War of Numbers (10 page)

“Here, take Joe Hovey’s desk,” Beaubien told me; “he’s on midtour leave in the States,” adding that Hovey had been with Collation for a year now, and was therefore entitled to a month off. I sat down at Hovey’s desk and began to collect paper.

South Vietnam had forty-four provinces, and, honoring a cliché that they were all different, I decided to tackle them one by one. Luckily, I found a bundle of papers called the USAID Year-end Reports, less than three weeks old, one for each province, prepared by the provincial USAID reps about what had gone on locally during 1965. I condensed the reports onto five-by-eight index cards, one per province. Sure enough, they were different. “Characteristically, time is on our side,” said the one from Bien Hoa. On the other hand, Vinh Long’s noted that its anti-VC efforts “had largely failed.” Long An’s was in between. There was an increase in “roadblocking and mining activity on Highway
Four,” it said, but the local Chieu Hoi program “was going well.”
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I made a note to look into the Long An defector program. By eleven o’clock on Saturday, I’d filled out forty-four cards. It was weekend quitting time and everyone was taking off.

“Come on down to the Cosmos,” somebody said on the way out the door. “It’s the Saturday morning staff meeting.” The Cosmos Club was the bar—also, I’d found, the CIA hangout—halfway between the embassy and the embassy annex. I’d had a hot dog for lunch there several times during the week, and had heard that on Saturdays many CIA province officers flew in from the field for its so-called staff meeting to swill drinks and exchange information. Hoping to do likewise, I walked down to the Cosmos and pushed open the door.

The din was terrific. Crammed into its dimly lit thirty-five-foot-long space must have been fifty agency employees, all shouting at the top of their lungs. Recognizing an acquaintance from Langley, I asked him in as low a voice as I could what he had going against the Vietcong. “You mean
spying?
” he shouted. “Zilch! Don’t know Vietnamese! Nobody does! Any VC wants to spy for us better damn well learn English.” I asked him what he thought about enemy morale. “Helluva lot better than mine!” he shouted. It was so noisy I gave up, just as some customers began to sing from a mimeographed songbook entitled
Songs of Saigon: Songs that Pacify.
Despite the time of year the songs were Christmas carols, the first to the tune of “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen:”
⁴

God rest you Gen’ral West-more-land
May nothing you dismay.
You know the First Air Cav-al-ry
Was wiped out yesterday.

And so on, more verses and songs, each louder and more raucous. A glass shattered against a wall, and I left, patting my trouser pocket to make sure that George Allen’s list of people to see about defectors was still there.

The list was propped on the steering wheel of an old gray jeep (arranged by Beaubien, who had connections in the motor pool), when on Monday morning I drove slowly down Pasteur Street, looking for 176. The Rand villa turned out to be standard design, its front door opening into a big room with fans on the ceiling and tiles on the floor. Leon Goure—maybe six feet tall, graying temples combed into a continental flare—issued from a side office. “Delighted to meet you,” he said in a nondescript foreign-sounding accent.

We sat down on a sofa as he described Rand’s Motivation and Morale project. It seemed that Rand had formed teams of Americans with Vietnamese interpreters to go around the countryside and interview VC prisoners and defectors. Using standard questionnaires, they had already collected a considerable body of evidence. The questions concerned everything you could think of about enemy morale.

“Are there any questions about deserters?” I asked, recalling George Allen’s admonition about VC quitters who went home rather than defect.

“Of course,” Goure replied, “we ask everyone about desertion. It’s the Vietcong’s biggest morale problem. There are
many
more deserters than defectors.”

“This may sound dumb,” I said, “but have you ever figured out how many more there are? I mean, a ratio?”

“Indeed we have,” he answered. “It’s based on the interviews. Seven. Seven deserters for each defector.”

“Seven!” I exclaimed, and did some quick math; if 10,000 VC soldiers a year defected, then 70,000 deserted, for a total of 80,000 leave-takers per year. “My God!” I said, “that’s on top of all their other losses, too—and from a quarter-million-man army.”

