War of Numbers (9 page)

“This increase in defectors is damn interesting,” Allen told me, as he flipped through the paper. “Look me up if you ever get to Saigon.”

That was it, the only reaction to my first morale memo. I decided to leave morale for the time being and work on the Sitrep. “A tour of the trenches,” Ed Hauck said as he gave his okay. The two military analysts were glad to see me. Now, at last, one of them could go on vacation.

Ed Hauck’s gloom on the war may have been misplaced, but not his observation about the Sitrep. Once you started working on it, there was no time for anything else. Skimming the mail (much less reading it) took until one o’clock in the afternoon. It took another three hours to put together a story for the next morning’s edition. The best thing to be said for the job was its four-in-the-afternoon deadline. At least we worked something like regular hours.

I plugged at the Sitrep for almost seven weeks. It was a nightmare. In the Congo, the rebellion had been predictable. By watching certain factors—such as the tribes, the B-26s, and the whereabouts of Antoine Mandungu—one could generally guess what was going to happen. But in Vietnam there was no pattern. Everything seemed to be going on everywhere at once. We’d catch the VC in one province one day; they’d catch the South Vietnamese in another the next. Then, every so often, they’d pull a humdinger. On 27 October, for instance, Vietcong commandos outside of Danang blew up eighteen Marine Corps helicopters. (Eighteen! Almost as big as the CIA’s entire Congo air force.) And exactly one month later, they wiped out a whole South Vietnamese regiment within fifty miles of Saigon. I quit the Sitrep in mid-December.

Although my “tour of the trenches” had been unpleasant, I’d learned an important lesson. Whatever the VC felt, they certainly didn’t act like they had sinking spirits. To underline the dichotomy, I scotch-taped to my desk a
Washington Post
clip quoting an American Special Forces officer in the central highlands: “If those VC are underfed, sick, and have low morale,” he was quoted as saying, “I’d hate to have to fight them when they’re well.”
⁸

Clearly, it was time for another stab at VC morale. Because now, it seemed to me, I’d run into two large and conflicting bodies of evidence. On the one hand, there were the defector statistics, which suggested the communists were becoming increasingly downhearted. On the other hand, there were the daily field reports, which seemed to show the VC were in reasonably good shape. Something was wrong. What could it be?

Once again, I began with the captured documents and POW reports. And once again they were little help, for the same reasons as before, only there were a lot more of them. Lacking other inspiration, I decided to take a fresh look at the defector figures, and damnitall, they were running close to the same level they’d reached in August, about two hundred soldiers a week. There had to be an explanation.

I reread “Downward Drift.” Its only clear loophole was Molly’s suggestion about Vietcong draftees. Maybe, as she had said, most VC defectors took off after boot camp. Well, that was easy enough to check. All I had to do was go to the central defector file—such as the British had had during the Malayan rebellion and we always maintained on the Russians—to see how long the average defector had been with the VC army before throwing in the sponge. The move was so obvious that I kicked myself for not having thought of it before. I asked Molly where the defector file was.

“Never heard of one,” she said. “Try R. Sams Smith in China-Asian Satellites. He knows a lot of people over at the Pentagon. Maybe they have one over there.”

“You’re out of your cotton-pickin’ mind,” Smith boomed over the phone, so loud everyone in the Southeast Asia cubicle could hear him. “A defector file presupposes organization and good sense, and if there’s two characteristics our effort in Vietnam ain’t got, it’s organization and good sense.”

I’d already learned that R. Sams Smith, the chief military analyst for North Vietnam, was a skeptic on the war, and constantly at odds with its chief political analyst, Dean Moor, supposedly an optimist. (Rumor had it that Moor had once predicted that a few Marine regiments would wipe up the VC in less than a year.) Despite his doubts about a defector file, R. Sams Smith gave me some phone numbers to try at the Pentagon.

I called the Army Chief of Staff for Intelligence, the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Systems Analysis, the Defense Intelligence Agency (its South Vietnam shop), and the Office of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Nobody had heard of a defector file, or even of a breakdown of
defector statistics. A Pentagon analyst told me that I ought to try the Rand Corporation down on Connecticut Avenue in the District, since Rand was doing a study called “Vietcong Motivation and Morale.” The man at Rand told me they didn’t have a defector file either, but that maybe the Agency for International Development had one, since AID handled the defector program in Vietnam.

