by Sam Adams
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.”11 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: 17,027.14 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.15 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.’ ”16 I ran over to Molly to show her Blascik’s cable.
I slammed in to Dean Moor’s office to berate him about “back burners.” He told me to calm down, official Washington was becoming aware of the problem (no thanks to the DDI, I thought), and the way I could help most was to finish my big study o
n the home guard.
Angrier than ever, I returned to work. By now I had gathered some two thousand reports—VC documents, POW and defector interviews, and so forth. My main problem was sorting them out. The Vietcong organization had begun to emerge as a vast bureaucracy with elaborate chains of command, categories, and subcategories that had to be kept apart. I split the organization into two pieces, assigning each one its own safe drawer. One drawer was for the home guard, the second was for everything that wasn’t. The second drawer contained dozens of manila folders with such labels as “Ordnance,” “Quartermasters,” “Assault Youths,” “Armed Public Security Forces,” “Couriers,” and “Sappers.” The home guard drawer had folders for each kind of guerrilla and militiamen. Most folder labels came from my notes from the Long An Chieu Hoi center. They were in both English and Vietnamese: “Village Guerrillas—Du Kich Xa”; “Hamlet Guerrillas—Du Kich Ap”; “Secret Guerrillas—Du Kich Mat”; “Self-Defense—Tu Ve”; and “Secret Self-Defense—Tu Ve Mat.” The lines between different types of Vietcong were often blurred, and I found myself continually shifting reports from one folder to another.
In mid-November, Lorrie brought me our latest official estimate for the VC. It wasn’t the MACV Order of Battle (which the CIA still didn’t get) but a page-long précis issued by the DDI Watch. I glanced it over to see if MACV had added any guerrillas and militiamen. I noted with disgust that it hadn’t. Then I glanced at the other numbers, this time jotting them down. They were:
Regulars 108,585
Service troops 17,553
Guerrilla-militia 103,573
Political cadres 39,175
Total 268,886
Somehow they looked familiar: not just the guerrilla-militia, but one or two of the others. Well, it was easy enough to check. I pulled out my copy of MACV’s Order of Battle—still dated 31 March 1966, and still (as far as I knew) the agency’s sole copy. I turned to the OB’s summary, and compared the old numbers there with the new ones from the DDI Watch. This is what I found. The “regulars” had increased by about 30,000. (Fine, I thought.) The “service troops” had gone up by some 600. (Not much of a change, I thought.) And the “political cadres” were exactly the same for November as they had been in March. I ticked off the months that had passed on my fingers: seven. A cartoonist would have drawn a light bulb igniting over my head. I asked myself: Could it be that the political cadres are in the same boat as the guerrilla-militia? I answered: Yes.
I beat a path to Molly. She laughed: “This is getting repetitive.” I went to the sixth floor to find out from George Allen who the political cadres were.
He said: “They’re party members, armed police, and people like that. It’s what we call the ‘infrastructure.’ They’re the center of the VC organization; they run the thing, including the army. As for that number, ‘39,175,’ it comes from a study the South Vietnamese army did in mid-1965. It was a lousy estimate back then: it’s probably even worse now.”
“What about the ‘service troops,’ ” I asked.
“Medics, quartermasters, engineers, the same as in our own military,” he said. “Where the OB got its number for them I couldn’t tell you, but it’s been around for a long, long time. I think it’s safe to assume that no one’s looked at it for at least two years.”
I said: “It looks to me like the entire order of battle is worthless.”
“Except maybe the regulars,” he corrected. And he confided in me some of the details of his earlier career. He told me that he had started on Vietnam as a civilian in the Pentagon in 1951, that he watched the Vietminh grow steadily until the collapse of the French in 1954, and that he had followed Indo-China more or less steadily ever since. “We’ve fallen gradually into the same pattern of mistakes as the French,” he told me. “They didn’t begin by faking intelligence; they merely assumed success in the absence of clear proof of failure. We’ve been doing that for some time. Take that example I gave you about General Harkins deducting guerrillas from the OB, because, as he put it, ‘we’ve been killing the bastards right and left.’ He wasn’t really lying. But since there was no document around which showed that guerrillas should be added to the estimate, he felt it was OK to subtract them. The danger in that kind of thinking is that it’s only a short step to outright fabrication. It’s a frame of mind that drove me to quit the Pentagon for the CIA. That was July 1963. I took a pay cut to come here, but I have no regrets at all. The agency’s pretty square. And here in Carver’s office, we work for the director, and the chances are good that if we have something to say with reasonable evidence to back it up, it’ll leave the building.”17
George went on like this for almost fifteen minutes before I asked him for a job. He said that he’d be happy to take me on, but that first he’d have to check with Carver. They’d let me know in a week or two. I went downstairs feeling a good deal better than when I’d come up.
