PHILIP CAPUTO, THE YOUNG LIEUTENANT who had led his platoon on some of the earliest combat missions in Vietnam, walked into his executive officer’s tent at U.S. Marine headquarters at Da Nang, South Vietnam. Caputo had seen friends shot and blown apart by land mines. In the summer of 1965, he’d been assigned this new job, a safer job—though not one he’d ever wanted.
“I was death’s bookkeeper,” he later wrote.
On a typically sweltering day, Caputo stood in front of a chart on the wall. Written in grease pencil on the acetate surface of the chart were columns and rows of numbers—the numbers of American and enemy troops killed or wounded in battle. Sweat dripping from his hands and nose, Caputo began to update the chart.
“How recent are those figures?” a colonel asked.
“As of this morning, sir.”
“Very good,” the colonel said. An important general was coming for a briefing, he explained. The statistics needed to be up-to-date.
American strategy in Vietnam was to rely on superior firepower to kill enemy troops faster than they could be replaced. Success was measured not in territory captured, but in numbers. The “body count” was the number of enemy fighters killed. The all-important “kill ratio” was the ratio of enemy troops to Americans killed. General Westmoreland believed that if the kill ratio was high enough, for long enough, the enemy would eventually crack.
Part of Caputo’s job was to verify the numbers by inspecting bodies brought into the base. With Americans, he matched the faces of the dead with photos on file. If they didn’t have faces, he used dental records. Vietnamese dead were much harder to identify. How could he tell if they were Viet Cong or unlucky civilians? When in doubt he relied on the unwritten rule his superiors had taught him: “If he’s dead and Vietnamese, he’s VC.”
That day four dead Vietnamese were brought in on a trailer. Caputo counted the mangled corpses and sent them on for burial. Then came word that the colonel wanted the visiting general to see the bodies—a tangible sign of the progress being made.
Caputo had the trailer brought back into camp. He checked to make sure there were still four bodies. It was hard to tell. Several limbs had come loose. The floor of the trailer was streaked with blood and brains.
“If that general’s going to look at those bodies,” a marine suggested, “we’d better hose the trailer down.”
While the general listened to a briefing in a nearby tent, Caputo and his men sprayed water into the trailer. Then they tipped the trailer to let the liquid drain. The general came out to have a look. Caputo saluted. The general, followed by other high-ranking officers, walked past the trailer, glancing quickly at the contents.
“A rivulet of blood-colored water flowed from under the trailer and soaked into the dust,” Caputo later recalled. “The brass stepped over it carefully, to avoid ruining the shine on their boots.”
* * *
In early November, the top commanders of the U.S. military gathered outside the Oval Office in the White House. Waiting with the Joint Chiefs was a young officer, Major Charles Cooper, holding a map of Vietnam mounted on a three-quarter-inch thick slab of plywood.
The chiefs had asked Cooper to prepare the map. The thing was heavy, and he’d called ahead to request that an easel be set up in the president’s office. He expected to set the map on the easel and then wait in the hall.
An aide showed the group into the Oval Office. President Johnson was there. The easel was not.
“Come on in, Major,” the president said to Cooper. “You can stand right over there.”
Cooper stood in the middle of the room thinking, “If I’d known I was going to have to hold the damn thing, I would have used thin plywood.”
“It’s really nice to have you people over here,” Johnson said to his military chiefs. “What have you got?”
“Well, Mr. President,” began Joint Chiefs Chairman Earle Wheeler, “we fully realize that what we’re going to present to you today requires a very difficult decision.”
In short, Wheeler explained, what they were doing in Vietnam was not working. American troop levels in Vietnam were nearing 200,000, but the enemy was adapting by breaking into small groups and moving unseen through the rugged mountains and forests. American soldiers were winning individual battles, and the kill ratio was favorable—about 2.5 to 1. Yet the Communists were easily replacing their losses. And no territory was being gained, because as soon as American troops left an area, the Viet Cong slipped right back in. No progress was being made. Worse, the war was being fought without a strategy that could possibly lead to victory.
Pointing to the map in Major Cooper’s arms, Wheeler described a more aggressive alternative: mine North Vietnamese harbors to block Soviet and Chinese ships bringing in military supplies. Pummel Hanoi with a massive bombing campaign. These steps, he said, might force the North’s leaders to rethink their position.
“So you’re going to cut them off,” Johnson said, “keep them from being reinforced, and then you’re going to bomb them into the Stone Age.”
