H-Diplo Roundtable XIX, 44 on The Myths of TET: The Most Misunderstood Event of the Vietnam War

George Fujii Discussion

 

 

 

 

2018

 

H-Diplo

 @HDiplo

 

Roundtable Review

Volume XIX, No. 44 (2018)

16 July 2018

 

 

Roundtable Editors: Thomas Maddux and Diane Labrosse

Roundtable and Web Production Editor: George Fujii

 

Introduction by Gregory A. Daddis

 

Edwin E. Moise. The Myths of TET: The Most Misunderstood Event of the Vietnam War. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2017. ISBN: 978-0-7006-2502-4 (hardback, $29.95).

 

URL: http://www.tiny.cc/Roundtable-XIX-44

Contents

Introduction by Gregory A. Daddis, Chapman University.. 2

Review by Jeffrey P. Kimball, Miami University, Emeritus. 6

Review by Douglas J. Macdonald, Colgate University, Emeritus. 10

Review by James J. Wirtz, Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey.. 25

Author’s Response by Edwin E. Moise, Professor of History, Clemson University.. 31

 

© 2018 The Authors.

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 United States License.

 

 

Fifty years on, the Vietnam War continues to elicit heated debate within the academic community and, more generally, among many Americans, especially those who lived through the turbulent decade of the 1960s. Consider the reviews of the documentary film, The Vietnam War (2017). Directed by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick, the eighteen-hour epic provoked a national exchange that ranged from fawning adulation to outright disdain. While some reviewers felt the directors had produced a “staggering” film, others found it “great TV” but “horrible history.”[1]

 

It should not surprise then that new scholarship on the American war in Vietnam follows a similar path as Burns’s and Novick’s film. Even before the fall of Saigon in April 1975, opposing camps were quarreling over fundamental questions. Was it a necessary or mistaken war? Who was most responsible for its outcome—senior military leaders, the media, antiwar protestors, or civilian policymakers? What did the experience tell us about the possible limits of American military power abroad?

 

Yet among all these debates, one episode continues to loom largest—the 1968 Tet offensive. For a decades-long, often stalemated war, this climactic event seemed the death knell of American influence in Southeast Asia. Scholars and veterans alike ascribed the phrase ‘turning point’ to what appeared a singular moment in which a potential military victory was turned, through miscalculation or malfeasance, into political defeat.

 

Predictably, a counterfactual approach to history mirrored the ‘turning point’ narrative. If only the American media had paid more attention to the crippling defeat suffered by Communist forces. If only civilian policymakers had allowed U.S. military commanders to take full advantage of what was clearly a battlefield victory. If only the antiwar movement had been suppressed in 1968.

 

Many of these counterfactuals inform a set of ‘myths’ according to Edwin Moise, who, in his latest book, tackles what he sees as the “most misunderstood event of the Vietnam War.” At its core, however, The Myths of Tet is an in-depth study of the problems of gathering and evaluating wartime intelligence. Vietnam scholars surely are familiar with the controversy. In 1967, the U.S. Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (MACV) and the CIA disputed battlefield assessments on the composition and strength of North Vietnamese army units operating inside South Vietnam and of insurgent National Liberation Front (NLF) forces, popularly known as the Vietcong. MACV, the story goes, pushed for lower estimates to demonstrate ‘progress’ being made in the war. Yet the early 1968 Tet offensive belied these claims, exposed a credibility gap between the American government and its people, and provoked the United States into commencing a long and tortuous withdrawal from South Vietnam.

 

What Moise intends in Myths is to dissect this ‘order of battle’ controversy before sharing ‘lessons’ on leaders and analysts who distorted wartime intelligence pictures. In fact, more than half of this work is a meticulous inquiry into the pre-Tet wrangling between MACV and the CIA over assessing enemy strength inside South Vietnam. Moise has built a reputation for being a scrupulous researcher and in this latest book, he does not disappoint.

 

Moise highlights the problems of MACV prioritizing ‘tactical intelligence,’ the difficulties of calculating the enemy’s Self-Defense militia forces, and the political implications of the American home front seeing the war as hopelessly stalemated. Simply coming to a consensus over key definitions proved elusive. Should intelligence analysts, for instance, include just ‘combat’ forces when trying to measure Vietcong recruitment inside South Vietnam? Or should they incorporate political cadres, administrative services, and part-time guerrillas into their accounting?

 

Yet this is more than a scholarly examination of bureaucratic infighting over intelligence assessments. There is important perspective to be gained here on organizational leadership, especially in times of war. While Moise finds “no clear evidence that anyone above the rank of colonel was consciously a liar,” (211) he argues that General William C. Westmoreland, MACV’s commander, had biased the intelligence process by expressing his preferences for lower enemy strength estimates. Thus, a short-term focus on maintaining public support at home in 1967, without looking beyond the exigencies of the moment, led to unintended consequences. In short, selling ‘progress’ in 1967 worked. But when the Tet offensive opened in early 1968, such claims seemed unfounded at best, and downright dishonest at worst.

 

Given the contentiousness of the larger debates on Vietnam, and of those surrounding the Tet offensive in particular, we should not be surprised that our roundtable reviewers would object to some of Moise’s findings. All three, however, agree that The Myths of Tet is an important scholarly contribution. There seems little doubt that Moise has produced a work that will be required reading for those students hoping to understand the intelligence war that formed such a crucial part of the American experience in South Vietnam.

 

James Wirtz, himself an author on the intelligence aspects of Tet, contends that Moise misses the forest of Hanoi’s offensive by concentrating too narrowly on the trees within the order of battle controversy. If Wirtz slightly overstates his case here, he surely is correct in emphasizing an important aspect of the intelligence debate—“unit taxonomy varied over time and by the organization offering the taxonomy.” In short, definitions matter. Nowhere was this more important than in Vietnam. For a war in which securing the rural population proved central to American and South Vietnamese war aims, accurately defining the word ‘secure’ influenced a host of key decisions—the military resources allocated to a province, the prioritization of pacification efforts, or the training arrangements for local militia forces. Yet, as both Wirtz and Moise correctly note, debate raged throughout 1967 and into 1968 over who exactly to count as a ‘combatant.’

 

On the utility of intelligence estimates to allied military operations, Wirtz suggests they had virtually no impact. Moise appears to agree, maintaining that “Westmoreland was not interested in using the order of battle as a tool for decision making.” (93) If true, though, we may ask what these findings suggest about the MACV commander’s supposed single-minded commitment to a strategy of ‘attrition.’ Moreover, it would seem that Westmoreland was persuaded, at least in part by his intelligence analysts, that the enemy’s planned offensive for 1968 would concentrate on the northernmost provinces of South Vietnam.

 

Douglas Macdonald offers a different criticism—that Moise dismisses far too much countervailing evidence when challenging the fundamental myths of Tet. In this case, both author and reviewer focus on the order of battle controversy. Importantly, Macdonald notes that the North Vietnamese equally misestimated recruitment and conscription in the South. Yet he also takes the author to task for linking the low order of battle to the surprise of Tet. Macdonald finds no relationship. Moreover, he suggests that the intelligence analysis was immersed within the larger debate over whether the war was fundamentally an invasion from the North or a local insurrection in the South. Such arguments continue to color the historiography to this day.

 

And while Macdonald rightfully praises Moise for depicting the Tet offensive as a continual offensive through much of 1968, he diverges from the author by arguing that allied casualties in 1968 were a weak indicator of the enemy’s order of battle. So too does Macdonald find fault with Moise’s evaluation of American assessments on enemy recruitment and conscription. The reviewer finds far too little attention paid to infiltration numbers from the North, implying that Moise overestimates the “insurrection model of the Vietnam insurgency” while undervaluing the invasion forces infiltrating into South Vietnam.

 

Finally, Jeffrey Kimball highlights a key reason why myths endure—they are useful. Politicians, senior military veterans, and scholars alike have all benefited from telling the story of Tet in ways that advanced their personal narratives. For instance, revisionists could paint Tet as a military victory turned political defeat to undergird their larger arguments of a winnable war. Yet relying on such myths could also backfire. Kimball argues, as one example, that Westmoreland was not well served by underestimating enemy strength. Contrasting Moise, Kimball calls the general both a “liar” and a “fool.” Clearly, the war continues to elicit strong emotions, even among accomplished scholars.

 

It should come as no shock that the author finds the reviewers to have misrepresented his viewpoints in certain areas. Fifty years on, these debates seem almost unavoidable. Yet participants of this roundtable concur, unquestionably, that Ed Moise has written an important piece of scholarship on the problems of intelligence analysis during the Vietnam War. As with the Burns and Novick film, the reactions to The Myths of Tet demonstrate that we surely have not heard the last word on one of the most divisive episodes in modern American history. But we just as surely are benefitting from new explorations by serious scholars and filmmakers who are adding further nuance to such a complex war.

 

Participants:

 

Edwin Moise is a professor of history at Clemson University. He was originally trained as a political and economic historian of modern China and Vietnam (Ph.D., University of Michigan, 1977). His first book was Land Reform in China and North Vietnam: Consolidating the Revolution at the Village Level (1983). A shift toward military history led to Tonkin Gulf and the Escalation of the Vietnam War (1996; revised edition including much more detailed information about signals intelligence forthcoming) and Historical Dictionary of the Vietnam War (2001). He is now working on a manuscript titled An Asymmetric Power: The United States and Its Asymmetric Wars.

 

Gregory A. Daddis is an associate professor of history and director of Chapman University’s MA Program in War and Society. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He has authored four books, including Withdrawal: Reassessing America’s Final Years in Vietnam (2017), and Westmoreland’s War: Reassessing American Strategy in Vietnam (2014).

 

Jeffrey P. Kimball is Professor Emeritus of History at Miami University and the author of books, journal articles, book chapters, essays, and reviews on foreign relations, wars’ causes and endings, alternatives to war, “primitive” warfare, nuclear history, popular culture, ideology, and historiography. His latest book, with co-author William Burr, is Nixon’s Nuclear Specter: The Secret Alert of 1969, Madman Diplomacy, and the Vietnam War (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2015).

 

Douglas J. Macdonald received his Ph.D. from Columbia University and is Associate Professor of Political Science, Emeritus at Colgate University where he taught in the Political Science Department and International Relations Program for almost thirty years. During his career, he was awarded residential fellowships at Harvard University and the Norwegian Nobel Institute in Oslo. In 2005-2007, he was a senior researcher at the Strategic Studies Institute of the U.S. Army War College analyzing Islamist terrorism networks in Southeast Asia. He retired from teaching at Colgate in 2014. In spring, 2015 he was a visiting professor in the Leadership Studies Program of the The Stanley Kaplan Program in American Foreign Policy at Williams College. His current research is for a book on U.S. intelligence in the Vietnam War, 1965-1968.

 

James J. Wirtz is Dean of the School of International Graduate Studies at the Naval Postgraduate School (NPS), Monterey, California. He received his Ph.D. from Columbia University, making for a short commute to watch the Westmoreland v. CBS litigation in lower Manhattan. He is the author of The Tet Offensive: Intelligence Failure in War (Cornell, 1991).

 

 

Edwin Moise—noted author, teacher, bibliographer, and historiographer of the U.S.-Vietnam War, as well as a historian of China and Vietnam—identifies and debunks in this concise book what he considers the eight major historical myths about the 1968 Communist TET Offensive. It was initially well-coordinated. Intense fighting did not continue beyond mid-February 1968. The number of Americans killed during TET did not exceed 2,000. Communist forces were defeated or severely crippled. Their political and administrative infrastructures were largely destroyed. The Viet Cong (People’s Liberation Armed Forces—PLAF) suffered the most and were subsequently replaced by North Vietnamese forces (People’s Army of Vietnam—PAVN), which were the only serious threat to U.S. and South Vietnamese armed forces (Army of Vietnam—ARVN). The U.S. news media misrepresented the TET Offensive as a U.S. military defeat. In the aftermath of TET 1968, the U.S. failed to build on its victory and instead reduced ground and air operations against the enemy.

 

These claims and beliefs, Moise argues, are demonstrably false and thus mythical. TET was not well-coordinated by General Secretary Le Duan, the Hanoi Politburo, or the southern-based Central Office for Vietnam—especially in its opening stages. Nonetheless, intense fighting continued at least through the remainder of the year, with U.S. combat deaths increasing far beyond the 2,000 claimed by mythologists (not even counting the wounded). Moreover, the ARVN was weakened by both casualties and desertions. Communist forces did indeed suffer heavy losses, but neither the PLAF nor PAVN were defeated. The American print and TV media did not misrepresent the fighting, and U.S. armed forces stepped up their counter-offensive into 1969.