There was still plenty to do in Room 5G44. And since the political cadres looked too complex to tackle right away, I decided to zero in on service troops. Question A was where the OB number had come from. But despite repeated phone calls to U.S. Army headquarters, to the office of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and to DIA, I couldn’t find anyone who knew. Shortly I gave up the search, and commenced going through my own files, especially the ones in my Non-Home Guard drawer. Within two weeks I had concluded that a more realistic estimate of service troops was in the neighborhood of 100,000, or about six times higher than the OB’s. It was no more than a semi-educated guess, but I felt it was conservative, since it stemmed from the theory that the Vietcong needed only one service soldier for each regular combatant. Our own army—admittedly far more sophisticated than the VC’s—had six service troops for every one who carried a gun.
As I was putting my findings on paper on Thursday, 1 December, Lorrie interrupted me with the morning mail. One of its reports brought me up short. It was about my old stamping ground, Long An Province, and was apparently responding to Colonel Hawkins’ request for a local estimate of guerrilla-militia. I recalled that the province chief, Colonel Anh, had told me there were “two thousand,” and sure enough, the report came up with virtually the same number.18 Then I looked at the fine print. The two thousand were all village guerrillas; the report omitted entirely hamlet guerrillas and self-defense militiamen. Well, in every province I’d looked at so far (for example, Binh Dinh) the two latter categories had way outnumbered the former. Therefore two thousand was only a fraction of Long An’s real number, and Colonel Anh—whether he had realized it or not—had been talking through his hat. I stuck a codicil on my service memo noting the OB number for Long An’s home guard, 160, was probably out of whack by several thousand percent.* Lorrie typed it all up, and I gave it to Dean Moor. Leaving intact the service soldier part, he crossed out the codicil.
He said: “The front office already knows the guerrilla-militia estimate is suspect. No need to rub their noses in it. Besides you oughtn’t to bother them with all these details.”
“Details!” I exploded. “Maybe if we’d paid more attention to details, we wouldn’t be in such a god-awful mess.”
Just then Lorrie poked her head in the door to hand me a message. It was from the front office. Richard Lehman wanted to discuss my application for a job with George Carver. I was to go right away. I excused myself from Dean Moor, and stormed up to the seventh floor, muttering to myself about nonattention to details.
Mr. Lehman was rocking back and forth in his leather swivel chair, his hands in a praying position, just like the time I’d seen him about changing jobs from the Congo to Vietnam. He said: “What’s this I hear about you wanting to leave the Indo-China Division?”
“I want to work for George Carver, sir,” I replied pointedly. “He listens to details. Furthermore, he seems to be having more success than the DDI is in getting the message out about the size of the VC army.”
He said: “George Carver is an upstart.”
It was an odd beginning to our hal
f-hour long conversation. The only time I’d heard “upstart” was in an old English movie, and Lehman had aroused my curiosity. I asked him: “Why is Mr. Carver an upstart?”
Lehman was discursive. From what I could gather, Carver had stolen the editorship of McNamara’s “Will to Persist” from under the DDI’s nose, and that since then he had sent numerous memos about Vietnam to the White House without so much as a by-your-leave. “The CIA ought not to speak with two voices,” said Mr. Lehman. I also got the impression that the DDI was annoyed at Carver for having commandeered George Allen, the agency’s foremost expert on the Vietcong. Finally Lehman asked me: “Now really, Sam, why do you want to go?”
Feeling slightly unreal—and that I wasn’t answering his question—I made the following points: that the Vietnam War was probably more than twice as big as American intelligence said it was; that our estimates of enemy logistics, recruitment, and population control were almost certainly dead wrong; that the Sitrep, which was the DDI’s main publication on the war, inadequately covered the Vietcong; that the best source on the VC, captured documents, were almost entirely neglected; that as far as I could tell I was the only analyst in Washington who worked on our southern enemies full time; and that worst of all, the MACV Order of Battle—the bedrock estimate on which all other estimates depended—was still unchanged despite a growing pile of evidence that it ought to be much higher.20
“Sam,” said Lehman with a kind voice, “we’re now aware of the problems with the order of battle, and we’re grateful to you for pointing them out. But you’re asking too much in too short a period of time. The change you want is enormous. You’ve got to allow the government machinery enough time to absorb it.”