“You’re right,” Goure said gravely. “Think of the consequences.” We discussed the consequences for half an hour. No doubt about it, they were bad for the VC. Goure then introduced me to Rand’s expert on VC defection, Joe Carrier. Carrier and I spent the rest of the morning exchanging stories about the inscrutability of Chieu Hoi statistics. “But maybe things are looking up,” he said. He’d made a promising contact at the Ministry of Psychological Warfare. We agreed to trade notes.

My mind still boggled by Goure’s seven-to-one ratio, I drove around Saigon in my gray jeep for the rest of the week, checking off names from George Allen’s list. My last stop was the main office building of USAID, which administered the VC defector program. On its third floor I cornered USAID’s chief for III Corps—the territory surrounding Saigon—to see what he knew about Long An Province’s Chieu Hoi program, the one I’d made a note about back at the Collation Branch.

“You’re in luck,” he told me. “Our Long An rep, Mr. King, just happens to be in the building. He’s up for the day from Tan An.” Tan An was Long An’s province capital, about twenty-five miles southwest of Saigon.

Travis King walked into the office a few minutes later. He was a tall, smiling Texan in his late forties, with cowboy boots, a farmer’s straw hat, and the beginnings of a paunch. “I got a nice little Chieu Hoi center,” he told me. “You should come down and see it.” How about next week? “Anytime,” he said, “Just give a day’s notice so I can meet you at the airport. But you be careful out there. Somebody got sniped at the other day.”

It wasn’t until late Tuesday that I was ready for the trip, and the next morning, 2 February, I checked into the Air America terminal at Tan Son Nhut. A pretty Vietnamese girl with bobbed hair and a white sweater stamped my boarding pass, and the pilot, the copilot, three other passengers and I climbed onto a Pilatus Porter, a Swiss-made airplane with a single turboprop engine and huge wings. The pilot pushed the starter button, the Porter belched and gave off a high-pitched whine. The copilot turned in his seat to say: “This is one crazy-ass flying machine. It stops on a dime.” The airplane took its place behind a line of camouflaged jet fighters waiting to take off from the main runway. Minutes later we were aloft.

The ground below was soon typical Delta—shining rivers and rice paddies, with thick clusters of houses perched in between. We followed a causewaylike road—I guessed it was Route Four—spotted with tiny busses and trucks. After a short while the copilot, reading from a manifest,
shouted: “First stop, Tan An. Mr. Adams, this is you.” Below was a small city, through which passed a river in one direction and Route Four in another. The airstrip looked to be a mile out of town.

The Pilatus Porter rapidly lost altitude and speed, and shortly we were approaching the grass strip, about one hundred yards above it, but off to one side. Instead of landing, we shot beyond, then made a sharp U-turn toward the runway. “Whooppee!” the copilot yelled. The Porter went into a stall, drifted gently downward, gave a mild lurch as it hit the grass, and after no more than fifty feet, rolled to a halt. I jumped out, clutching an overnight bag. “Good luck!” the pilot bellowed. The plane took off. I looked around. The airstrip was deserted.

“Jesus, the sniper,” I said to myself, and plunged toward a nearby bunker. From inside I saw the airstrip was ringed by puddle-covered fields, beyond which, about two hundred yards off, were some woods. Wishing I’d brought a gun, I wondered how long the sniper might take to wade from the woods to the bunker.

Fifteen minutes later there was a squeal of brakes. It was a USAID pickup truck driven by Travis King. “Sorry to keep you waiting,” he said. “I got held up at the bridge.” I tossed my overnight bag into the back of the truck and we sped off for Tan An. Long An’s province capital was a hot, dusty market town filled with people, oxcarts, bicycles, and busses. We weaved our way through the traffic to a small two-story rowhouse on a side street just off the main square. “This is it,” King said, “USAID headquarters.”

We went inside, walking through the standard big room with the obligatory ceiling fans, upstairs to a second-floor back porch where King filled me in on the Vietnamese I’d have to deal with: Colonel Anh, Long An’s province chief, who was forthright and cooperative; Lieutenant Chat, who ran the Chieu Hoi center (“Chat takes some getting use to”); and Co Yung,
^*
who would be my interpreter. He’d recently hired Co Yung to work for Doctor Lowe, a volunteer from Utah, in bed at the
moment with dengue fever. “You can have Co Yung until Doctor Lowe gets better.”