 

Moise suggests that because “it is seldom possible to be certain how many” of the myths are “honest mistakes or . . . outright lies,” it is more likely they originated as “bullshit” (6). That is, the mythmakers—according to Moise’s definition of the term, which corresponds with that of philosopher Henry G. Frankfurt[2]—did not care whether their TET tales were true or false as long as their purposes were served. Among the prime mythologizers were General William Westmoreland, Commander of Military Assistance Command Vietnam (MACV); Joseph Alsop, the hawkish Washington Post columnist; and Peter Braestrup, the hawkish Saigon correspondent for the Washington Post. (Moise also names other military and civilian personnel as well as some prominent chroniclers and historians of the war who later promulgated TET myths.)

 

Moise does not directly or fully explore the motives of those who falsely portrayed TET as a victory for U.S. and South Vietnamese forces. He does suggest, however, that the prime original mythmakers were hawks (or at least proponents of the war) who repeated or built upon their previous claims and lies about the progress in the war before TET—namely, that Communist forces were being rolled back as U.S. and South Vietnamese forces were making significant gains toward ultimate victory. Even though Westmoreland and other hawks had not fully anticipated TET, Westmoreland’s upbeat assessment before, during, and after TET cast a positive light on MACV’s war strategy, as well as on the war itself.

 

Ironically but predictably, Westmoreland’s and MACV’s sanguine assessment of progress in the war before TET ran counter to their hopes then and after TET for getting more than 200,000 plus additional U.S. troops deployed to Vietnam. For President Lyndon Johnson, his ‘Wise Men,’ and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the fundamental problem with such reinforcement—especially after January 1968—was that it would have additionally strapped the global military posture of the United States. It would also have required Johnson to take the politically risky steps of mobilizing reserve forces and raising taxes to pay for these reinforcements at a time of rising inflation. Moreover, sending more young men to Vietnam, increasing taxes, and calling up reserves would have further eroded public support for the war even beyond the already declining poll numbers at the end of 1967.

 

The first half of The Myths of TET is a well-researched, necessary, but dizzying analysis of the prelude to TET: the Communist “order of battle” before the TET Offensive began, MACV’s fudging of enemy numbers, and the conflicting higher numbers produced by other U.S. agencies. The second half of the book is about TET itself: preparation for the offensive; the battle; the construction of myths and Moise’s debunking of them; brief comments on the war’s aftermath; and lessons learned. The most important lesson, according to Moise, is that “people in power positions should be very cautious about letting their subordinates know what they want to hear” (210).

 

Moise makes this observation particularly in reference to Westmoreland, about whom he also writes that in the year before the TET Offensive, the MACV commander let his subordinates “know that he preferred low estimates of enemy strength” but “seems to have believed the low estimates that subordinates gave him.” This led his subordinates to greatly slant their estimates “to fit his expressed preferences. . . . He did not realize that the intelligence estimates were being massively biased to fit his expressed preferences” (210).

 

But if this is correct, it suggests that Westmoreland was not just a ‘bullshitter’ in the sense defined by Moise and Frankfurt (i.e., one who does not care about truth or falsehood as long as it serves his purpose). He was also a fool. If he wanted Johnson to grant him the 200,000-plus reinforcements he desired, he was not served well by underestimating enemy troop numbers. Nor was he served well by encouraging or tolerating inaccurate assessments of the growing strength of his Vietnamese enemy in 1967 leading up to TET 1968. Westmoreland was also a liar. Moise reminds the reader, for example, that in 1984, the General dropped his suit against CBS for its TV documentary about TET, because witness evidence was mounting that he had misled the public, Congress, and President Johnson about enemy numbers in order to advance his claim that the war was being won (41-42).

 

Perhaps I missed something, but Moise does not discuss the issue of whether MACV’s estimates of PLAF casualties deceptively included body counts of South Vietnamese civilians. On another matter, Moise also writes that the first significant decline in the bomb tonnage the United States dropped in Indochina occurred in August 1969 (206). Government sources indicate, however, that compared to the period 1965 through 1968, the total expenditure of munitions deployed by airpower across all of Indochina from the beginning of 1969 through 1972 increased dramatically, from 3,190,458 to 4,213,073 tons, even though the number of combat air sorties declined, from 1,765,000 to 1,687,000.[3]

 

Moreover, some Vietnamese sources reinforce the claim that PLAF and PAVN forces did indeed take heavy casualties and were significantly crippled during the 1968 fighting. Former North Vietnamese diplomats, Luu Van Loi and Nguyen Anh Vu, for example, wrote in 1996: “The spring 1968 general offensive ... was a big political and psychological success.... However, we had also suffered great losses. We had thrown all our forces into the general offensive ... and when the enemy opened their counteroffensive, we had no force left, our position was weakened and we coped with the counteroffensive with great difficulty. We fell into a critical situation in the years 1969, 1970, 1971.”[4]

 

If correct, this assessment throws into question Moise’s argument that Communist forces were not severely “crippled” (2)—though it does not undermine his thesis about other TET myths. Thus, a more accurate appraisal of the fighting could be that the U.S.-ARVN counteroffensive not only produced larger U.S.-ARVN casualties but also seriously damaged—yet did not destroy—the PLAF and PAVN. Subsequently, the Politburo was able to amend its strategy and carry it out successfully by 1972.

Meanwhile, President-elect Richard Nixon was revising U.S. strategy in the wake of TET and after his election in November 1968. Having learned in March 1968 that Johnson’s Wise Men had advised him to disengage from the war, candidate Nixon told confidants that “I’ve come to the conclusion that there’s no way to win the war. But we can’t say that, of course. In fact, we have to seem to say the opposite, just to keep some degree of bargaining leverage.”[5]

 

Once in office, Nixon’s strategy was not simply “Vietnamization” (206), which is the conventional historical wisdom. His strategy was multifaceted and only coalesced during his first two years in office: Madman Theory threat-making; threat diplomacy vis-à-vis Hanoi and Moscow; selected military escalations throughout Indochina; de-Americanization; Vietnamization (i.e., building up ARVN); détente and rapprochement with Moscow and Beijing; and the ‘decent interval’ exit strategy, coupled with a negotiated compromise agreement with Hanoi.

 

On this point, I have one additional minor objection about Moise’s subtitle: The Most Misunderstood Event of the Vietnam War. My impression is that the most misunderstood major event of the Vietnam War is the Nixon phase—specifically, the widespread misunderstanding of his policy and strategy during his presidency, as well as the matter of how the January 1973 Paris Agreement came about. These, for example, are topics that were badly muddled in the recent Ken Burns/Lynn Novick documentary series on the Vietnam War.[6]

 

Despite minor omissions and possible errors, Moise’s Myths of Tet is an essential, corrective study of the mythology surrounding the TET Offensive and the Vietnam War in general. The myth of U.S. and ARVN victory in the 1968 fighting—which is what this book is mainly about—played into the hawkish Right-wing stab-in-the-back legend about the Vietnam War in general: the claim that the press, the antiwar movement, congressional doves (especially Democrats), and the faint-hearted citizenry lost a war that could have been won.[7] Moise does not use the term, ‘stab-in-the-back,’ or place TET mythology into this larger myth-making framework. But he does clearly suggest that in the construction and perpetuation of the myths of TET, there was a strong element of blaming others for the U.S. failure in Vietnam by those who perpetuated the war.

 

Review by Douglas J. Macdonald, Colgate University, Emeritus
 

Professor Edwin Moise of Clemson University is one of the premier historians of the Vietnam War. Students of the war are indebted to him for his outstanding bibliography on the conflict, which he generously edits and supports online. He is a spirited and intellectually adventurous scholar who takes on controversial issues: the North Vietnam (NVN) Land Reform of 1956; the Gulf of Tonkin Incident of 1964; and, now perhaps his most difficult, complex, and elusive topic, the Tet Offensive(s) of 1968.[8] Any work by a premier historian on such a turning point in history is by definition an important book.

 

This time around, however, Professor Moise has written what I would call “verdict first” history. This approach, formulated by the late Ralph B. Smith, “starts out from an interpretation which is supposedly beyond challenge and proceeds to collect the ‘evidence afterwards’ required to demonstrate its validity.” This appellation need not imply that such works are of low quality. Indeed, any fair-minded reader would acknowledge Moise’s dedication and scholarship. Yet, when one is making a “case” against another “case” (what Moise portrays condescendingly as a set of myths) there is a natural tendency to emphasize confirming evidence at the expense of disconfirming data. As with much verdict history, the problem is not so much what Moise includes in his narrative, though there are problems there, but the elements of the story that he ignores.[9]

 

Tet and the OB debate

 

The controversy surrounding the Tet Offensives was present from their beginning, particularly involving U.S. intelligence estimates of the Communists’ Order of Battle (OB), that is, military resources at one’s disposal. Sam Adams, a CIA analyst who worked on the OB, and his subsequent supporters, charged that the Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (MACV) cooked the numbers of Communist forces in 1967 for political reasons to falsely show progress in the war. MACV, by narrowing the definition of who counted for inclusion in the OB, estimated around 300,000 “effective” fighters were in South Vietnam in 1967, and actually gave a lower number by the end of the year. By including part-time, unarmed, and other supporters who did periodic tasks for the insurgency, Adams and other CIA dissenters placed the OB figure at around 600,000. Adams eventually and controversially charged that the MACV leadership suppressed evidence leading to the difference in numbers, and ultimately alleged that his superiors in the CIA abetted the cover-up. Professor Moise generally accepts the order of magnitude of Adams’s numbers. (Chapters 2-3.)

 

The OB debate is more than just a hobby horse for academics; it has become part of the general perception of the nature of the war. The bitterness of these bureaucratic battles also lingers for some participants in the controversy. In a recent issue of International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence, for instance, former CIA official Richard Kovar, who transferred out of the Vietnam intelligence section over the OB issue in 1967, makes the case for the dissident view in a review of a book by Adams’s godson, Who The Hell Are We Fighting?, calling Adams a “hero.”[10] In the review, Kovar notes that Adams’s posthumously published, unfinished book, War By Numbers, is used as a source to train current CIA OB estimators.[11]

 

There also is a “Sam Adams Award for Integrity in Intelligence,” given by an organization calling itself the “Sam Adams Associates for Integrity in Intelligence.”[12] By contrast, the official MACV view, particularly as represented by then Lt. Colonel Daniel Graham, who headed signals intelligence analysis for MACV J-2, is excoriated by Kovar and others as the villain in the intelligence failures leading up to the Tet Offensives of 1968.[13] Professor Moise adopts a similar critical view of MACV, and Graham (73-88.)

 

In reality, however, each side in the order-of-battle debate got some important things right, and some important things wrong. Neither side, for example, accurately estimated North Vietnamese recruitment/conscription in the South, or anything close to it.[14] Recruitment/conscription and infiltration data can now be found in official postwar Vietnamese histories that give a better sense of the relative accuracy of the two sides of the OB debate.[15] Surprisingly, these postwar Vietnamese statistics rarely appear in The Myths of Tet. This data also addresses some of the issues that animated the standoff between MACV and the CIA over the size and nature of the enemy in Vietnam.[16]

 

The Origins of the OB Debates

 

The OB intelligence problem facing the US Army was a unique one in its modern experience. The system that MACV devised to solve that problem was accurately characterized by Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development (CORDs) director Robert Komer as “Byzantine.”[17] The effort bifurcated in 1967 into two separate MACV organizations: The Combined Intelligence Center, Vietnam (hereafter, Combined Intelligence) and the Current Intelligence, Episodes, and Estimates Division (hereafter, Current Intelligence). The former had existed since 1965, but the latter was created out of several pre-existing MACV bureaus and the advent of new MACV intelligence leadership in mid-1967 under General Phillip Davidson, Jr.

 

There were significant differences between the two units in terms of organization, access to intelligence data, and epistemic approaches to the OB problem. Combined Intelligence was restricted to “collateral” sourcing (POW interrogations, captured documents, etc.) because it was a joint Army of the Republic of (South) Vietnam (ARVN) and MACV operation and the more highly classified intercepted enemy communications (SIGINT) were believed to be too sensitive to share with a sometimes leak-prone Vietnamese ally. Nothing used was classified beyond confidential, (Kin for ARVN) the lowest classification extant.

 

In contrast, Current Intelligence utilized “all-source” materials, but especially SIGINT because it supplied tactical information to commanders in the field.[18] Combined Intelligence, because of the labor-intensive and time-consuming tasks of translating and evaluating materials, not to mention properly identifying Communist units in the field, often had a time lag of three months to a year before producing an accepted end product. Tactically, it was mostly useless because untimely. This difference undermines a key assertion by Moise—that a deliberately low estimate of the enemy’s OB was responsible for the surprise suffered at Tet (85, 130). No one at the time would have looked to Combined Intelligence as an important source of indications and warning of enemy actions or a source of current, actionable intelligence.

