War of Numbers (11 page)

“I have a lot riding on you,” the president told the general. Westmoreland thought Johnson looked worried and intense, uncertain exactly what course to take in Vietnam. That was why they were there: to make basic decisions on the war. Among those present were Robert McNamara of Defense; Dean Rusk of State; Earl Wheeler, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; Walt Rostow, soon to head the National Security Council; and President Thieu and Prime Minister Ky of South Vietnam.
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There was a series of formal briefings, one by Westmoreland’s chief of intelligence, the J-2, Brigadier General Joseph McChristian. Yes, McChristian said, things are better than they were a year ago; but don’t get your hopes up any time soon. His briefing had so few bright spots that another of Westmoreland’s generals—William DePuy, the J-3, chief of operations—interrupted to say that surely McChristian was overlooking many signs of near-term progress. The high-level audience listened raptly as the two staffers had it out. Although their dispute might have seemed the usual one between operations (traditionally upbeat), and intelligence (often glum), Westmoreland was far from disagreeing with McChristian.
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When Johnson asked him in private how
long he thought the war might last, Westmoreland answered: “Several years.”
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Nonetheless the conference had a solid result. Until then, Westmoreland had fought the war in Vietnam without formal orders on strategy. He got them at Camp Smith. Drafted by a deputy to McNamara, dated 8 February 1966, stamped “Top Secret,” and approved by President Johnson, the orders concluded: “Attrite, by year’s end, [the communist] forces at a rate as high as their ability to put men in the field.”
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Westmoreland was to fight a war of attrition, its object to grind down the enemy until he gave up. America had fought, and won, earlier wars of attrition: the Civil War for one, World War I for another. General Westmoreland took the orders back with him to Vietnam. He was to carry them even into retirement at Charleston, South Carolina. There, many years later, when a researcher asked him what his wartime strategy had been, Westmoreland referred him to the February 1966 “instructions,” the ones he received at Camp Smith.

My next session with Co Yung was just like the first one. She dictated from one side of the wooden table, I wrote notes from the other, while the overhead fan continued its slow revolutions. As the hours passed, our pace quickened. Safaris of box-bearing Chieu Hois came and went. I gave each box its own number: no. 16 for Private Liem’s, 261st Infantry Battalion, twelve months with the VC; no. 21 for Assistant Squad Leader Ut’s, village guerrilla, thirty-three months with the VC; no. 60 for Recruit Mam’s, six days with the VC (he’d previously deserted Saigon’s army, having cut off a finger).
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With Co Yung’s English improving rapidly, we kept at it until Doctor Lowe got better from dengue fever. After that I caught her at odd moments, using most of my spare time to rewrite notes and travel around the province.

My first trip was with Travis King. He was doing his “daily rounds,” he said, in this case trying to persuade the Vietnamese to put up a school house at Thu Thua District’s seat, about five miles to the north by crow, perhaps twice that by USAID pickup. We careened over the narrow, winding dirt track to Thu Thua at about sixty miles an hour. (“Doesn’t
give the VC time to set up an ambush,” he said.) When we got there, he went off to talk to the district senior advisor, while I asked another advisor, a potbellied black sergeant called McCrae, what he thought about VC morale.

“Don’t know about your end of the province,” he said, “but up at my end they’re feeling pretty good.” McCrae said that local guerrillas had the run of the hamlets thereabouts, that they collected taxes even in Thu Thua itself (“about fifty feet from where we’re standing”), and that they had little trouble keeping their province units up to strength. “Like last month we heard that the VC Long An Province Battalion, that’s the 506th, had five hundred men in it. Hell, that’s damn near T, O and E.” (T, O and E stands for “table of organization and equipment,” military jargon for full complement.) When King was done talking about the school, we drove back to Tan An just in time for Doctor Lowe’s daily swing through the province hospital. The doctor invited me to come along. I thanked him and went.

The hospital was a two-story stuccoed building with high ceilings, stinking pissoirs, huge cauldrons of steaming rice, and many beds, all taken. I followed Doctor Lowe, Co Yung, and two Vietnamese interns from bed to bed as they read fever charts and checked dressings. Seeing that many patients had leg wounds—some legs were gone altogether—I asked the doctor why. “Land mines,” he told me. “The whole goshdarn province is seeded with land mines and booby traps. Mines and booby traps are our biggest medical problems around here, except maybe malaria.”