“Haven’t a clue,” an AID man said, “but I bet I know who does.”

“Who’s that?” I asked.

“Molly,” he said. “Molly Kreimer. She’s one of yours. She’s a walking encyclopedia on Vietnam.”

So R. Sams Smith was right! Not only was there no defector file, no one had a clue who the defectors were. It was amazing. The Sitrep published defector statistics each week, the Pentagon fed them into its computers, President Johnson bragged about them to reporters, but not a soul in Washington, not one, knew what these figures represented. I might have worked myself into a lather of righteous indignation but for the fact that I’d used precisely the same numbers, without explanation, in my morale paper.

The beginning of wisdom is finding out what you don’t know. I decided to be the first person in Washington to ask Saigon who the defectors were. The branch secretary gave me some cable blanks. I addressed the cable to “AUSTIN J. POLWHELE.” c/o the Saigon Station. “POLWHELE” was the code name for George Allen, the DDI representative, “Downward Drift’s” sole reader. I asked Allen everything I could think of concerning VC defectors: names, dates of birth, religion, length of service with the VC, jobs held, reasons for quitting, and so forth. Then I asked about Chieu Hoi reporting procedures. Where did the numbers come from? Who compiled them? Were they ever checked for accuracy? Were they padded? I warmed to the possibility of fraud. Had POLWHELE heard of any made-up numbers? If so, who did it? How? Why? It even occurred to me—although I didn’t include it in the cable—that the entire system was faked. Maybe there were no defectors. God almighty.

I was filling out my fourth cable blank when Ed Hauck interrupted. “Hey, Sam,” he called from his desk. “Good news. Lehman just called about your trip. You’re going to Vietnam in January. Three months TDY.” TDY meant temporary duty.

That was good news. At last I was on the track of something big. I stuffed the draft cable to George Allen into my safe drawer—its questions could wait until Saigon—and asked Ed Hauck for the afternoon off. It was almost Christmastime, and I hadn’t done my Christmas shopping. I drove down to Sullivan’s Toy Store on Connecticut Avenue in the District and bought my son Clayton a yellow Tonka-Toy steam shovel with a caterpillar tread and a crank handle.

^*
Plus 39,175 people whom the factbook called “political cadres.”

3   THE PUZZLE OF VIETCONG MORALE

AT FIRST LIGHT ON SATURDAY, 15 January 1966, I was lying in bed on the second floor of a two-story villa at 189/2A Vo Tanh Street, a thoroughfare that led to Tan Son Nhut, Saigon’s municipal airport, less than a mile off. The only sounds were the whir of the air conditioner and the distant roar of helicopters taking off on their first missions of the day. I looked sleepily at the wind-up clock on the table next to the bed. It was 5:18.

KABOOM!!! A huge explosion and a crash of glass. I dove under the bed.

“GET THAT SONOFABITCH!!” somebody shouted from downstairs.

POW-POW! Two gunshots, running in the alley below, sirens, more shots, and the squeal of a car tearing down an empty street.

I spent a while under the bed. The noise subsided in due course, after which I went back under the covers and fell asleep.

Getting up about two hours later, I asked a villa guard (an American MP from Winnetka, Illinois) what had happened. He said a VC terrorist had leaned a bicycle packed with plastique against a house used by Americans, and the ensuing explosion had knocked down a wall, killing a sergeant. “It was ten blocks away,” he added.

“Then who were you shooting at?” I asked.

“You got me on that one,” he said. Whoever it was, he’d missed. That was my baptism of fire in Vietnam. It wasn’t much, but I wrote home about it anyway.
¹

By nine o’clock I was wondering what to do with the rest of the day. I had landed at Tan Son Nhut on Wednesday to find that the Vietnamese Tet holidays were about to begin. “Saigon shuts down for Tet,” the CIA man who met me at the airport had explained. The holidays were still going strong. With the whole weekend to kill, I caught a ride to Saigon’s main PX, bought some cheap binoculars and khaki pants, returned to the villa to put them away, and then walked slowly down the now-crowded Vo Tanh Street about two miles to the center of town. On Nguyen Hue Street, I bought some orange marigolds at a flower stall, and on Tu Do a Vietnamese phrasebook and a map of Saigon at an Indian bookstore. The map showed Saigon had a zoo. I like zoos. I reached Saigon’s at midday.