 

CIA dissenter Adams gets much credit from his supporters for ‘discovering’ the low figures used in some categories of MACV’s OB in mid-1966, primarily those outside the immediate tactical need for information on the Main Units it was fighting in 1964-1966.[19] Yet MACV was aware of the softness of some of the numbers which they had inherited in 1964-1965 from ARVN and earlier U.S. analysts. Indeed, in March 1966, before Adams began looking into the problem, MACV J-2 (intelligence) chief General Joseph McChristian set up a project designated ‘Ritz’ to study the Communist military OB, which was followed later in the year, partially in response to Adams’ analysis, by project ‘Corral’ that aimed to study the political OB. Thus, the studies of the actual fighters and their supporters among the population were done separately, though in tandem. By early 1966, MACV J-2 had enough personnel to assess the lower echelons of the insurgency rather than just the Main Force units. Lt. Colonel Gains Hawkins and Combined Intelligence were placed in charge of the projects.[20]

 

The Ritz and Corral projects were carried out largely by inductive methods: interviews with commanders and intelligence officers in the field, captured documents, and interrogations. Unlike Current Intelligence and the CIA, Combined Intelligence also included inputs from ARVN intelligence. Unlike most senior officers, General McChristian actually took the pedagogical mission of working with ARVN seriously. Moreover, ARVN provided MACV J-2 with cultural and linguistic help for which McChristian publicly thanked them. Although Moise plays down the importance of extrapolation, the CIA and Current Intelligence, unlike Combined Intelligence, relied heavily on the method due to relatively few samples for reaching their figures for the total OB. In March 1967, after a year-long inductive study, Combined Intelligence reached tentative totals that were roughly in between the old MACV OB and Adams’s new one.

 

The OB debate was caught up in a larger question over the nature of the Vietnam War. The disagreements were fundamental and remain so. Everyone recognized that the Vietnam War had a hybrid basis in military terms: part conventional and part insurgency. But in American interpretations two alternative and politically loaded explanations drove the intelligence debates of 1966-1968. One was based on the analytical assumption that the war was primarily an invasion by the NVN (hereafter, invasion explanation), the other that it was primarily a local insurrection based in the villages (hereafter, insurrection explanation.)[21]

 

The new figures from the Ritz/Corral studies in 1967 were close to midpoint between Adams’s estimates and the old OB:

 

Main/Local

Old MACV

MACV Dissenters

CIA Dissenters

Forces

107,972

107,972

118,000

Admin Support

  23,700

  23,700+

100,000+

Guerrillas

112,760

198,000

275,000+

Political OB

  39,175

  90,000

100,000+

Totals

283,607

419,672+

593,000+

[Source: “Chart, Democratic Republic of South Vietnam – Communist Forces in Vietnam – CIA Research Reports (Supplemental),” (March 27, 1967), 587, at: TT: Item No. F029200040371. A handwritten note at the bottom of the page says: “Prepared by S. Adams.”]

 

Leaving off the “+” (or higher), the old OB total was 136,065 lower than the new Ritz/Corral inductive study, and Adams’s estimated totals were 173,328 higher. Yet MACV’s dissenting officials were also nowhere near CIA’s dissenters in orders of magnitude in their OB estimates. The question then, and now, was how to arbitrate among the figures?

 

These differences shaped intra-governmental relations in the period. The OB debates represented a breakdown of civil-military relations and empathy to an unusual degree. As Orrin Schwab observes: “Two [organizational] cultures, one grounded in military history and institutions, the other civilian, founded in the political and social milieu of the post-Second World War America, diverged over the Vietnam War.”[22] Professor Moise decidedly sides with the insurrection explanation and treats the invasion explanation as one of the set of myths he is out to dispel (28, 71).

 

The Innovations of The Myths of Tet

 

How to wade through the numbers? The answer thus far in the historical record has been to make inferences from the OB during the Tet Offensives and apply them retroactively. But Moise adds two interesting analytical tweaks to this approach. First, he correctly emphasizes the continuous military battles throughout 1968, when too much of the literature refers only to the February-March wave as the Tet Offensive. This is a badly needed corrective to the war literature. Hence my own use of the plural Offensives when referring to the events of 1968. Moise is not alone in this, but it is helpful to see a major historian of the war iterate it anew.

 

This also leads Moise to define the 1968 developments as continuous events of the war that can be compared with what occurred in 1967 as a standard of judgment. This is defensible, although 1968 did represent a major escalation of the war by the NVN and the year had its ebbs and flows. But the principals in the United States at the time, and many subsequent scholars, tended to look to the February-March wave as a new standard with which to compare the intensity of subsequent Communist actions. When contemporary or subsequent analysts referred to the “Mini-Tet” of the May-June wave, or the relative weakness of the August-September wave, they were comparing them to the February-March wave, not 1967 statistics as Moise does. When viewed in this way, their conclusions do not seem so egregious. But it is useful to the Vietnam War literature for Moise to bring up the question to make others aware of the different points of comparison that are used when offering judgments about the severity of battlefield activity.

 

Second, Moise uses the number of U.S. and ARVN casualties during 1968 as an indicator of the number of Communist troops fighting, and as support for the higher numbers of the OB dissenters. Hence his argument that without the kinds of numbers of village-based combatants claimed by the MACV and CIA dissenters being available locally (he very rarely mentions infiltration during 1968 in relation to the Tet Offensives), such a level of fighting could not have been sustained. He correctly notes, for example, that the U.S. casualties in the May-June wave were higher than in the February-March wave.

 

The military’s explanations for the higher U.S. and ARVN casualties in 1968 were that: 1) in the February-March wave the element of surprise gave the Communists a measure of very temporary superiority, and, 2) more importantly, the May-June and August-September waves were characterized by indirect artillery attacks, with longer distance shelling predominating rather than frontal assaults as in February-March, which would likely have required fewer combatants to deliver more allied casualties. In other words, there is no direct causal connection between U.S. casualties and the Communists’ OB. Thus, the number of allied casualties, which Moise relies upon heavily, is a weak indicator of enemy OB. It was the relative lethality of the weapons used that better explains the higher numbers of allied casualties.

 

As Ronald Spector, who has written one of the few books to incorporate the fighting throughout 1968, which Moise rightly praises (5), notes:

 

Although the number of attacks was impressive, the Communists’ May offensive was far less formidable than their earlier efforts at Tet [i.e., the February-March wave.] There were only about a dozen ground assaults, most of them minor, and the Communists mainly confined themselves to shelling their targets from a distance. Within a day or two of the first attacks of [May-June’s] mini-Tet, it became clear that the Communists were concentrating their efforts in three areas of South Vietnam: the eastern portion of I Corps, the Central Highlands, and above all Saigon.[23]

 

When speaking of the less intense activity in the May-June and August-September waves most analysts are discussing geographic scope and numbers of attacks compared to the February-March wave.

 

The military’s point about the increased numbers of indirect fire attacks can also be seen in a multi-year comparison, and this is a case where such a comparison makes sense. In 1967, there were 1,538 ground assaults and 992 indirect fire only attacks recorded. In 1968, the number of ground assaults was about the same as 1967, 1,500, but indirect fire only attacks had risen sharply to 2,410. In 1969, ground assaults went up slightly to 1,615, while indirect fire only attacks went down slightly to 2,237.[24] Indirect fire only attacks do not require large numbers of troops, while ground assaults do. They can produce higher levels of casualties with lower levels of troops. The available evidence strongly suggests that is what happened.

 

By all credible accounts, the May-June and August-September waves were weaker compared to the effort in February-March 1968. But the standard of judgment for the intensity of the war had become the geographic range of the offensives. The new standard for the intensity of the war now became the February-March wave. If actions were less than countrywide – and the February-March and August-September waves were hardly countrywide - then it was judged a weaker effort. Thus, Moise makes a good case for the increased length of the fighting after March,1968, and it is a case that needs to be made, but not for a large local Communist OB being necessary to sustain it. Indeed, the one analytical group that came closest to predicting the first wave, a three-man CIA team in Saigon, used the MACV numbers and captured documents to make their predictions, not the dissenters’ extrapolations. Moreover, as the postwar Vietnamese histories show, it was not local insurgents who did much of the fighting in 1968 but infiltrators from the North.

 

Contested Numbers

 

Moise takes strong issue with the MACV claim that recruitment/conscription was declining in 1967. Though he admits that overall Communist recruitment/conscription in the South was suffering in early 1967, he also makes the following statement about an August report from CORDS Director Robert Komer and Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker that there was hard evidence that recruitment/conscription was declining: “The claim that MACV figures on declining Viet Cong recruitment were based on ‘hard evidence’ was absurd” (52). Yet there were abundant captured documents and POW interrogations published by MACV (i.e., published within the U.S. government, but periodically made public by the U.S. Embassy in weekly reports) that supported that conclusion.

 

Moreover, MACV was not the only organization reporting Communist problems with recruitment/conscription in 1966-1967. In a March 1967 Intelligence Memorandum entitled “re: Viet Cong Manpower Problems,” the CIA’s Office of Research and Reports, the Special Assistant for Vietnam Affairs Office (where Sam Adams was positioned), the Office of Current Intelligence, and the Office of National Estimates offered “the best judgment of the Directorate” on the question. It found that, based on captured documents which contained many COSVN (the insurgency’s headquarters in the South) directives, severe problems with recruitment and conscription were occurring during 1966-1967 in Ba Ria, Long An, Binh Duong, Quang Nam, and Phu Yen Provinces. In the crucial Tay Ninh Province, shortages in the first half of 1966 were “due to the shortage of recruits, who can no longer be obtained from villages and hamlets.” [25] There were growing reports from defectors that PAVN troops were being used more and more as replacements as the Main Force Unit battles in northern South Vietnam required more and more replacements for their high rate of casualties.

 

In the allied-designated Military Region IV, the recruitment goal in 1966 had been 5,000, but only 600 were enlisted. In Binh Dinh Province, the one which Adams initially used to demonstrate undercounting, a May 1966 directive complained of a civilian labor shortage that was seriously affecting food preparations, placing new time-consuming duties on the fighters. In Military Region I, where most of the Main Force Unit fighting of the war took place, only 45% of recruitment/conscription goals were met in the first five months of 1966. The wider war after mid-1965 had bred resistance to the insurgents even in areas they controlled. A notebook captured in Operation Cedar Falls in early 1967 noted that because of the presence of U.S. forces in the countryside, the insurgency had lost access or control of over one million people from mid-1965 until late 1966.[26]

 

A follow-up CIA study in July 1967 made the same points and was based on several hundred captured documents and defector/deserter sources. It noted that in Binh Dinh Province the insurgency was reported to have only reached 30% of its recruitment/conscription goals in the first quarter of 1966.[27] Adams had taken aspirational goals from his documents from Binh Dinh and assumed they would be filled. By mid-1967, it was clear they had not been.

 

In the Communist-designated B-2 Battlefront, whether through disillusionment with the Communists, rallying to the SVN, fleeing the violence, or avoiding involvement in the war altogether, by 1967 the insurgency was becoming predominantly a Northern affair and the future trends were all in that direction. The main reasons were apparently the increased violence in the countryside, taxes, the unpopularity of corvée labor, and conscription. As David Elliott notes, after 1965: “It became difficult or impossible to motivate villagers to participate in ammunition transportation, destroying roads, or waging ‘face-to-face struggles.’ [Communist] Cadres became acutely concerned about the welfare of their own families. This brought revolutionary activity to a near standstill in some places and had a serious effect on cadre morale.”[28]

 

What do postwar Vietnamese government figures demonstrate? They can provide surprising, and even shocking, challenges to orthodox Western interpretations of the war. To the extent they are accurate, they indicate that infiltration from the NVN by PAVN troops increased considerably to make up for the drop in recruitment/conscription in South Vietnam. I have not found comparative statistics for the entire country, but there are infiltration and recruitment/conscription statistics for the vital B-2 Battlefront of the Communists, which encompassed all of the U.S./ARVN Military Regions 3 and 4, and part of the southern Military Region 2. Seventy percent of South Vietnam’s population resided there, and it was the primary local recruitment/conscription target for the insurgency in the South.

 

[Refer to the PDF edition]

 

Thus, one would expect that recruitment/conscription figures on the B-2 Battlefront would be somewhat representative, if not higher, than those in the rest of South Vietnam.