Not long after my visit to the hospital I had a seemingly unrelated experience, this one involving the VC Long An Battalion, the 506th, the same one that Sergeant McCrae had said was near T, O and E. It took place while I was waiting for lunch on the rowhouse’s back porch. One of Travis King’s sidekicks—Mr. Graessle, an ex–Los Angeles cop who advised the South Vietnamese police—burst upstairs shouting: “They just caught the VC in the Right Testicle.” He explained excitedly that the Right Testicle was the nickname of the easternmost of two big loops in the river ten miles south of Tan An, in Tan Tru District, and
that the South Vietnamese army had trapped the VC Long An Battalion by blocking the neck of the loop. “Now we can clobber the bastards by air!” Graessle exclaimed. As if to underline his statement, six U.S. Army helicopters roared over the porch traveling south. Higher up I could see some Air Force jets going the same direction.

Just then King arrived, and we went inside for a lunch of crabmeat salad. “The 506th is in deep trouble,” he said, to a series of distant bangs. “Those sound like five-hundred-pound bombs.” I spent the rest of the afternoon working on notes and listening to explosions. The next morning a U.S. Army advisor from the small MACV compound down the street told me that 156 VC soldiers had died in the fight. “A damn good count,” he said. “I eyeballed most of the bodies myself, and if you throw in the wounded, the 506th ought to be sidelined for quite a while.” I found out afterward that the South Vietnamese had dubbed the battle “Operation An Dan 14/66.”
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A day or so later my notes were more or less in order, the Chieu Hoi sample being 146, Long An’s entire defection take for the last four months. I decided that rather than do more of Lieutenant Chat’s boxes, I’d try to make sense with what I had. This meant putting together a profile of the average VC defector—describing such things as how long he’d been with the Vietcong and where he stood in the organization. The defectors’ standing seemed to me particularly important (were we getting honest-to-goodness VC, or just the hangers-on?), so I’d picked up from Saigon several intelligence studies on the VC in order to bone up on their organization. These included MACV’s “Glossary of Viet Cong Terminology,” and its “Enemy Order of Battle,” or OB for short. The OB listed the number of enemy troops by province and by type, but most interesting for my purposes, it said who they were and what they did. By reading the OB and other studies, I began to get a fair idea of what the communist army looked like.

They showed that the VC army was organized like a pyramid with three layers. The top layer consisted of the so-called main forces, heavily armed soldiers formed into big units such as divisions and regiments.
The middle layer consisted of the so-called local forces, well-armed battalions and companies run by the provinces and districts. (The Long An 506th was a typical local force outfit.) The bottom layer consisted of the so-called guerrilla-militia, which acted as a home guard for VC villages and hamlets. I had a lot of notes on the bottom layer types from the Chieu Hoi files.

My notes showed the guerrillas—most of them armed with rifles—were of two types; village guerrillas (du kich xa), who defended entire villages, a village being made up of several hamlets; and hamlet guerrillas (du kich ap), who defended the hamlets themselves.
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 The hamlet guerrillas were backed up by the self-defense militia (tu ve)—usually equipped with grenades—whose main jobs were to stand guard, dig trenches and tunnels, and lay mines and booby traps. (I guessed it was the militia who filled Doctor Lowe’s hospital with leg wounds.)

Then, having sorted out the organization, I began on my VC defector profile. Here’s what I found: Of the 146 defectors, just short of 90 were VC soldiers, the rest were part of the communists’ civilian structure. Of the almost 90 soldiers, only 6 had belonged to the VC main and local forces, the rest being evenly divided between guerrillas and self-defense militiamen. The average VC defector was young (around twenty), low-ranking (normally a private), and had been in the Vietcong organization for a little less than a year.