I spent the afternoon under the zoo’s vast broccoli-shaped trees, the only American among thousands of locals. It was an unexpected experience. The
New York Times
and the Sitrep had described Saigon crowds as “sullen” or “anti-American,” but these people, families mostly, didn’t fit the description. Many smiled and said hello. A small girl in a straw hat with a bright red ribbon gave me a blue flower (her parents beaming approval), and I gave her an orange marigold in exchange. Two couples used me as a photographic prop. I drank some foul-tasting beer pronounced “bah-me-bah.” The zoo was so nice that I went back there the next day. By Sunday evening I had almost forgotten about my dive under the bed. When I headed for work at the American Embassy at 7:00
A.M.
Monday, the war seemed far away.

The sight of the embassy brought me back to earth. It was a large fortresslike structure surrounded by white concrete barrels, sandbags, and gun-toting guards, both American MPs and white-clad Saigon police. There were more guards in the lobby, including a Marine behind the front desk who said I was in the wrong place, I belonged in the embassy annex. “Turn left as you go out the door,” he told me, “it’s
about a hundred yards down the street.” I walked down the street—traffickless, having been closed off ten months before when a Vietcong sapper exploded a 250-pound bomb
²
—past a low-slung bar called the Cosmos Club, to a four-story concrete building with a pile of sandbags out front. “You want the top floor,” a guard said from behind the sandbags. I climbed four flights, went down a short hall, and opened a door. Inside it was pitch black.

“Electricity’s out,” a voice said.

“Third time in two weeks,” another voice said.

“Betcha the VC got the power plant again,” said a third.

“Hey, you, shut the door. You’re letting in the heat.” I closed the door and stood in the dark stuffy air. Minutes later, the lights flickered on, along with the air conditioners. A ragged cheer went up. I found myself standing in a hallway with doors on either side, from which peered several squinting faces.

“Welcome to the Collation Branch,” said a man with a hawk nose and a blond crew cut. “This is the DDI’s penal colony. Name’s Howard Beaubien.”

Beaubien led me around the Collation Branch’s five rooms, introducing me to about twenty people. They were already back at their desks, reading newspapers, gossipping, or staring at the walls. One wall had a Vietcong flag on it, another a VC pamphlet that read in English: “Why die in Vietnam? Your Girl’s Going Out With Your Best Friend.” There were also filing cabinets, in-and-out boxes, piles of paper, and typewriters—all the trappings of a busy office except activity. Beaubien explained why.

Apparently in 1964, someone had gotten the brainstorm to send out some DDI researchers to help the Saigon Station analyze the VC. The DDI front office had reluctantly agreed, using the opportunity to unload what it thought were malcontents or deadwood. When the specially selected analysts arrived in Saigon, the station couldn’t figure out what to do with them, finally sticking them on the annex’s fourth floor, where they’d languished for over a year. “Don’t pay attention to these
meatballs,” Beaubien told me. “Man you want in George Allen. He’s off at MACV. Be back later this morning.”

George Allen arrived at half past ten. He was short, forty years old, with thick glasses and youthful gray eyes. Recalling my morale paper from Langley, he asked me into his office. I produced the cable I’d almost sent him from headquarters before Christmas about defectors, and ran through its questions. Allen answered them quickly. No, there was no master list of defectors in Saigon, so far as he knew. Yes, some Chieu Hoi statistics were doubtless faked, it would depend on the province. Yes, there were defectors, lots of them (answering the question I’d left out of the cable). However, the person I should talk to on the subject was Leon Goure, head of Rand’s VC Motivation and Morale project, run out of a villa at 176 Pasteur Street in Saigon.

“But don’t get too bogged down with defectors,” Allen went on. “An even bigger problem for the Vietcong is
deserters.
Those are VC who get fed up with the war, and instead of turning themselves in to the local Chieu Hoi center, either go home or hide out in the big cities. Half the bartenders in Saigon are ex-Vietcong.” He gave me a list of people to contact besides Goure. I left Allen’s office to look for a place to sit.