 

When charted graphically certain trends in recruitment/conscription and infiltration in the B-2 Battlefront become clear and challenge the basic assumptions of the insurrection explanation:

 

[Refer to the PDF edition]

 

B-2 Battlefront Infiltration vs. Recruitment/Conscription, 1961-1975

[Source: General Department of Rear Services, Review of Rear Services Operations for the Cochin China-Extreme Southern Central Vietnam Battlefield (B2) During the Resistance War Against the Americans (Hanoi: People’s Army of Vietnam, 1986), Appendix 8 “Building Armed Forces in the B-2 Theater (Cochin China and Extreme Southern Central Vietnam),” 546. Translated by Merle Pribbenow II. Chart by D. Macdonald.]

 

Several general observations are in order. First, in the Diem period of the early 1960s, when most interested Americans’ views of the war were formed, the insurgency was primarily a village-based insurrection, at least in the B-2 Battlefront. Contrary to the arguments of some revisionist Vietnam War historians[29], the Diem government was in trouble and facing a genuinely popular revolt by 1963. This is the period during which the image of a village-based insurrection took hold among critics of the war in the academy, the press, and other opinion-shaping institutions. It appears to be a somewhat accurate conclusion relative to the amount of infiltration at that point. But it should also be noted that recruitment/conscription never reached that level again.

Beginning with the large unit American intervention in mid-1965, the nature of the war began to change dramatically. As conscription, coercion, and taxes overtook the ‘Robin Hood’ image the local insurgents had promulgated, such as it was, the insurgency apparently began to resemble more the Sheriff of Nottingham for many villagers.[30] As has often been noted, the fact that the peasants fled the Communists did not mean they supported the SVN. In about the first quarter of 1966, the number of PAVN infiltrators became greater than the number of local recruits/conscripts on the B-2 Battlefront. It should also be noted that neither the CIA, MACV, nor the National Security Agency (NSA) had any idea how far this shift to infiltration had actually gone at the time according to the public record. The numbers of recruits/conscripts did go up during 1968, but how voluntary any of that was is unclear. After the failure of the May-June wave it began to collapse again.

 

This also appears to have been a national trend throughout South Vietnam. The official PAVN history of the war notes a total of 81,000 infiltrators (virtually all “fillers,” or small groups sent to disperse to existing units in the South rather than intact PAVN units) in 1967, with a national recruitment/conscription figure in the South of a mere 7,600 new troops.[31] This is at a time when the CIA and MACV dissenters were citing an estimate of 7,000 recruits/conscripts per month, and were arguing that the recruitment/conscription estimates should be increased.[32]

 

Although recruiting/conscripting did increase overall just before the Tet Offensive, as Moise notes, its quick and steep decline appears to have begun sometime in mid-1968. By 1969, the recruitment/conscription total in the B-2 Battlefront was a face-saving 100. As far as the key indicator of recruitment/conscription goes, if there were similar developments in the rest of South Vietnam, Moise’s claim that the local part of the insurgency stayed strong during 1969-1971 needs to be revisited based on the new evidence from postwar Vietnam.[33]

 

As the scope of the fighting intensified during 1964-1967, the PAVN had to rely more and more on recruits/conscripts from the North. The national levels of infiltration reflect that and are shown in the following chart:

 

[Refer to the PDF edition] 

 

[Sources: The Military History Institute of Vietnam, People’s Army of Vietnam, translated by Merle L. Pribbenow II, Victory in Vietnam: The Official History of the People’s Army of Vietnam, 1954-1975 (Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas Press, 2002), 115, 127, 156, 170-171, 181, 191, 211, 226-227, 464 fn. 14, 466 fn. 13. These figures presumably represent all areas, including the DMZ. For the years 1961-1963 the total figure of 40,000 is given. I have arbitrarily split them into a 10-15-15 sequence, but only the total number is cited in the text. Chart by D. Macdonald]

 

One can further see how this “Northing” of the war affected the relative insurgent mix of the OB in the B-2 Battlefront in postwar statistics:

 

[Refer to the PDF edition]  

 

[Source: General Department of Rear Services, Review of Rear Services Operations for the Cochin China-Extreme Southern Central Vietnam Battlefield (B2) During the Resistance War Against the Americans (Hanoi: People’s Army of Vietnam, 1986), 546, Appendix 8. Translation provided by Merle L. Pribbenow II. Chart by D. Macdonald]

 

These figures, which are not yet dispositive but are strongly suggestive, challenge Moise’s analysis and the dominant literature on the war and demonstrate the need for a fresh analysis. Whether one calls it an invasion or not, the insurrection model of the Vietnam insurgency is in need of major revision based on postwar evidence and newly declassified SIGINT intelligence information. Whatever explanations emerge from the new evidence from Vietnam and U.S. intelligence agencies, surely these developments must have affected the decision-making for the Tet Offensive in the North.

 

Though Moise barely mentions infiltration during 1968, preferring to concentrate on what he sees as largely local insurrectionist actions, many of the SIGINT figures on infiltration in 1968 are now available, though still heavily redacted.[34] The following chart, though based on documents claiming to carry estimates of arrival in South Vietnam by PAVN troops, in fact demonstrates the numbers entering the “infiltration pipeline” that stretched from southern North Vietnam into the South, not those actually arriving there. With the ending of bombing above the 20th parallel in March, 1968, the U.S. Air Force concentrated its efforts in south North Vietnam and the Laotian infiltration routes, and with more precise intelligence than ever before. The following totals are therefore artificially high because they do not include attrition on the Ho Chi Minh Trail. I have added the American and ARVN casualty figures from Moise’s book to show the magnitude and scale of the PAVN infiltration when compared to the allied casualties during the Offensives that he emphasizes.

 

[Refer to the PDF edition]

 

[Sources: KIA: Edwin Moise, The Myths of Tet, 150-151; Infiltration: “Memorandum and Chart,” Art McCafferty, White House SIGINT Analyst to Walt Rostow (June 10, 1968); CIA/DIA, “Memorandum for Mr. W.W. Rostow,” and Enclosure, “Evaluation of Mr. McCafferty’s Memorandum of 10 June 1968,” n.d., at: https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP78T02095R000100060010-2.PDF Chart by D. Macdonald.]

 

Moise does not include such levels of infiltration but rather assumes the increased number of insurgents were already existing locally as the insurrection explanation would predict. As noted above, recruitment/conscription also increased, at least in the B-2 Battlefront. Yet one must ask: if PAVN had hundreds of thousands of ready reserves available as the dissenters were claiming why was it necessary to infiltrate more than 100,000 semi-trained people unfamiliar with the South from the NVN on an emergency basis beginning in February 1968 after the Tet Offensives had already begun? Where were all those estimated reserves that the dissenters claimed? The insurrection explanation offers no plausible explanation for the absence of the large numbers of Viet Cong irregulars.

 

The only explanation given for this puzzle has been that the estimated irregulars were all killed. But in terms of KIA casualties, the official American figures from the Office of the Secretary of Defense put estimated Communist killed at 181,000 and infiltrators at 230,000 (“total leaving Vietnam”). Postwar Vietnamese histories suggest those are on the high side. The Vietnamese government now uses figures of roughly 110,000 KIA and 140,000 infiltrators arrived in South Vietnam for 1968.[35]

 

Thus, the new figures on Communist recruitment/conscription and infiltration, historically underreported sources of information, are especially telling for the OB problem. Recruitment/conscription went up modestly in the last half of 1967, but it likely had a strong element of threats and was closer to coercion than voluntarism. Even so, for recruitment/conscription in South Vietnam the total was an anemic 7,600 for the entire year. The overall insurgency may have been still mostly intact in 1967 leading up to the Tet Offensives, but its Southern component was seriously slipping away. How much the leadership in Hanoi understood that is a large unanswered question, but if they did not, they certainly discovered it in February 1968. In response they threw green, malarial, and untrained troops from the North at the allied side. These were not PAVN regulars.[36] The slaughter was horrific. As noted, American intelligence intercepted SIGINT that claimed 230,000 had entered the infiltration pipeline during 1968. According to postwar Vietnamese sources, 140,000 arrived. Although these figures should be seen as rough orders of magnitude, as many as 90,000 infiltrators – about 39% - may have died or deserted on the Ho Chi Minh Trail during the Tet Offensives.[37]

 

In summary, Edwin Moise has produced the most systematic account of the insurrection explanation for the Tet Offensive, while trying to define elements of the invasion explanation as mere myths. Postwar evidence from the Vietnamese government and new American intelligence evidence offer serious challenges to the insurrection narrative that he does not address. That evidence shows that U.S. intelligence did reasonably well in estimating large unit infiltration, but rather poorly for small unit and replacement infiltration prior to the intelligence breakthrough in early 1968. Both MACV and the CIA, however, badly overestimated the popularity of the insurgency among southerners, as does Moise’s account. We now know much more about passive and other forms of resistance among peasants that is a form of agency that is not easily quantified and that can easily be mistaken for political support for insurgents or governments.[38] Scholars should no longer rely on the revolutionary romanticism that has dominated the history of the Vietnam War.

 

 

 

Two narratives compete in The Myths of Tet. The foil is the conventional wisdom surrounding the Communists’ 1967-1968 “Winter-Spring Offensive.”[39] It suggests that by June 1967, U.S. and South Vietnamese forces were locked in an attritional stalemate with the Viet Cong (VC) and the North Vietnamese Army (NVA). Communist forces were suffering heavy casualties without making progress towards unification of the country and the morale of the VC and their supporters to the north was deteriorating. By the fall of 1967, some intelligence analysts at the U.S. Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (MACV) also suggested that the allies had reached the ‘crossover-point,’ whereby Communist losses exceeded their ability to secure replacements. U.S. forces had achieved one of the objectives assigned to them by a ‘metric-crazed’ Pentagon; it was possible to suggest that U.S. units were beginning to win the Vietnam War because they had achieved their ‘attrition objective.’ Everyone in Washington and Saigon recognized that political commitment was America’s Achilles’ heel. Nevertheless, the voters at home seemed tolerant of the body bags and accepted official reassurances that things were going well. The Tet offensive then erupted on the nights of 30-31 January 1968. The benefits of a lopsided allied battlefield victory vanished as the political shock of the surprise attack forced a policy reassessment in Washington. Political defeat was snatched from the jaws of battlefield victory, so to speak. Those who claim that an American path to victory was clear in the aftermath of Tet exaggerate the prospects for success. Still, counterfactuals abound: things might have turned out differently if those VC sappers had never made it to the U.S. Embassy in Saigon and onto television screens in the United States.

 

The other narrative is Edwin Moise’s painstaking effort to discredit this conventional wisdom by illustrating through a series of vignettes that there was never any hope, progress, or lost opportunity during the Vietnam War and those who saw light at the end of the tunnel were either delusional or pathologically dishonest. According to Moise, senior U.S. officers and officials more or less deliberately and knowingly underestimated enemy strength and overestimated allied progress. As a result, they failed to react to signals of impending attack against South Vietnam’s cities during the Tet offensive, thereby helping to deliver a political shock to the American body politic and especially to official Washington. Through perfidy, dishonesty, and malfeasance, which were enhanced at every turn by stupidity, members of the Lyndon Baines Johnson administration and senior U.S. officers exacerbated political vulnerabilities that the Communists exploited. For Moise, American officials and officers only have themselves to blame for their defeat in Vietnam.

 

Despite these divergent perspectives, there is general agreement within these dueling narratives about the main events that occurred from about September 1967 to August 1968. NVA and VC main force units launched a series of attacks in the Central Highlands and in I Corps (often referred to as the Border Battles), culminating in the NVA siege of the U.S. Marine outpost at Khe Sanh. These attacks were intended to draw U.S. units away from the coastal cities of South Vietnam, which in any event is where they were supposed to operate.[40] Then during the nights of 30 and 31 January 1968, the Communists launched attacks against southern cities, hoping to spark a ‘General Uprising’ among urbanities. This sort of thing had happened before and was part of Vietnamese strategic culture and folklore; in previous uprisings every last man, woman, and child would wield whatever implement was available to kill as many ethnic Chinese as possible.[41] During Tet 1968, everyone was supposed to attack government forces and facilities spontaneously and occupy cities, leading to the collapse of the Army Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) and the isolation of U.S. units, which would be busy engaging VC main force and NVA units in the countryside. By definition, a General Uprising is a ‘go-for-broke’ affair that utilizes every available resource to defeat a superior opponent. If all went well, Washington would be placed on the horns of a dilemma: escalate or go home. Ironically, things went very badly for the Vietcong and their North Vietnamese allies, but Washington still faced that same dilemma.