I met Co Yung after lunch. She was about thirty-five, short, neatly dressed in white, her black hair in a permanent wave, and her face pockmarked, evidently from an old case of smallpox. King, Co Yung, and I left the rowhouse, strode down the side street (noisy with children, merchants, and blaring radios), and crossed the town’s main square (dusty, policed by chickens), detouring past a row of sun-baked armored red cars to a small boxlike structure at one corner. “This is the Chieu Hoi center,” said King as we entered the building, “those are the defectors,” he went on, pointing at eight to ten dozing Vietnamese in black pajamas, “and this is Lieutenant Chat.” A Vietnamese army officer bowed and smiled, revealing numerous gold teeth. “You’re in business,” King concluded; “Call me if you need me.” He made for the door, leaving me with Co Yung, Lieutenant Chat, and the somnolent defectors.

Right away there was a problem. Despite her title as “interpreter,” Co Yung knew little English. She was fluent in French, however, of which I had the high school variety, and we spoke haltingly in that language. Realizing that mine wasn’t good enough to interview defectors through Co Yung, I decided to work from the files. The center’s walls were lined with boxes, apparently containing dossiers. I said to Co Yung in French: “Ask Lieutenant Chat if we can look at those boxes.” She did so. Chat shook his head: No. She tongue-lashed him in Vietnamese. He shook his head again: Yes. Led by Co Yung, two VC defectors and I carried four boxes each back to the USAID rowhouse, thence to a small cottage in back. The defectors put the twelve boxes on a big wooden table in the cottage’s main room, then left. Yanking the string of the ceiling fan, Co Yung said: “Commençons.”

We commenced. She emptied the first box on the table, and skimmed through the papers. They were in Vietnamese, of course, which she translated into French. I wrote what she said onto a legal-size pad of yellow paper, translating as much as I understood into English. Soon she began to ask what such-and-such a word was in English. I’d
tell her, and henceforth—to my amazement—she used English. Sometimes I’d ask her what something was in Vietnamese. She’d tell me, and I’d write it down in a notebook.

The first box took almost an hour to get through. Like the other boxes, as I was to find, it concerned one person. For all the time we spent on him, he didn’t amount to much: a part-time VC courier, apparently a civilian. However, the other boxes were about soldiers. Co Yung and I sorted out the military terms as we went along. For example:

YUNG
: This one belongs to the auto-defense.

ADAMS
: That’s self-defense in English. What’s the Vietnamese?

YUNG
:
Tu ve.
(And she wrote it down for me with the proper accent marks.)

A second example:

YUNG
: This one’s a guerrilla.

ADAMS
: Same word in English.

YUNG
:
Du kich
in Vietnamese.

The examples were typical. Most of the first twelve defectors were either “guerrillas” or “self-defense” militiamen, belonging to a sort of VC home guard, whose job, it seems, was to defend VC territory. After much passing back and forth of notes—in French, Vietnamese, and increasingly in English—we finished the twelfth box at 6:00
P.M.
, quitting time. Lieutenant Chat’s defectors fetched the boxes back to the Chieu Hoi center.
“La même chose demain,”
I said to Co Yung. “It shall be my pleasure,” she replied in English. We parted, me going to the rowhouse for an early supper and bed.

As I lay in the dark, listening to the nightly skirmish start up a mile or two out of town, I thought with satisfaction that at long last I was finding out who the defectors were. Okay, my data base was only twelve, but that was twelve more than anyone else’s. I went to sleep not knowing that I had taken the first step on a path that eventually led to the most far-reaching intelligence discovery of the Vietnam War.

Publisher’s note: After the CBS-Westmoreland trial Adams intended to rewrite his book to include some of the new information which had emerged during the three-year legal struggle. The following passage, a kind of author’s aside, was intended as part of this effort, but it remains unique—no others had been completed when Adams died.

[Until this point, what I have written has been entirely autobiographical, describing what I heard or saw at the time. The following five paragraphs deal with events that took place simultaneously out of my hearing and sight. I found out about them after resigning from the CIA.]

Oblivious to the doings in Tan An, the main overseers of the war were gathering at United States’ Pacific headquarters at Camp Smith, Hawaii. It was President Lyndon Johnson’s first meeting with General William Westmoreland in the general’s role as America’s commander in the field.