“Well, that’s not exactly it,” said Air Force Chief of Staff John McConnell, “but you’ve got to punish them.”
Johnson turned to the others. He wanted to know if they supported this plan, which risked escalating tensions with the Soviet Union and China.
They all did.
“You’re trying to get me to start World War III with your idiotic bullshit!” the president shouted. “I’ve got the weight of the Free World on my shoulders and you want me to start World War III?”
Johnson lit into the military men, dropping the f-bomb, Cooper noted, “more freely than a marine in boot camp.” The chiefs listened in stunned silence. Presidents did not talk to top commanders like this.
Finally calming a bit, Johnson asked the men to put themselves in his shoes.
“Imagine that you’re me—that you’re the president of the United States,” he said. “What would you do?”
“I can’t do it, Mr. President,” said the badly offended Wheeler. “No man can honestly do it. It’s got to be your decision and yours alone.”
Cooper saw the anger rising in Johnson’s face. He was about to explode again.
* * *
Daniel Ellsberg spent much of the fall of 1965 in the passenger seat of an International Harvester Scout, bouncing down rural roads outside of Saigon. Driving the car at high speed was John Paul Vann, a retired army colonel, now working as a civilian advisor for the government. Vann held the steering wheel in one hand, and in the other an AR-15 rifle, pointed out the open window. He had extra ammunition draped over his shoulder and grenades on his belt.
“You’re safest in a single, unmarked vehicle,” Vann told Ellsberg, “driving fast at irregular times during the day.”
Ellsberg was still determined to help win the Vietnam War. Now employed by the State Department, he was part of a team working to find non-military ways to defeat the Communists. The goal: to win over the “hearts and minds” of the people of South Vietnam, to help convince them they’d be better off siding with the Americans than with Ho Chi Minh. When Ellsberg first arrived in Vietnam, he’d been given an air-conditioned apartment in Saigon, with security guards at the door. It quickly became obvious that he wasn’t going to learn much from that comfortable spot. He needed to get out of the city, to where the war was being fought. Vann had offered to take him.
Over six weeks, Vann and Ellsberg drove to all the provinces around Saigon. Vann explained that the biggest danger came from roadside mines set by the Viet Cong. He taught Ellsberg to constantly scan the barbed wire fences along the road, looking for a shiny edge that hadn’t had time to rust, the telltale sign of a recent slice.
When they pulled into villages, children invariably crowded around the car, smiling and calling out any English they knew:
“Okay! Okay!”
“Hallo!”
“Number one!”
Ellsberg’s thoughts flashed back to his own son and daughter, to the time when they’d all lived together. “I remember my children running out to climb over me at the end of the day,” he wrote in a letter from Vietnam, “and my heart turns over.”
As they toured villages, Vann pointed out buildings damaged in recent Viet Cong attacks. The villages had militias, Vann explained, but they tended to avoid confronting the Viet Cong. It’s not that villagers supported the communist fighters; rather, they were outgunned and afraid. Even South Vietnam’s large army, which was supposed to patrol and protect these areas, avoided the enemy.
Daniel Ellsberg with children in South Vietnam, 1965. On the back of the photo, Ellsberg wrote, “It’s an exciting challenge and I’m very grateful to be here.”
“Only the Viet Cong were out at night,” Ellsberg realized. “They owned the night.”
Late one afternoon, driving along a dirt road between thatch huts, Ellsberg saw fear on the faces of the villagers. Moments later the car rolled past a group of twelve young men in loose black pants.
“There’s little doubt you’re looking at a VC squad,” Vann said.
Ellsberg snapped a photo.
Viet Cong commanders, Vann explained, paid a large reward for dead Americans.
Ellsberg put down his camera.
“We’re safe for a little while,” Vann said, “because they don’t expect to see us and it takes them a few minutes to react.”
Vann turned around and drove slowly back through the center of town.
“Eventually,” he said, “one of the people back there is going to start thinking about collecting the twenty-thousand piaster reward and the gold medal the VC gives out for a dead American.”
But the people in these towns always seemed so friendly, Ellsberg pointed out.
“They’re friendly people,” Vann said. “They don’t hate individual Americans, even in VC territory.” But don’t be fooled, Vann added, they won’t help you either; they’re all too scared of the Viet Cong.
“These people smiling at us right now,” said Vann, “would smile just as warmly if they knew that in another ten yards we were going to be blown up by a mine the VC laid last night.”