 

So much for the big picture and therein lies the rub. The Myths of Tet is not about the ‘big picture.’ It is about demonstrating how key estimates, statistics, documents, and statements support the author’s position while discrediting the conventional wisdom. It can only be appreciated, let alone understood, by an expert audience because its narrative hinges on exquisite distinctions and interpretations of fact. Although I have about eighty ‘quibbles’ with the narrative that could each generate an article-length response, I will spare the reader endless commentary about some tree and focus on the forest. Specifically, elements of Moise’s narrative support the MACV position about the size and nature of communist forces in Vietnam. There are also theoretical reasons to suggest that the order-of-battle controversy did not play a key part in the U.S. intelligence failure surrounding the Tet offensive.

 

The Order of Battle

 

In the early-1990s, analysts at the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) asked if I would be willing to discuss some analytical issues with them. As it turned out, they were working on an order of battle for the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Columbia (FARC) and they were having difficulty determining exactly who to count as a combatant. Should they count part-time soldiers who had no crew-served weapons or little military training? Should political supporters be counted as a replacement pool? What about porters and corvee labor? Did the FARC’s unit classification make any sense, or was it a figment of Marxist imagination? Temptation got the better of me. When they finished describing their problems, I could not stop myself from posing a question in return: “What does the CIA think?”[42]

 

Under most circumstances, there is nothing particularly mysterious about an accounting of an opposing military, commonly referred to as its ‘order of battle.’ It is an estimate of the size and makeup of an opponent’s military force done on a unit-by-unit basis. Not only does it provide a general quantitative and qualitative estimate of exactly what one is up against, but it also allows assessments of individuals units. This is critical because it is helpful to know if one’s immediate opponent is an elite unit, a green unit, a unit that suffered heavy casualties, and so on. Issues surrounding order-of-battle estimates generally do not preoccupy historians, but over and under estimates of an opposing military have influenced political, strategic, and tactical outcomes in war.

There does not seem to be much debate about MACV’s estimate of North Vietnamese Combat troops (55,000) and Viet Cong Main and Local Forces (63,000)—see estimates for June 1967 (Table 3.1, 60). This is not surprising. These units were conventional in nature, had standardized organizations and equipment, and were in radio contact with higher headquarters. Signals Intelligence (SIGINT) could identify their existence and whereabouts, which Moise acknowledges (20). Because the South Vietnamese were not privy to SIGINT, MACV had to make a show of documenting the existence of these units with captured materials, prisoner interrogations, or dead soldiers. Nevertheless, conventional Communist units were easy to understand, count, and recognize.

 

All other lists of the different types of communist units operating in Vietnam and the size of those units are admittedly a dog’s breakfast and apparently remained that way throughout the war. In the June 1967 estimate noted above, the number of VC guerrillas was listed as somewhere between 60,000—120,000 and militia were listed as “at least 125,000.” (Table 3.1, 60). The numbers given in this table are not particularly important—they ere just supplied as a starting point for a debate between MACV and the rest of the U.S. intelligence community on a special national intelligence estimate on the enemy order of battle.

 

Nevertheless, the table highlights several issues. The first issue, which Moise recognizes, is that unit taxonomy varied over time and by the organization offering the taxonomy. In other words, it is impossible to determine in this particular table, along with all the other tables provided in the narrative, exactly who is being counted in each category. Different organizations used different categories, and these different categories sometimes combined different types of units and individuals in less than transparent ways. The taxonomy used in the June 1967 table used categories to describe enemy units that were not utilized by MACV.

 

Additionally, in common parlance, policymakers and officers alike referred to enemy units using terms that actually did not correspond to the official categories in either order-of-battle estimates or even the debates over the order of battle itself. This accounting is so confusing that sixty years later, Moise twice has to halt his narrative (28, 68) to bring some modicum of order to the chaos. Bureaucrats will go to great lengths to create standard measures and categories, but in this case it was never really possible to tell who was being counted.[43] Competing taxonomies and a lack of agreed metrics created acrimony.

 

The confused taxonomy is in turn a manifestation of the absence of an accepted model, theory, or even data that could explain the role, size, and composition of the different types of Communist units that participated in People’s War. For instance, Self-Defense forces existed at the village level; everyone seemed to acknowledge their presence. Even in hindsight, however, it is difficult to see how one would develop an estimate of their overall strength because Self-Defense units were not standardized. It also was unclear exactly what constituted membership in the Self-Defense force. No one seemed to know how much military training they received. Moise quotes CIA analyst Sam Adams on this point: “The intelligence community . . . is unsure of the role of the village self-defense forces . . . . Nor do we know with any precision what the irregulars are armed with” (81). Because Self-Defense forces lacked radio communications, SIGINT could not be used to locate their whereabouts or estimate their strength. Moise notes that individuals might have been drawn from the Self-Defense forces to serve as fillers in VC guerrilla units during Tet, but he also notes that they lacked the mobility to participate as entire units in the offensive. Self-Defense forces were undoubtedly important in the Vietnamese view of People’s War. Nevertheless, significant doubts remain about how important they were on the battlefield.

 

An even more fundamental problem complicated unit taxonomies. One would think that by definition, in a People’s War framework, all able-bodied individuals not already serving in combat or support units would be members of the Self-Defense force, regardless of training, equipment, or political commitment. The U.S. military lacks a corresponding unit category for this type of thing. As a result, MACV objected to including what looked to be civilians in an order of battle. General William Westmoreland probably said it best: “with respect to the self-defense and secret self-defense, we are not fighting those people, they are basically civilians. They don’t belong in any representation, numerical representation of the military capability of the enemy” (43). Ironically, the U.S. literally was not fighting ‘those people.’ U.S. efforts were concentrated against NVA and VC main force units in the Central Highlands and I Corps, not in pacification efforts against the VC in the villages. In 1967, pacification was ARVN’s problem. Critics of the MACV position have never accepted the possibility that the military’s objection to including various types of “People’s War Units” in the order of battle was based on professional or moral grounds – that it was both wrong and misleading to label these people as combatants. Today, lawyers would make that decision, not intelligence analysts.

 

The order-of-battle issue demonstrates that as Communist units deviated from conventional norms, there was no shared philosophy or methodology for understanding or counting them. No consensus was reached on a unit taxonomy. The simplest explanation for this state of affairs is that it is difficult to translate People’s War concepts into American strategic culture and doctrine. Order-of-battle estimates were admittedly conservative and slow to change due to the multi-phenomenology required to add additional units—a requirement probably introduced to head off accusations that MACV was cooking the books to justify requests for additional forces. Order-of-battle estimates were also historical in nature and not part of the current intelligence picture used to conduct field operations. Order-of-battle estimates generally facilitate current operations, but this was not the case for American forces during the Vietnam War.

 

Order-of-battle estimates took on a unique role during the Vietnam War because they helped measure progress in attaining the ‘attrition’ objective; they seemed to have virtually no intelligence impact on ongoing operations.Without advancing front lines to trace progress, some measure in the metric-centric Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara’s Pentagon had to emerge. Attrition became one of those metrics. Debates about the order of battle, like most intelligence debates, focused on minutia, but again like most intelligence debates, they were ultimately about the biggest political question of the day. They were about who was wining the war. Most participants in those debates recognized their significance. Thus, if Sam Adams had gained acceptance of a large enemy order of battle—in the 300,000 to 600,000 range—reaching the ‘crossover point’ would have led to U.S. troop reductions in about a decade, a politically unacceptable situation. Achieving the ‘crossover point,’ combined with the lower estimate championed by MACV, however, allowed Westmoreland to anticipate U.S. troop withdrawals by late 1968 or 1969, a politically acceptable timeframe.

 

Senior members of the CIA recognized that the agency was encroaching on the military’s turf by engaging in the order-of-battle debate. Even in 1967, it was clear that the CIA lacked expertise in this area; nevertheless, senior agency officials allowed Adams to tilt at windmills. CIA officials did not give a damn about the order of battle, but in hindsight, it appears that they were trying to create a net assessment of U.S. policy using the metric-based bureaucratic language of the day. MACV kept the CIA at bay; the Tet offensive, not the minutia of the debate over enemy strength, produced that net assessment. Nevertheless, the order-of-battle debate continues to reverberate as a surrogate for the ultimate question facing historians—could the United States have won the Vietnam War?

 

Origins of Surpris

 

The Tet offensive was a strategic surprise attack for several reasons. First, it was a gamble: without the element of surprise, the attack was doomed to fail. In other words, surprise was not just a force multiplier; without surprise as a key enabler, defeat was inevitable because even NVA units would be destroyed if they faced the brunt of U.S. firepower. Second, it was strategic in the sense that it attacked U.S. strategy by circumventing the shield provided by U.S. forces and U.S. Search & Destroy (attrition) operations by placing South Vietnam’s cities quickly under Communist control. It was an attempt to alter current trends that were not in the Communists’ favor. For instance, Moise relays post-Tet reports suggesting that VC units were making up for their losses with North Vietnamese fillers and that North Vietnamese made up the bulk of those who defected during the offensive. He also reports that COSVN (VC Headquarters in South Vietnam) personnel closed up shop and joined the Tet attacks; this is a clear indication that they believed they were in fact undertaking a ‘go-for-broke’ initiative. The only reason the VC would throw headquarters personnel into the attack is that they had no plan ‘B.’. Certeris paribus, there is no incentive to gamble everything if an attritional stalemate is moving in one’s favor.

 

The Communist decision to launch the Tet offensive not only suggests that MACV’s belief that the crossover point had been reached might have been correct, but also that MACV’s estimate of the order of battle was in the ballpark. Recognizing its relative weakness, the weaker party in the conflict is attracted to strategic surprise because it allows it to obtain objectives that are impossible to attain in attritional engagements. In other words, the weaker party in a conflict is attracted to strategic surprise because it allows it to achieve goals beyond its reach when facing a stronger opponent that is forewarned and engaged.[44] By contrast, the stronger party retains an attritional mindset, which sets the stage for surprise to occur. When signs of an impending attack are detected, the stronger party often dismisses them as hare-brained or wildly unrealistic because of the estimate that the weaker party lacks the resources to succeed. Gross miscalculations of relative strength rarely characterize the views of the initiator or the victim of surprise attack.

 

Allied intelligence detected signs of the Tet offensive months before the actual attacks. As Moise notes, by December 1967, officers and officials in Washington and Saigon were talking about the possibility that the Communists would risk everything in a desperate attack. They were not surprised by the attacks because they underestimated the strength of military forces arrayed against them; instead, they were slow to respond to signs of impending attack against the cities because of an accurate estimate of enemy military and political strength. Specifically, allied intelligence did not believe that the urban population would rise up in support of the ‘General-Offensive General Uprising.’ Indeed, Moise suggests that the Tet attacks against Saigon were to include ‘tens of thousands’ of protestors descending on the Presidential Palace. (139) Rumors of an urban revolt were dismissed as preposterous by intelligence officers. There simply were not tens of thousands of VC supporters, for instance, in the confines of Saigon. Intelligence analysts and officers recognized something was afoot by January 1968, but they simply did not believe that generating an urban revolt was the main event of the Communists’ plan.

 

Order of Battle Redux

 

As I completed my doctoral research thirty years ago, I thought it possible that Sam Adams and those who championed a massive increase in the order-of-battle estimate had actually stumbled across an insight into the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong mindset. Adams relied on captured documents that reported very large numbers of individuals in quasi-military units; yet, allied intelligence had a hard time confirming the presence, size, or the activities of these forces. I thought it possible that Viet Cong cadre might have exaggerated the number and size of these units to meet their own quotas. The Viet Cong might have played with the numbers too, causing officials in Hanoi to overestimate the degree of political support they enjoyed in the south. I also think it ironic that this thought occurred to none of the participants in the order-of-battle debate, who were all consumed by a few narrow questions they put to the available data. I confess that temptation has again gotten the best of me. Was the Tet offensive motivated by a Communist overestimate of the size of their own order of battle? If not, exactly where were all those people during the Tet offensive?

 

 

I was aware that I was I was writing a contentious book. I knew it would offend some people, and I was expecting that some critics of the book would misrepresent it. But I am distressed to find that all three of the reviewers here attribute to me arguments that I have not made. Some of their responses seem directed more at the book they expected me to write than at the one I did write.

 

One of the major issues in Douglas Macdonald’s and James Wirtz’s reviews is the order of battle (OB), the official listing of enemy strength in South Vietnam issued every month by Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (MACV). Heated disputes over the OB began in 1967 and have continued up to the present. These began with accusations that MACV was underestimating the strength of some categories of Communist personnel. Later, when MACV dropped from its OB some categories (most famously the “Self Defense” forces—part-time village militia) that it said had too little military significance to be worthy of inclusion, there were charges that this had been improper.

