When the leader of the Vietnamese communist movement, Ho Chi Minh, learned of the assassination, even he was surprised. “I can scarcely believe the Americans would be so stupid,” he said.
Out in the countryside across South Vietnam, the garrison state constructed by President Diem and the U.S. Department of Defense began to crumble. The local people, be they paddy rice farmers or committed Vietcong, began tearing down the fabricated enclaves the Diem regime had forced them to build as part of the Strategic Hamlet Program. News footage seen around the world showed farmers smashing the fortifications’ bamboo walls with sledgehammers, shovels, and sticks, as the strategic hamlets disappeared. Seizing the opportunity, the communists began sending thousands of Vietcong fighters to infiltrate the villages of South Vietnam. They came down from the North by way of a series of footpaths and jungle trails, which would become known as the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Soon it would be impossible to tell a neutral farmer from a committed communist insurgent.
Command and control was an illusion in Vietnam. Despite millions of dollars, hundreds of men, and the use of lethal chemicals as part of a herbicide warfare campaign, ARPA’s Project Agile—with its cutting-edge gadgets and counterinsurgency techniques—was having little to no effect on the growing communist insurgency spreading across South Vietnam. Perhaps Americans in Saigon might have been able to foresee the fall of President Ngo Dinh Diem, but it is unlikely that anyone could have predicted what happened shortly thereafter, halfway around the world in Texas. Twenty days after the execution of Diem and his brother, while riding in an open car through Dealey Plaza in Dallas, President John Kennedy was shot dead by an assassin.
Another president, Lyndon Baines Johnson, would inherit the hornet’s nest that was Vietnam.
CHAPTER TEN
Motivation and Morale
The anthropologist Gerald Hickey leaned out the side of a low-flying military aircraft watching the sea snakes swimming below. The weather was warm, the sea calm, and as the aircraft he shared with a team of ARPA officials approached Phu Quoc Island in the Gulf of Siam, the water was robin’s egg blue. It was the winter of 1964, and Hickey was back in Vietnam, working for the RAND Corporation on another ARPA contract, this time studying how U.S. military advisors got along with their Vietnamese counterparts. The war that did not officially exist marched on.
The ARPA officers were heading out to the island to test weapons and gear which they would then turn over to their junk fleet commander counterparts, local Vietnamese fishermen paid by the Pentagon to patrol the coasts and keep an eye out for Vietcong. Hickey was here to interview participants on both sides. “En route, the ARPA officers tested the new AR-15, an early version of the M-16, by shooting at long sea snakes, which when hit, flew into the air,” Hickey recalled.
Once on the island the group set up a beachfront camp, stringing ARPA-engineered hammocks between palm trees and setting up ARPA-engineered tents before heading over to the steep sea cliffs, where they tested the ruggedness of ARPA-designed military boots. Hickey tagged along, notebook in hand, taking notes and asking questions, as he always did. After the day’s work, the men sat around a fire pit eating grilled shark and giant sea turtle, washing it down with rice and La Rue beer.
After the Phu Quoc Island trip, Hickey headed back to Saigon and then up to the U.S. military facility at Da Nang, conducting dozens of interviews along the way. On July 4, 1964, he caught a ride in an H-34 Marine helicopter and headed into the Ta Rau Valley to a Special Forces camp located at Nam Dong.
“Known as deep VC territory,” Hickey noted in his journal.
Captain Roger Donlon, commander of the unit at Nam Dong, met Hickey at the dirt landing pad when his helicopter touched down. Hickey noted how heavily fortified the camp was, its perimeter ringed with anti-sniper sandbags, machine gun posts, mortar pits, and concrete bunkers. Hickey was here at Nam Dong to interview each member of the twelve-man Special Forces team as well as their Vietnamese counterparts, young men who were mostly Nung people, an ethnic minority of Chinese descent.
The team at Nam Dong was here in the Ta Rau Valley to protect five thousand Vietnamese who lived in the surrounding area. In addition to patrolling the jungle, the Special Forces team organized locals’ efforts to dig wells and build schools. There was little else to do here, and Hickey recalled that “the A-team members were happy to have an anthropologist in town.”
His first day in Nam Dong, Hickey accompanied Captain Donlon out to one of the villages where there had been reports of chemicals being sprayed out of aircraft. “Rice crops had been destroyed and villagers were sick,” Hickey noted. Captain Donlon told the sick villagers that he would send their complaints up the chain of command. Hickey had no way of knowing that the organization paying for his report, ARPA, was the same organization behind the science program that had sprayed the chemicals on the villagers and their rice crops.
