Free War of Numbers by Sam Adams

giving the South Vietnamese a hard time ever since, neither Paris nor Saigon had the resources to do the job. America had plenty. One hundred thousand U.S. soldiers were already in Vietnam, 100,000 more were on the way, and bases were going up all over the country.Operation Starlight was the kind of thing we could expect a lot of in the future. He concluded:
The importance of this change that is now going on can hardly be exaggerated. It does not mean, alas, that the war is being won now, or will be won without a great deal of effort and sacrifice. But it does mean that at last there is a light at the end of the tunnel … 6
    Knowing what Ed Hauck would say about this, I went over to Southeast Asia’s Cambodian analyst to get a different opinion. He was hunched over a sheaf of cables from Phnom Penh like a bookie studying his tout sheets.
    “What’d you think of that Alsop piece in the Post this morning, Stanley?” I asked politely.
    “ ‘Light at the end of the tunnel,’ my ass,” he growled. And he gave me a look like I was a damn fool even to ask the question. I returned to my desk noting that Ed Hauck’s pessimism seemed to have infected other members of the branch. Naturally I didn’t tell Stanley that I tended to agree with Alsop.
    Not long after that I consulted with Molly. A slight, red-haired woman with a pleasant, angular face, she was so short her feet didn’t reach the floor when she sat at her desk, so she propped them up on an old Vietnamese-French dictionary. She had owned the dictionary since 1951, when the Foreign Documents Division hired her to translate captured Vietminh documents from Vietnamese into English. There being no such thing as a Vietnamese-English dictionary in those days, FDD had taken on Molly because she was fluent in French, and therefore could use their only Vietnamese dictionary, the Vietnamese-French one. I was consulting her about some terms she kept using in the Sitrep.
    “What’s the difference between a ‘militant’ and a ‘moderate’ Buddhist?” I asked.
    Unrolling a draft from her overworked typewriter, Molly swung her chair toward me (adjusting the dictionary with her toes as she did so), and launched into the most complex discussion of religious factionalismI’d ever heard. In a flat Ohio accent—her family was from Cincinnati—she first discussed the splits in the Buddhist hierarchy, then the schisms between the various pagodas, then the disagreements within the pagodas, and was well on her way to explaining that even individual bonzes were of two minds when I completely lost track. Also, she hadn’t answered my question. I repeated it.
    “When you cut all the weeds away,” she said, “a moderate Buddhist is one who’s on our side, and a militant Buddhist is one who isn’t.” And she laughed. That first encounter with Molly Kreimer was impressive. She knew one hell of a lot about Vietnamese Buddhists.
    By now I was getting a bad conscience about my morale project. My only conclusion so far about VC morale—that they were less fanatical than the Japanese—was hardly spectacular. Besides, I kept runing into the same problem. Just what is morale? If you consider everything that makes a person happy or sad, plucky or craven, the subject is boundless. A related problem was evidence. This had the advantage of being nearby. Evidence was arriving in Southeast Asia by the bushel basket.
    In late September I decided to attack the evidence problem head-on. Collecting as many reports as would fit on the top of my desk, I began sorting them out. Within a couple of days I had arranged the paper into three piles, each labeled with an index card. Under the first card, marked “Primary Evidence,” was a four-inch stack of reports sourced directly to the Vietcong such as captured documents, POW interrogations, and defector interviews. Under the second card, marked “Statistics,” was a similar pile, this one of account sheets from Saigon, counting such things as