 

Macdonald says that a dispute between two fundamental interpretations of the war drove the disputes over the OB between 1966 and 1968. He says MACV saw the war as “primarily an invasion by the NVN,” while Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) critics of the MACV numbers (and later, I in my book) saw it as “primarily a local insurrection based in the villages.” This is not true of MACV, or of CIA, or of my book.

 

The Myths of Tet does not in fact support either extreme interpretation. Both the invasion from North Vietnam and the insurgency in South Vietnam were fundamental to the Communist war effort at the time of the Tet Offensive.[45] Saying the war was ‘primarily’ one thing or the other would have been as silly as saying the United States military was made up primarily of the Army or primarily of the Air Force.

 

MACV did give the press and the public a view of the war as primarily a North Vietnamese invasion of South Vietnam, but this did not have much influence on its estimates of enemy strength. On the eve of the Tet Offensive, the MACV OB for January 1968 put, in the most conspicuous possible location, page 1 of section I, figures indicating that enemy personnel in South Vietnam, the way MACV counted them, were mostly Viet Cong. North Vietnamese (including those serving in Viet Cong units, not just the ones in units of the People’s Army of Vietnam (PAVN, which MACV called the North Vietnamese Army), made up no more than thirty percent.[46] If the people who produced MACV’s OB had cared about making the enemy forces look mostly North Vietnamese, they would have modified their OB to count only the personnel of regular combat units. This would have given them a majority of northerners. Or at least they would have shifted the southern guerrillas (full-time guerrillas had not been dropped from the OB when the part-time militia were) to a less conspicuous location in the OB.

 

What drove MACV’s conduct in the OB dispute was not an analytical judgment about the nature of the enemy, but a political imperative to reduce the figure for total enemy strength, so as to persuade the public and the Congress that the war was being won. In pursuit of this goal, by January 1968 MACV was seriously undercounting the personnel of regular North Vietnamese combat units, making the war look less like a North Vietnamese invasion of South Vietnam than it actually was.

 

There were some people in the CIA who exaggerated the importance of the Viet Cong village militia, as I acknowledge in my book (81). There may have been some who thought of the war as primarily a southern insurgency, though I cannot recall any who actually said that. But if CIA analysts had been determined to have figures that showed the Communist forces as made up mostly of southerners, this would not have caused a dispute. The MACV figures showed that. What bothered the CIA critics was that the MACV figures for particular categories of Communist forces were grossly inaccurate. They did not reflect the number of personnel actually in those categories, as MACV defined those categories.

 

Macdonald understates the degree to which intelligence officers at MACV, not just at CIA, believed in strength estimates much higher than those in MACV’s order of battle. He acknowledges that there were some, but he implies they were few and lowly. Thus he presents a table contrasting the figures in the MACV OB, as of March 1967, with the views of what he calls “MACV Dissenters” and “CIA Dissenters.” If one consults the document from which he copied this table, one will find that the column he labels “MACV Dissenters” was originally labelled “OB Figure in Near Future.”[47] These were figures that Major General Joseph McChristian, MACV’s J-2 (chief of intelligence), found convincing enough that he was planning to incorporate them into the OB.

 

Neither Macdonald nor the other reviewers mention that when I argue that MACV was underestimating Communist strength in the period leading up to the Tet Offensive, an important part of my evidence is official MACV reports, issued in the name of the MACV J-2[48] at various dates ranging from weeks to years after Tet, acknowledging that the strength of the Communist forces on the eve of Tet had been higher than MACV had reported at the time.

 

I argue in The Myths of Tet that the intensity of combat in 1968 and the first half of 1969 indicated that the Communist forces were stronger than the MACV figures had shown. Macdonald says that I argue that the “village-based combatants” made the difference, that without them the fighting could not have been as intense as it was. This is a blatant misrepresentation of my argument. At no point do I suggest that the Viet Cong part-time village militias, which had been dropped from the MACV OB in 1967, played any large role in the 1968 combat. The best case I had for the militia having participated at all was in the battle for Hue, and I said that in Hue they “had not functioned as combat troops” (126). I made it clear that the full-time village guerrillas, whom MACV had not dropped from its OB but was undercounting, played an important role in the Tet Offensive. But I did not suggest that role was vital, and I said hardly anything about the role of village guerrillas in keeping the heavy fighting going after February 1968. The intense, bloody combat that continued long after February 1968 was conducted mainly by regular combat troops.

 

When I discussed the way MACV was underestimating Communist strength in the months and weeks leading up to Tet, my emphasis overwhelmingly was on regular combat troops, especially the way MACV was underestimating infiltration from North Vietnam, and undercounting North Vietnamese combat units in South Vietnam. I treat this as a major issue (115-123, 176-177). There is no hint of this in Macdonald’s review.

 

I am very puzzled by one passage in which Macdonald wrote, “MACV, by narrowing the definition of who counted for inclusion in the OB, estimated around 300,000 ‘effective’ fighters were in South Vietnam in 1967, and actually gave a lower number by the end of the year.” At no time in 1967 did the MACV OB count, or claim to count, “effective” fighters. I cannot recall ever seeing the words “effective” or “fighter” in any MACV OB. The narrowing of the categories to which Macdonald referred reduced the total size of the OB not to about 300,000 but to 235,852, of which less than 200,000 were combat troops or guerrillas.[49] If MACV had credited the Communists with even close to 300,000 fighters, my book would have looked very different.

 

I argue that if MACV had used higher estimates of enemy strength, warnings that the enemy was planning a major offensive might have been taken more seriously (85, 130). Macdonald rejects this on the grounds that estimates of total enemy strength were not “an important source of indications and warning of enemy actions or a source of current, actionable intelligence.” This is a non sequitur.

 

Macdonald argues that the heavy casualties the Americans suffered in May, June, August, and September 1968 were not evidence that the Communists still had strong troop units during those months, because Communist troop units were not responsible for most of the casualties. Instead the Communists were relying mostly on indirect fire—shelling from a distance—allowing them to inflict more casualties while using fewer troops. He supports this with some statistics on the number of indirect fire attacks by year, and with a passage from an excellent book by Ronald Spector, about the number of indirect fire attacks in May. But the quote from Spector’s After Tet does not say that those indirect fire attacks inflicted a lot of casualties. Indeed, in Spector’s detailed account of the May fighting, the Americans seemed to suffer the heaviest losses not when the enemy troops were trying to keep safe by firing artillery from miles away, but when PAVN infantry “aimed to surprise and pin down the Americans at ranges so close that there could be no help from the deadly U.S. artillery and aircraft.”[50]

 

Macdonald provides no evidence that the heavy casualties the Americans were suffering in May and later months were from indirect fire, and I do not believe that they were. If the Communist forces during 1968 had suddenly begun to kill far more Americans by long-range shelling than they ever had before, Spector would have noticed this, and commented on it. General Westmoreland would have noticed it. Somebody would have noticed it. I would not be hearing about it for the first time in an H-Diplo roundtable review in the year 2018.

 

In the third quarter of 1967, MACV dropped its estimate of enemy recruiting inside South Vietnam from 7,000 to 3,500. In The Myths of Tet, I was scathingly critical of the methodology behind both the old high estimate and the new low estimate (49-51), but I endorsed MACV’s claim that there had been a dramatic decline: “MACV believed that the estimate of 7,000 Viet Cong recruits per month was obsolete; that it had been valid for 1966 but that the recruitment rate had declined dramatically by early 1967. This belief appears to have been correct. By the first half of 1967, almost every young man who was not highly resistant to Viet Cong recruiting had already been recruited” (50). Yet Macdonald writes that “Moise takes strong issue with the MACV claim that recruitment/conscription was declining in 1967.” He seems to take my statement that the new MACV estimate was not based on hard evidence to mean that I do not believe there had been a major decline in Communist recruiting, and he devotes considerable space in his review to gratuitous evidence that there had been such a decline.

 

Macdonald’s discussion of Communist recruiting/conscription in the period after Tet is much more relevant to what I actually wrote. I did not actually say that the Communists were obtaining substantial numbers of personnel inside South Vietnam, but I clearly implied it by citing MACV intelligence estimates indicating that the number of native-born southerners in the Communist forces remained high. I take these estimates seriously because I do not believe MACV’s bias would have been to exaggerate the number of southerners. And given the intensity of combat, it would not have been possible for the number of southerners to remain high unless the Communists were finding substantial numbers of southern recruits to replace losses.

Macdonald says that Communist sources recently published in Vietnam indicate that recruitment was low in the post-Tet period. This is a serious argument, but the Vietnamese sources I have seen are not detailed enough to be convincing. Most crucially, a statement that there were X number of recruits during a certain period is too ambiguous to have much meaning if there is no clear indication as to whether this is the figure for recruits to main forces, to main and local forces, to main and local forces plus guerrillas, to main and local forces plus rear services, or to main and local forces plus both guerrillas and rear services.

 

Macdonald’s best source on recruitment/conscription is a statistical appendix to a history of rear services operations in the B-2 Front, roughly the southern half of South Vietnam. I thank him for the reference; this is an important work, and I had been unaware of it. But the appendix is problematic. It lists numbers of personnel in three categories—main force, local force, and militia—by year, and numbers of personnel infiltrated from North Vietnam by year, and numbers of personnel recruited locally by year. But the data are inconsistent. The combined total of personnel added to the force—infiltration plus local recruitment—is for some years inadequate to account for the increase in size just of the main and local forces.[51] Either some of the data are seriously inaccurate, or the figures for local recruitment cover only recruiting to some very limited segment of the Communist forces, not even all of the regular troop units. And if something in the appendix is wrong, it is most likely to be the figures for recruiting. Of personnel strength, infiltration, and local recruiting, it is recruiting that would have been least likely to leave a clear paper trail in the kind of records that would have been available to the historians writing this study.

 

I accused MACV of seriously underestimating the size of the North Vietnamese forces in the South, and the rate of infiltration from North Vietnam, in late 1967 and January 1968. Macdonald totally ignores this because it does not fit his picture of me as an ideologue determined to downplay the North Vietnamese role in the war. I made it clear that the North Vietnamese role in the war increased after Tet, even relative to the substantial size it had already reached by the beginning of 1968: “The Viet Cong were very seriously weakened by 1969, leaving the war to be fought mainly by the North Vietnamese” (158). But I did not go into the details of infiltration during this period. These did not seem relevant to the points I was making, and they would have added further statistical detail to a work already overloaded with statistics.

 

Macdonald treats my failure to discuss infiltration in detail for this period as proof that I think infiltration was low. He provides much gratuitous evidence that it was high. But I do not believe, and did not say or even faintly imply in The Myths of Tet, that the level of infiltration was low.

 

Macdonald writes, “Moise’s claim that the local part of the insurgency stayed strong during 1969-1971 needs to be revisited based on the new evidence from postwar Vietnam.” When I try to imagine where he might have gotten this idea, my first guess is my statement that the Viet Cong were not “essentially destroyed” in the Tet Offensive, in other words early in 1968 (2). But the gap between not being essentially destroyed and remaining strong seems as wide as the gap between the Tet Offensive and the year 1971. There was also my statement that the Viet Cong political infrastructure in the northeast part of Binh Dinh province had not been destroyed by 1970 (173). But infrastructure not destroyed is, again, not quite the same as local insurgency strong.

If I may step away from my book for a moment to give an illustration of my attitude: the Rear Services history from which Macdonald got his figures for recruitment in the B-2 Front also contained a table giving the strength of the Self-Defense Militia in the B-2 Front, by year. This table showed the Self-Defense Militia reaching a peak strength of 147,300 in 1966, and declining to 51,200 in 1970.[52] I think the insurgency had been damaged badly enough by 1970 that I am surprised, and even a bit suspicious, at the claim that the Self-Defense Militia retained more than a third of its peak strength.

 

James Wirtz is correct in saying that I am very critical of the foolish optimism of many American officials, but his claim that in contrast to this optimism I argue “that there was never any hope, progress, or lost opportunity during the Vietnam War” is false. I make it clear that the Saigon government had become much more stable by late 1967 (112); that the heavy fighting of 1968 inflicted “military disaster” on the Communist forces (149), leaving the Viet Cong “very seriously weakened by 1969” (158); and that in the wake of this, pacification “achieved impressive successes in 1969 and 1970” (172). If these things did not constitute progress from the American viewpoint, what would have?