So there it was—the result of almost two weeks’ work. Not much on its surface, but quite a lot when looked at from a distance. It showed first—what I’d expected—that most VC defectors were low-level and relatively inexperienced. But most important it showed that there
were
defectors, honest-to-God ones, bona fide members of the communist army as defined by the official United States order of battle. I was particularly struck that during this one four-month period, Long An—one of forty-four provinces—had more than 80 guerrillas and militiamen defect to the government. If Long An’s experience was valid countrywide, it was one hell of a drain on the VC army.

At this point I asked myself the next obvious question. OK, 80-plus guerrilla-militia had defected in the last four months in Long An. How big a dent did this put in Long An’s VC home guard? This was something I could check. The MACV Order of Battle listed the guerrilla-militia by province. I flipped to the back of the OB to look up Long An. I found it, and my finger tracing along the page, read these numbers: 100 guerrillas, 60 self-defense militia for a grand provincewide total of 160 guerrilla-militia.

“Cut it out!”
I said to myself;
“that means four months from now there won’t be any left. Besides the whole damn province is swarming with guerrillas.”
Clearly something was wrong. I made a note to ask the province chief, Colonel Anh, about it the next day. By luck I had an appointment to see him at nine o’clock in the morning. The appointment had been arranged by the newly assigned CIA province officer, Paul Anderson, whom I’d only just met.

Anderson shook me awake at dawn. “Travis King told me you wouldn’t mind,” he said with a wide grin. He had a blond pompadour, blue eyes, and enormous shoulders—a Norwegian version of Li’l Abner. At just before nine, we were climbing the steps of Long An’s province headquarters, a handsome French-built structure shaded by trees. Anderson remarked that Colonel Anh was universally well thought-of, having fought with the Vietminh against the French in the earlier go-around.

The colonel proved to be well built, stocky, and fluent in English. “How do you do, Mr. Adams,” he said. I stood by as he and Paul Anderson discussed Long An’s counter-terror team, a CIA-financed elite unit to fight the VC. A half hour passed before Anh turned to me. “Is there something I can do for you?”

“Yes, sir,” I replied. “Could you tell me how many VC guerrillas and militiamen your intelligence people carry for Long An?” To avoid mistranslation, I repeated the question, using the terms du kich and tu ve. The colonel asked a nearby captain, who answered in Vietnamese. Colonel Anh translated: “Two thousand.”

“Holy mackerel!” Anderson exclaimed. (I’d told him on the way over about the MACV order of battle holding of 160.) Colonel Anh asked me what the matter was. He shrugged when I told him. “As is so often the case, Saigon is in error. Mr. Adams, the next time you visit MACV, would you please tell them to correct their mistake?” Proud to have spotted the discrepancy, I said I would be happy to do so.

For the rest of my time in Long An, I tagged behind Paul Anderson and his Vietnamese deputy, Lieutenant Lam. They showed me the “counter-terror team,” some fifty boyish-looking men, armed to the teeth; we visited the nearby village of Khanh Hau, the collection of hamlets described in Gerald Hickey’s classic study of Vietnamese rural life,
Village in Vietnam
;
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and we dined at a restaurant next to the river. I spent many hours talking to Lieutenant Lam. Gradually, he opened up. Late one evening over supper, Lam told me how much he hated the VC. They had killed his brother, he said.
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My last swing through the province was in a silver-colored Air America helicopter, down for the day from Tan Son Nhut. Anderson and Lam were touring Long An’s district seats, and on the way to the last stop, Tan Tru, the pilot veered off course so we could inspect the big loop in the river, the so-called Right Testicle. Shouting over the chopper blades, Lam pointed out how the blocking force had trapped the VC in battle. There were bomb and artillery craters all over the loop. My only surprise was how anyone from the 506th could have survived.

A few minutes later, we landed on a concrete slab next to a cemetery just outside the district seat. A black Army major named Foote, olive drab baseball hat set squarely on his head, marched us to Tan Tru, a Verdun-like enclosure of barbed wire, bunkers, and trenches set around a collection of dingy houses. Foote said that VC guerrillas infested the nearby countryside, and that Tan Tru often got hit by mortars. He
showed us the district’s newly acquired television set, hidden beneath an immense pile of sandbags. (“Best-fortified TV set in the province,” he said proudly.) I asked him about the battle of the Right Testicle, just four miles off.