Free War of Numbers by Sam Adams Page B

the memo, and studied the chart (once even looking at it upside down). “Maybe you’ve got something,” he said, furrowing his brow. “Try it out on Molly.”
    “I’m not much on numbers,” Molly said as I sat down by her desk. Holding it like a dead mouse, she read the memo, saying under her breath, “I don’t know about that,” “Golly,” and “Hmm.”
    “Now you cut that out, Molly,” I told her. “I know they’re statistics, but you’ve got to face up to what they mean. Why has the number quintupled? How do you explain it?”
    Molly also knew it was a good question. She thought for a while and said, “The communist army used to be all volunteers. Now they’reusing the draft. Maybe the draftees are taking off as soon as they’re out of basic.”
    “It’s a good point, Molly,” I said. “I’ll put it in my memo.”
    “Maybe you’ve got something,” Molly replied. “Try it out on Dick Lehman.”
    I called for an appointment, and went up to the seventh floor. Lehman had the same reaction as Molly and Ed. “But you’re right,” he acknowledged. “There’s a lot more defectors than there used to be.” He agreed to publish the memo.
    The printers ran it off the next morning. Wednesday, 20 October 1965, under the title, “Vietcong Morale: Possible Indicator of Downward Drift.” 7 Filled with caveats about inaccurate statistics and containing Molly’s caution about Vietcong draftees, it pointed out (in a very low key) that the upward trend of defectors was simply too big to be overlooked. But there was a disappointing footnote that Lehman had stuck to the bottom of the first page after I’d left the seventh floor. It said the memo was “experimental,” that although “comments were invited,” it was being circulated “only within the CIA.” Slightly annoyed, I asked Ed Hauck why it wouldn’t leave the building.
    “The military’s taken a lot of gas over cheerful numbers,” he explained pleasantly. “Lehman doesn’t want the agency in the same boat.”
    I passed Thursday and Friday waiting for comments. None came. A few days later, and for the first time, I actually saw someone reading “Downward Drift.” It was the DDI representative, George Allen, back at headquarters for consultation. He was in the cubicle seeing Ed Hauck, whom he’d worked for in 1963.
    “This increase in defectors is damn interesting,” Allen told me, as he flipped through the paper. “Look me up if you ever get to Saigon.”
    That was it, the only reaction to my first morale memo. I decided to leave morale for the time being and work on the Sitrep. “A tour of the trenches,” Ed Hauck said as he gave his okay. The two military analysts were glad to see me. Now, at last, one of them could go on vacation.
    Ed Hauck’s gloom on the war may have been misplaced, but not his observation about the Sitrep. Once you started working on it, there was no time for anything else. Skimming the mail (much less reading it) took until one o’clock in the afternoon. It took another three hours to put together a story for the next morning’s edition. The best thing to be said for the job was its four-in-the-afternoon deadline. At least we worked something like regular hours.
    I plugged at the Sitrep for almost seven weeks. It was a nightmare. In the Congo, the rebellion had been predictable. By watching certain factors—such as the tribes, the B-26s, and the whereabouts of Antoine Mandungu—one could generally guess what was going to happen. But in Vietnam there was no pattern. Everything seemed to be going on everywhere at once. We’d catch the VC in one province one day; they’d catch the South Vietnamese in another the next. Then, every so often, they’d pull a humdinger. On 27 October, for instance, Vietcong commandos outside of Danang blew up eighteen Marine Corps helicopters. (Eighteen! Almost as big as the CIA’s entire Congo air force.) And exactly one month later, they wiped out a whole South Vietnamese