 

The question of whether the war was hopeless is not one I have ever thought interesting enough to merit much discussion, but I did comment on it once in my book, rejecting a suggestion that the war was hopeless. In March 1968, the Office of the Secretary of Defense sent to the White House a remarkably gloomy document stating that even a huge expansion of U.S. forces in Vietnam (far beyond the famous February 1968 request for 206,000 additional troops), and a huge increase in the level of casualties inflicted on the Communists, would not enable the United States to prevail. I said that this statement seemed “improbable,” that it was not supported by evidence, and that if it had been true there would have been no way for any American to know that it was true (199).

 

Wirtz rehashes old arguments in defense of the low MACV estimates of Communist strength, which I rebutted in my book, without mentioning that I had attempted to rebut them,thereby failing to engage my rebuttals. Thus he ends his review with a rhetorical question: If the Communists had larger forces than were shown in the OB, “exactly where were all those people during the Tet offensive?” Part of the answer appears in my extended discussion of this question in The Myths of Tet (124-128), in which I quoted and rebutted a statement from one of his own articles.[53]

 

I argue in The Myths of Tet that disagreements over the strengths of individual categories were at the heart of the OB dispute. I firmly rejected the widespread notion that the OB dispute centered on the question of which categories should or should not be counted (74-75 and passim). I argue MACV’s OB seriously underestimated the strength of every category of enemy personnel, with documented evidence for each category. The way the OB in January 1968 was undercounting regular North Vietnamese combat troops in South Vietnam, and the elite attack forces often called “sappers” that were about to spearhead the attacks in the cities during the Tet Offensive, seems especially relevant in a book on the Tet Offensive.

 

Wirtz describes the order of battle issue as if it was fundamentally a dispute over which categories should or should not be included in the OB. He does not mention that I disagree, or that I accuse MACV of undercounting any particular category of Communist personnel, and in particular does not so much as hint that I charge MACV with undercounting regular combat troops. He even writes, “There does not seem to be much debate about MACV’s estimate of North Vietnamese Combat troops.” A large part of Chapter 5 of my book deals with the debates over this issue, which were occurring within MACV intelligence even in 1967, and which became conspicuously public in 1982.

 

Wirtz argues that it was appropriate for MACV to eliminate the Self-Defense forces from its order of battle because they were not combatants. He assumes that the principle that an order of battle was a listing of combatants was so firmly established that to include the Self-Defense forces in it would be “to label these people as combatants.” I point out in The Myths of Tet that the MACV order of battle was not and did not claim to be a listing of combatants. The number of non-combatants listed in it declined in late 1967, but remained in the tens of thousands. There was never even a proposal within MACV that the order of battle be limited to combatants (77). Wirtz does not argue against my analysis on this point, but ignores it, writing as if he cannot imagine why anyone might doubt that MACV’s order of battle was intended to be a listing of combatants.

 

Wirtz writes, “One would think that by definition, in a People’s War framework, all able-bodied individuals not already serving in combat or support units would be members of the Self-Defense force, regardless of training, equipment, or political commitment.” I do not know what American theory of people’s war he has been reading. No such thing is stated or implied in the Vietnamese Communists’ (or for that matter the Chinese Communists’) theories of people’s war.

 

Wirtz exaggerates the extent to which differences in the terminology used to describe enemy forces impaired communication among American agencies, writing, “different organizations used different categories, and these different categories sometimes combined different types of units and individuals in less than transparent ways…. It was never really possible to tell who was being counted.” As an example, he says that a June 1967 table compiled by the Office of National Estimates “used categories to describe enemy units that were not utilized by MACV,” but he does not say what the differences were. In fact the only significant way this table deviated from the categories in MACV’s current order of battle was that it lumped together as “Militia” two groups that the MACV OB defined separately, the “Self Defense” and “Secret Self Defense” forces.[54] This was transparent and did not confuse anyone. 

 

It is very difficult to relate the categories used in postwar Vietnamese publications with those used by any U.S. agency during the war. This is one reason I have so seldom tried to use postwar Vietnamese statistics as evidence when evaluating conflicting U.S. estimates (115-116). But when MACV talked with CIA, they were usually using the same definitions for the categories they discussed.

 

Wirtz states incorrectly that it was “unclear exactly what constituted membership in the Self-Defense force.” The Self Defense unit of a hamlet was a unit. Its commander, and every member, and probably every peasant in the hamlet, understood exactly who in the hamlet was a member and who was not. Everyone in U.S. intelligence understood this except for a few who were determined to find some excuse for omitting the Self Defense forces from the OB, and who decided to pretend that the Self Defense forces were not made up of units each of which had a clearly defined membership. American and South Vietnamese intelligence officers trying to figure out how many members there were worked primarily from captured documents and from interrogations of prisoners or defectors, exactly as they did when trying to figure out how many men there were in a main-force battalion. (Wirtz implies that signals intelligence [SIGINT] provided the Americans good information about the strength of the main-force battalions, but that was not the case). The biggest difference was that the Self-Defense forces included a very large number of very small units. The ones for which U.S. intelligence knew the exact strength represented a small fraction, so figures for total strength necessarily involved a lot of extrapolation. But the U.S. did not have valid data for the strength of all, or even almost all, of the main-force battalions either. A valid total figure for main-force strength required more extrapolation than MACV liked to admit.

 

Wirtz states that there was no consensus among U.S. organizations as to the taxonomy of Communist forces. There was in fact a consensus, negotiated by representatives of MACV, CIA, and other agencies at a February 1967 conference, and codified by MACV in a document titled “Order of Battle Reference Manual—Strength.”[55] The conference had not been contentious; MACV and CIA had found it easy to reach agreement. MACV later abandoned that consensus when it realized that the taxonomy it was using would lead to politically unacceptable figures for total enemy strength. 

 

Wirtz argues that the Tet Offensive was a desperation move by the Communists, something that they would not have done unless they were desperate. The fact that they were desperate enough to launch the Tet offensive “suggests … that MACV’s estimate of the order of battle was in the ballpark.” Really? MACV’s estimate said they were outnumbered by a margin of well over three to one. They would not have considered such an offensive if outnumbered only two to one?

 

This strange argument seems directly to contradict the suggestion in Wirtz’s concluding paragraph that the Communists would not have been likely to launch the Tet Offensive if they had understood how weak they were. Both versions studiously ignore the question posed by The Myths of Tet: if the Tet Offensive had been a desperate gamble born from weakness, how could the Communists, after losing that gamble, have fought on to victory?

 

Jeffrey Kimball is by far the most accurate of the three reviewers in summarizing many of my arguments; he is the only reviewer to suggest that I had anything significant to say about media coverage of the war.

 

But even his review is misleading in one area. He states that I denounce as false—a myth—the notion that “Communist forces were defeated” in the Tet Offensive; that I claim “neither the PLAF [People’s Liberation Armed Forces a.k.a. Viet Cong] nor PAVN were defeated.” This is the opposite of what I actually wrote. Conspicuously in my opening paragraphs I endorse as “well founded” the idea that “the Tet Offensive was militarily a defeat for the Communist forces, since they failed to take the cities and suffered very heavy casualties in the attempt” (1). I also refer to the Tet Offensive as a military defeat for the Communists in other locations (2, 148), and I note that the Communists’ refusal to abandon offensive operations long after they had lost the element of surprise “turned the Communists’ initial military failure into a military disaster” (149).

 

On the question of Communist casualties, Kimball’s review is inconsistent. First he acknowledges that I said Communist losses were heavy, then he presents evidence that they were indeed heavy in a way clearly implying that he is refuting some suggestion of mine that they were not heavy. His evidence includes a statement by former North Vietnamese diplomats Luu Van Loi and Nguyen An Vu greatly exaggerating Communist losses. If by the time the U.S. and the Republic of Vietnam launched their post-Tet counteroffensive the Communists had had “no force left,” that counteroffensive would have rolled across South Vietnam and won the war. The Communists were weakened, but never close to having no force left.

 

Finally, I am startled to see Gregory Daddis, in his introduction, claim that I wrote that “debate raged throughout 1967 and into 1968 over who exactly to count as a ‘combatant.’” I have not noted any such thing. This is actually one of the minor myths I refute in my book. In the last four-and-a-half months of 1967—not the whole year—debate raged over who to count in listings of enemy personnel. But this was not a debate over who to count as a combatant, under that label or any other.


Notes

[1] James Poniewozik, “Ken Burns’s ‘Vietnam War’ Will Break Your Heart and Win Your Mind,” New York Times, 14 September 2017; Jeffrey P. Kimball, “Ken Burns’s Vietnam: Great TV. Horrible History,” Newsweek, 29 September 2017.

[2] Henry G. Frankfurt, On Bullshit (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005).

[3] “Response to Sen. Harold Hughes,” Furlong Papers, US Air Force Historical Research Agency, Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama.

[4] Luu Van Loi and Nguyen Anh Vu, Le Duc Tho-Kissinger Negotiations in Paris (Hanoi: Thê´Gió Publishers, 1996), 65-66, citing the Ministry of Defense, Hanoi.

[5] Quoted in Richard Whalen, Catch the Falling Flag: A Republican’s Challenge to His Party (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1972), 202. President Nixon, Henry Kissinger, General Creighton Abrams, and Melvin Laird expressed similar thoughts in 1969. See, e.g. Telephone conversation, Nixon and Kissinger, 12 May 1969, 11:30 p.m., Henry A. Kissinger Telephone Conversation Transcripts, Richard Nixon Presidential Library (also held at the National Security Archive); Memo, Kissinger to Nixon, 20 March 1969, subj: Vietnam Situation and Options, folder 7, box 89, National Security Council Files: Vietnam Subject Files, RNPL; and Kissinger, White House Years (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1979), 477.

[6] The Vietnam War: A Film by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick (Public Broadcasting System, 2017).

[7] See, e.g., Jeffrey P. Kimball, “Out of Primordial Cultural Ooze: Inventing Political and Policy Legacies about the US Exit from Vietnam.” Diplomatic History 34:3 (June 2010): 577-587.

[8] See Edwin E. Moise, Land Reform in China and North Vietnam: Consolidating the Revolution at the Village Level (Enduring Editions) (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, [1983], 2012); Moise, Tonkin Gulf and the Escalation of the Vietnam War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996). Moise’s online bibliography of the war may be found at: http://edmoise.sites.clemson.edu/bibliography.html. I am following the usage of Vietnamese military histories that refer to the February-March, May-June, and August-September “waves” in 1968. For this review I will refer to the regime in North Vietnam as “NVN” and the regime in the South as “SVN”.

[9] Ralph B. Smith, “Review Essay: Choosing War in Vietnam,” The Journal of Military History 64:2 (April 2000), 503-504, et passim.

[10] Dick Kovar, “The CIA’s Don Quixote: A Review of: “C. Michael Hiam: Who The Hell Are We Fighting?: The Story of Sam Adams and the Vietnam Intelligence Wars,” International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence 20:3 (2007), 533-537. C. Michael Hiam, Who The Hell Are We Fighting?: The Story of Sam Adams and the Vietnam Intelligence Wars (Hanover: Steerforth Press, 2007). The book was reprinted in 2014 as Hiam, A Monument to Deceit: Sam Adams and the Vietnam Intelligence Wars (Lebanon: ForeEdge Press, University Press of New England, 2014). Hiam is a psychologist from Massachusetts and an amateur historian. He relies heavily on interviews from CIA and MACV dissenters, years after the events, for some of his most important evidence. His father and Sam Adams were classmates at Harvard and remained close. His other books include, Eddie Shore and That Old-Time Hockey (Toronto: McLelland and Stewart, 2010), and Dirigible Dreams: The Age of the Airship (Lebanon: ForeEdge Press, University Press of New England, 2014).

[11] Sam Adams, War By Numbers: An Intelligence Memoir (Hanover: Steerforth Press, 1998).

[12] http://samadamsaward.ch/history-of-the-sam-adams-award/. Previous winners of the award have included Julian Assange of the Wikileaks Organization, Edward Snowden, a NSA contractor who defected, and Chelsea Manning, a 2018 candidate for the Senate from the state of Maryland who was convicted of leaking classified information to Assange’s organization.

[13] “Deposition—Richard David Kovar (June 7, 1984), at: Texas Tech Virtual Vietnam Archive, https://vva.vietnam.ttu.edu, Item No. 0250820001, 155, 157-158, 228-235, 337. (Hereafter, TT: Item Number).

[14] It is impossible, then or now, to know how many insurgents were true volunteers and how many were coerced or dragooned into service. Captured documents and POWs made clear both motivations were abundantly present, but I have found no good statistical information on the subject. I will use the combined term recruitment/conscription to recognize this ambiguity.