The men drove back to the base in an Army jeep, careful to get to the camp before nightfall. Once the sun disappeared behind the mountains, the valley was plunged into darkness, making travel dangerous and difficult. Back at Nam Dong, Hickey filled out a timesheet, required by RAND to be submitted each week, and dropped it in the command center’s U.S. mailbox. He ate dinner with the Nung soldiers, interviewing them in their native language. The Nung soldiers told Hickey they believed a Vietcong attack was imminent, and he took the news to Captain Donlon. A team meeting was organized, and Donlon ordered the Vietnamese strike force to double its outer perimeter security and also ordered the helicopter landing zone to be fortified. Donlon gave Hickey an AR-15 and told him to sleep with it close by his bed.
In the middle of the night, at 2:26 a.m., a massive explosion knocked Hickey out of bed. More explosions followed, and suddenly the camp was filled with white phosphorus smoke. With the sound of automatic weapons fire coming from every direction, Hickey grabbed his eyeglasses and his AR-15 and started to run. “Suddenly bullets were piercing the bamboo walls,” he later recalled.
Outside his bunkroom, the mess hall and supply room were on fire. “Mortar rounds landed everywhere, grenades exploded, and gunfire filled the air. In a matter of minutes,” Hickey recounted, “the camp had become a battlefield.” For a moment, he felt all was lost. That he would die here in Nam Dong. Instead, the anthropologist raised his AR-15 and assumed the role of a soldier, fighting alongside the Green Berets and the Nung commandos through the night.
When light dawned and the Vietcong retreated back into the jungle, Hickey surveyed the carnage. Sixty Nung, two Americans, and one Australian had been killed. “There were bodies and pieces of bodies everywhere—on the cluttered parade ground, in the grasses, and on the [perimeter] wires.” One of the Nung soldiers he had eaten dinner with the night before was dead, recognizable only by the insignia on his shirt. “The smoky air was heavy with the odor of death,” Hickey recalled. Overcome by a wave of nausea, he threw up.
“The July 1964 Nam Dong battle foreshadowed the fury of the struggle that would become known as the Vietnam War,” wrote Hickey. “As that war, with its modern technology and armaments and large armies, drew all of South Vietnam into its vortex and captured the world’s attention, the battle of Nam Dong faded into obscurity.” Americans still did not know they were fighting a war in Vietnam. Captain Roger Donlon was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor, the first of the Vietnam War, and Gerald Hickey would continue his work as an anthropologist, writing more than a dozen reports for ARPA, on subjects including the role of the AR-15 in battle and the effects of Agent Orange on the Vietnamese.
Back in America, RAND Corporation president Frank Collbohm had set his focus on securing a lucrative new contract with the Advanced Research Projects Agency. Collbohm and analyst Guy Pauker flew to Washington, D.C., to meet with ARPA officials. RAND’s Third Area Conflict Board believed that the firm’s social scientists could help stop the Vietcong insurgency by researching and analyzing for the Pentagon the “human problems” connected to insurgent groups. The bro
ad-themed contract they sought had enormous potential value and would turn out to be RAND’s single-biggest contract during twelve years of war in Vietnam. It was called the Viet Cong Motivation and Morale Project, and it was secured in a single meeting in Washington, D.C.
In Washington, Collbohm and Pauker met with Seymour Deitchman, Harold Brown’s new special assistant for counterinsurgency at ARPA. Before Deitchman took over the counterinsurgency reins, ARPA’s Project Agile programs had been overseen by William Godel. But the situation with Godel had taken a bizarre turn. For eighteen months, Godel had received high praise from the White House and the Pentagon for his counterinsurgency work, winning the prestigious National Civil Service League award and being named one of the nation’s ten top government administrators in 1962. But suddenly and mysteriously, financial incongruities within Project Agile’s overseas expense accounts were brought to the attention of Secretary of Defense McNamara, and the FBI was brought in to investigate. Godel was at the very center of the investigation. Counterinsurgency was too significant a program to leave in the hands of a man under suspicion, and Deitchman, an aeronautical and mechanical engineer working at the Institute for Defense Analyses, or IDA, was chosen to replace Godel.
