

24.
The agency’s Cartography Division published the map in January 1967, as CIA map 64529 1–67. I hasten to note that both MACV J-2 and the CIA Collation Branch in Saigon used VC maps; but these maps had not found their way to CIA headquarters. Likewise, the National Security Agency—which analyzed VC communications—had compiled an enemy map; but it was so highly classified, that it was seldom looked at outside NSA.

25.
Mr. Moore later recalled this conversation in an interview I had with him in late 1975.

26.
MACV Order of Battle, 31 December 1966.

27.
CIA memorandum prepared for Secretary McNamara by the Office of National Estimates, 9 January 1967.

28.
An example of the range of services provided me by the Purcellville Library was its two-year quest for the derivation of the phrase
catbird seat.
Eventually one of its librarians found me its likely origin: “(probably from the
bird’s habit of singing from a high perch) an enviable position, as of power.” My thanks to Mrs. Virginia Haley, and her husband, Pete.

29.
Internal CIA memorandum, special assistant for Vietnamese Affairs (Carver) to the DDI, 11 January 1967. On file with the CIA Inspector General.

30.
Internal CIA memorandum, 13 January 1967. On file with the CIA Inspector General.

31.
Memo from the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to DIA, 19 January 1967.

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OURTEEN
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HREE

Sources

The documents cited in this chapter are generally from two sources: either the batch I gave Representative McCloskey in May 1975, or the collection that the CIA turned over to the House Intelligence Committee in December 1975. The latter documents include a complete set of “Vietnam Situation Reports” for the period 23–30 January 1968 (of which the 29 January edition appears in facsimile) and various other reports connected with the CIA’s “Post Mortem” on Tet.

Among the books I consulted were Don Oberdorfer’s
Tet!
(Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Co., 1971); an unpublished manuscript on Tet by ex-CIA analyst Patrick McGarvey: U.S. Marine Captain Moyer S. Shore II’s
The Battle For Khe Sanh
(Washington, D.C.: USMC Historical Branch, 1969): W. W. Rostow’s
The Diffusion of Power: An Essay in Recent History
(New York: Macmillan Company, 1972), whose pages 462 and 463 quote extensive passages of the cable Saigon Station wrote in November 1967 predicting the Tet Offensive: and Bernard Fall’s
Hell In A Very Small Place
(New York: Vintage Books, 1966).

Supplementing these sources were several interviews, and of course, my own personal recollections.

Notes

1.
The account of the first meeting on Fourteen Three is based on memorandum for the record “N.I.E. 14.3–67, the USIB Representatives Meeting 23 June 1967,” which I wrote the same day, and later filed with the CIA Inspector General. The numbers quoted in this differ slightly from those listed in the memorandum of conversation. The latter’s numbers were often expressed in ranges (e.g., 456,000–541,000 in the case of the CIA’s estimate for the total number of VC), while the book uses a single figure, normally in the range’s
middle. My motive is simplicity. I feel the order-of-battle dispute is complex enough as it is, without my inflicting on the reader two sets of numbers rather than one. I have followed the practice of using a single number instead of a range throughout the entire chapter.

2.
Interestingly, everyone I talked to who worked with George Fowler liked him, for example, David Siegel, who was Fowler’s subordinate at DIA, described him admiringly: “The ultimate bureaucrat. The finest harrumpher I’ve ever known.”

3.
CIA cable, Saigon Station to CIA Headquarters, 10 July 1967.

4.
Davidson succeeded McChristian as MACV J-2 on 1 June 1967.

5.
CIA memorandum, “The Viet Cong Security Service,” July 1967. It contains 125 pages and 391 footnotes.

6.
Unpublished memorandum, “Research On The Vietcong: A Proposal For A VC Study Group,” 2 August 1967. Filed with the CIA Inspector General.

7.
(May memo, re documents. Get citation later. [This citation was not supplied—Ed.])

8.
Based on ranges copied from the slide. Once again, I use a single number rather than the range. In addition, I have corrected some minor mathematical errors on the slide, which was evidently put together in haste.

9.
The countrywide guerrilla total, by VC region, as listed in MACV Bulletin 4,530:

10.
The document referred to is translated in CDEC log number 06–1038–67, which lists 11,235 Guerrillas in Quang Da, the VC designation for the government’s Quang Nam Province. Confusingly the Vietcong also had a Quang Nam Province, covering roughly the same area as the government’s Quang Tin.

11.
The Estimates staffer was David Laux.

12.
The problem of strength accounting is even more complex than appears here. Normally the VC listed their units in one of three ways: The T, O and E, or ideal, strength (which for a VC Division was around 10,000 men); the “assigned” strength, usually less than T, O and E, which listed the number of
men actually assigned to a unit (which in a VC division could be, say, 7,500 men); and “present-for-duty” strength, which lists the number who actually showed up for morning muster (in the same VC division, say, 6,000). The difference between assigned and present-for-duty strengths reflects the men who are away. (For example, the above division has 1,500 fewer men present for duty than assigned; the 1,500 absentees include men on sick call, deserters not yet stricken from the rolls, and soldiers in special training camps or on leave.) Civil War buffs are familiar with the problem. Union regiments with a T, O and E of a thousand men sometimes fought with a present-for-duty strength of 150.