[15] A major source is The Military History Institute of Vietnam, People’s Army of Vietnam, translated by Merle L. Pribbenow II, Victory in Vietnam: The Official History of the People’s Army of Vietnam, 1954-1975 (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2002).

[16] I am greatly indebted to other postwar Vietnamese histories largely made available to me by the scholarly generosity of translator and Vietnam War Scholar Merle Pribbenow II. Mr. Pribbenow, a former CIA officer with extensive Vietnam experience, also provided Professor Moise with important materials, as he has for many scholars. Moise reads Vietnamese; I do not.

[17] “Affidavit of Robert W. Komer (April 19, 1984),” TT: Item No. 0250146001, p. 3.

[18] Thus, CIA official Harold Ford’s defense of the CIA in the dispute is quite misleading in claiming that MACV generally did not use SIGINT. That was true for Combined Intelligence, but not Current Intelligence. SIGINT was also sometimes distributed down to the company level in the field. Ironically, it was the dissenters in Combined Intelligence that agreed with the civilian dissenters in CIA, not the SIGINT-informed Current Intelligence. No one looked to Combined Intelligence for current intelligence; that is not what it did. Harold P. Ford, CIA and Vietnam Policymakers: Three Episodes, 1962-1968 (Washington, DC: Central Intelligence Agency, Center for the Study of Intelligence, 1998), “Episode Three,” fns 4, 5, at: https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-publications/books-and-monographs/cia-and-the-vietnam-policymakers-three-episodes-1962-1968/epis3.html The online version of this monograph has no page numbers, but does number its footnotes.

[19] Ford, CIA and Vietnam Policymakers, n.p.

[20] “Deposition—Gains B. Hawkins (September 20, 1983),73, at: TT: Item No. 0250805001.

[21] There is a vast literature on the subject since the issues remain in the debates over more recent insurgencies. The military arguments are made clearly and insightfully for the invasion explanation by Colonel Harry G. Summers, On Strategy: A Critical Analysis of the Vietnam War (New York: Presidio Press, 1982), and just as clearly and insightfully for the insurrection explanation in Andrew F. Krepinevich, Jr., The Army and Vietnam (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1988).

[22] Orrin Schwab, A Clash of Cultures: Civil-Military Relations during the Vietnam War (Westport: Praeger Security International, 2006), xi. I have written elsewhere on civil-military relations during an insurgency that cause acute problems in such relations, particularly in liberal governments where both sides have to be accommodated to some degree. Douglas J. Macdonald, Adventures in Chaos: American Intervention for Reform in the Third World (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992). For accounts that specifically include civil-military relations during Tet, see James J. Wirtz, The Tet Offensive: Intelligence Failure in War (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992), and Captain Ronnie E. Ford, Tet 1968: Understanding the Surprise (New York: Routledge, 1995). For the CIA dissenters’ views, see Sam Adams, War by Numbers, and George W. Allen, None So Blind: A Personal Account of the Intelligence Failure (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2001). For defenses of the military intelligence viewpoint, see Lt. General Phillip B. Davidson, Secrets of the Vietnam War (Novato: Presidio Press, 1990), especially 29-92; T.L. Cubbage II, “Westmoreland vs. CBS: Was Intelligence Corrupted by Policy Demands?” Intelligence and National Security 3:3 (1988): 118-180.

[23] Ronald H. Spector, After Tet: The Bloodiest Year in Vietnam (New York: The Free Press, 1993), 157-158.

[24] Thomas Thayer, with an introduction by Colonel Gregory Daddis, War Without Fronts: The American Experience in Vietnam (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 2016), 45, Table 5.2. This is a reprint of Thayer’s 1985 book with the same title.

[25] CIA, “Intelligence Memorandum, Democratic Republic of South Vietnam–re Viet Cong Manpower Problems–CIA Research Reports (Supplemental), (March, 1967), 108, at: TT: Item No. F029200040383.

[26] CIA, 108.

[27] CIA, Unsigned Memorandum, “Subject: SNIE 14.3-1-67: Viet Cong Recruitment and Morale Problems,” (July 26, 1967), 2, at: TT: Item No. F029200040860.

[28] David W.P Elliott, The Vietnamese War: Revolution and Social Change in the Mekong Delta, 1930-1975, Two Volumes (Armonk: M.E. Sharpe, 2003), Volume Two, 767.

[29] For example, Mark Moyar, Triumph Forsaken: The Vietnam War, 1954-1975 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009, Paperback Edition), Chapters 9, 11.

[30] For a good overview of the changed relationship between the insurgents and the villagers after 1964, see Elliott, 736-744.

[31] The Military History Institute of Vietnam, People’s Army of Vietnam, translated by Merle L. Pribbenow II, Victory in Vietnam: The Official History of the People’s Army of Vietnam, 1954-1975 (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2002), 466, fn 13. Hereafter, PAVN.

[32] See “Affidavit of Joseph C. Stumpf (April 18, 1984),” 2-6, at: TT: Item No. 0250155001. Stumpf was a CIA officer sent to Vietnam in late 1967 to complete a study on Communist recruitment. While there he became convinced that the figure MACV was using--3,500 per month—should be at least doubled. Junior officers in Combined Intelligence told him they agreed with the increases but were being blocked by their superiors from reporting this.

[33] Other attempts to argue that the Southern-based insurgents were not hurt that badly in 1968, largely relying on postwar interviews with former insurgents in the South and a misunderstanding of the OB on both sides, have not been successful. Ngo Vinh Long, “The Tet Offensive and Its Aftermath,” in Marc Jason Gilbert and William Head, eds, The Tet Offensive (Westport: Praeger, 1996), 89-125; Robert Brigham, “The NLF and the Tet Offensive,” in ibid., 63-72; Peter Brush, “The Significance of Local Forces in Post-Tet Vietnam,” Journal of Third World Studies 15:2 (Fall 1998), 67-78.

[34] For example, see, Robert J. Hanyok, Spartans in Darkness: American SIGINT in the Vietnam War, 1945-1975 (Washington, D.C.: Center for Cryptologic History, National Security Agency, 2002), 110-116, at: https://www.nsa.gov/public_info/declass/cryptologic_histories.shtml (last accessed 16 January 2018).

[35] Vietnamese figures: Lien-Hang T. Nguyen, Hanoi’s War: An International History of the War for Peace in Vietnam (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012), 338, fn. 7 cites a “recent official” Vietnamese history that puts the figures at “111,306 cadres and enlisted men of our armed forces and political [sic] in South Vietnam were killed or wounded and tens of thousands of members of the revolutionary masses [were also].” At a recent State Department conference on Vietnam, Vietnamese military officer and historian PAVN Colonel Nguyen Manh Ha stated the best estimate the Vietnamese have at present is 110,000 KIA. U.S. State Department, “Vietnam Conference, Panel: The View from Hanoi: Historians from the Socialist Republic of Vietnam” (September 29, 2010), n.p., at: https://history.state.gov/conferences/2010-southeast-asia/view-from-hanoi. As for the infiltration numbers for 1968, readjusted figures in 1972 informed by SIGINT put the figure at 230,000. See NSC Memorandum, Phil Odeen to Henry Kissinger (November 28, 1972), at: https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/doxcs/LOC-HAK-558-13-14-3.pdf. The official PAVN history puts the figure as having “increased by 1.7 times” from infiltration in 1967. If that means there was a 70% increase, the 1968 infiltration figure would be 137,000. If what is meant is that the increase itself is 1.7 times the 1967 figure, that would put the infiltration total at 218,700 which is much closer to the SIGINT estimates. I have not been able to mediate the numbers with other evidence and use the lower figure of 137,700 here. PAVN, 227. Whichever the case, there was considerable infiltration from the North to South during 1968 and it is not included in Moise’s account.

[36] For the poor conditions and performance of infiltrated troops based on two captured COSVN documents from 1967-1968, see Documents 43-44, “Friction Northern and Southern Vietnamese: Directives Urge ‘Shoulder-to-Shoulder with Our Kith-and-Kin Brothers,’” (September 1968), “Viet-Nam: Documents and Research Notes,” at: TT: Item No. 2310615041. (last accessed 14 November 2016.) The Northern infiltrators were seen by their Southern “Kith-and-Kin” (including by troops and others on the Ho Chi Minh Trail who called them “brainless”) as diseased (probably from the prevalence of malaria,) ignorant, and relatively useless on the battlefield. They were very poorly trained. Upon hearing their accents, local shopkeepers charged the Northerners 10-15% more for food and other necessities. The documents call on the Southern cadres to try to put a stop to it. One was issued in December 1967 just before the first wave, and the other in April 1968 just before the May-June wave.

[37] See charts and footnote 28.

[38] See especially James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992); Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999). Although Scott largely deals with governments, insurgencies can act like a government in areas they control as the Communists did in Vietnam, and they were apparently more or less equally resisted as the SVN after 1965.

[39] For an example of this conventional wisdom see James J. Wirtz, The Tet Offensive: Intelligence Failure in War (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991).

[40] In addition to their attrition objective, the second goal of U.S. units was to ‘shield’ the coastal cities from NVA and VC main force units that operated in the countryside. So in a sense, this ‘deception’ strategy might be best characterized as an effort to ‘fix’ U.S. forces in their normal operating areas. See James J. Wirtz, “Deception and the Tet Offensive,” Journal of Strategic Studies 13:2 (1990): 82-99. Moise offers an interesting twist to this argument: VC main force and NVA units might have been attempting to create holes in U.S. defenses to flow forces towards southern cities in conjunction with the Tet attacks. In any event, breaches did not occur and the forces never flowed.

[41] The Tru’ng sisters, who are regarded as the national heroines of Vietnam, are at the center of this mythology. See Joseph Buttinger, Vietnam: A Political History (New York: Praeger, 1968), 27-37.

[42] They responded by saying that the CIA had declined to address the issue, deferring to the DIA.

[43] James Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998).

[44] James J. Wirtz, “The Theory of Surprise,” in Richard K. Betts and Thomas G. Mahnken, eds., Paradoxes of Strategic Intelligence: Essays in Honor of Michael Handel (London: Frank Cass, 2003).

[45] The war had been primarily a southern insurgency at least up to 1963, and was primarily a North Vietnamese invasion of the South at least from 1972 onward.

[46] Order of Battle Summary, 1 January Thru 31 January 1968, I-1, https://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/star/images/024/0240907005.pdf

[48] And sometimes personally signed by the MACV J-2, though I did not stress that in my book.

[49] “Monthly Order of Battle Summary,” 31 October 1967, section I, page 1, https://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/star/images/024/0240801005A.pdf.

[50] Ronald Spector, After Tet: The Bloodiest Year in Vietnam (New York: Vintage, 1994), 181.

[51] “REVIEW OF REAR SERVICES OPERATIONS FOR THE COCHIN CHINA-EXTREME SOUTHERN CENTRAL VIETNAM BATTLEFIELD (B2) DURING THE RESISTANCE WAR AGAINST THE AMERICANS,” translation by Merle Pribbenow of Tong Ket Cong Tac Hau Can Chien Truong Nam Bo-Cuc Nam Trung Bo (B2) Trong Khang Chien Chong My (Hanoi: General Department of Rear Services, People’s Army of Vietnam, 1986), 546.

[52] “REVIEW OF REAR SERVICES OPERATIONS FOR THE COCHIN CHINA-EXTREME SOUTHERN CENTRAL VIETNAM BATTLEFIELD,” 546.

[53] I must confess to not literally saying “exactly where” the extra Communist personnel were. I said some were in Hue (118), but for the most part I described what they did rather than naming specific geographic locations.

[54] Some people are under the impression that the MACV OB did not use the categories “Guerrilla,” “Self Defense,” and “Secret Self Defense” during this period, because on its summary page, these three groups were lumped together as “Irregulars.” But outside the summary page they were identified as separate groups. Thus the OB that MACV had released a few days before the table was compiled had given separate definitions for the three sub-categories of Irregulars, and separate figures for their strengths at the province level. For example it had listed 2,390 Guerrillas, 1,805 Self Defense, and 5,425 Secret Self Defense for An Xuyen province. “Monthly Order of Battle Summary, 1 May thru 31 May 67,” 2-3, II-10, Records of the Military Assistance Command Vietnam, Part 2, Classified Studies from the Combined Intelligence Center Vietnam, 1965-1973 (Frederick: University Publications of America, 1988), reel.

[55] United States Military Assistance Command, Vietnam, Office of the Assistant Chief of Staff, Intelligence, “Order of Battle Reference Manual–Strength,” 12 February 1967, https://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/star/images/250/2500111001A.pdf.