Also present during the meeting was the powerful William H. Sullivan, a career State Department official and the head of President Johnson’s new Interagency Task Force on Vietnam. In a few months’ time, Sullivan would become ambassador to Laos. Between Sullivan and Deitchman, the officials in the room had the power to award a significant counterinsurgency contract to whomever they saw fit, in this case RAND. Which is exactly what the record shows happened next.
William Sullivan pulled out a sheet of paper and set it in front of Collbohm and Pauker. On the paper was a list of twenty-five topics that the Interagency Task Force and the Pentagon wanted researched. Down at the bottom, near the end, one topic leaped out at Guy Pauker. It read:
“Who are the Vietcong? What makes them tick?”
Pauker was electrified. “Where did this question come from?” he asked.
“That question came directly from Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara,” Sullivan said, “who keeps asking the question.”
“Frank and I agreed on the spot that RAND would try to answer the Defense Secretary’s question,” Pauker recalled.
Guy Pauker, born in Romania, was a staunch anticommunist. He had a Ph.D. from Harvard in Southeast Asian studies, and was an expert on how Stone Age cultures, such as the Navajo, do or do not adapt to the modern world. He felt excited by this counterinsurgency challenge. The Vietcong were like a Stone Age people, Pauker believed, and he welcomed the opportunity to determine what it was that made them tick. Collbohm and Pauker returned to RAND headquarters in Santa Monica, where they put together an outline for the new project and a bid.
Over at the Pentagon, the question “What makes the Viet Cong tick?” had also been confounding the Advanced Research Projects Agency. “The original intent” of the RAND program, as Seymour Deitchman later explained it, was to understand the nature of the Vietcong revolutionary movement by finding answers “to such questions as, what strata of society its adherents came from; why they were adherents; how group cohesiveness was built into their ranks; and how they interacted with the populace.” By the summer of 1964, the secretary of defense had grown frustrated by the lack of progress being made in the “techniques” area of Project Agile. Three years into the conflict and still no one seemed to have a handle on who these Vietcong insurgents really were. ARPA needed quality information on the enemy combatant, said Deitchman, and for this, to help facilitate the new RAND Corporation study, the secretary of defense made a deal with the CIA.
Joseph Zasloff was the lead social scientist on the original Viet Cong Motivation and Morale Project, and in 2014 he recalled the premise of the RAND study. “The CIA had detention centers and prisons in South Vietnam,” Zasloff said, facilities that were not supposed to exist. It was in these secret detention centers that the CIA kept captured communist POWs, from whom various case officers tried to extract information. “We interviewed these prisoners for our study,” explained Zasloff. “We learned a lot from them about what had been going on. Some were old and had fought at Dien Bien Phu. Some were just teenagers. They were all very dedicated. Had great discipline and commitment. They were indoctrinated into the communist way of thinking.”
Joe Zasloff and his wife, Tela, arrived in Saigon for the Motivation and Morale Project in the summer of 1964. Zasloff, an expert on Southeast Asian studies, had spent the previous year at RAND working on a report for the U.S. Air Force called The Role of North Vietnam in the Southern Insurgency. In this report, which he produced from his office in Santa Monica, Zasloff concluded that the North Vietnamese were responsible for fueling the insurgency in the South. Through the lens of history this is hardly news, but in 1964 Zasloff’s findings were considered original. He was sent to Saigon to lead this new RAND study. Zasloff did not have the kind of hands-on social science research experience that Gerald Hickey and John Donnell had, but he had been to Vietnam, in the late 1950s, as a university professor teaching social science at the Faculty of Law in downtown Saigon.
Because Zasloff would be working directly with the highest-ranking members of the MACV, he was given a civilian rank equal to the rank of general, as well as accommodations fit for a general. The Zasloffs settled into ARPA’s elegant two-story villa at 176 Rue Pasteur, just down the street from the Combat Development Test Center. Their front yard had trees and a grassy lawn. A wide wooden veranda and second-story balconies added to the French colonial feel, as did the staff of servants who took care of housekeeping needs. Tela Zasloff had the maids string white lights throughout the garden, said to be inhabited by ghosts. A ten-foot-tall concrete wall had been constructed around the villa’s perimeter as an added security precaution.
The villa’s first-floor interior was grand, laid out like a posh hotel lobby, with rattan furniture and potted palm trees. The downstairs served as a work area for the RAND researchers who came and went. At night, the Zasloffs frequently hosted dinner parties.
One month after the Zasloffs got the place up and running, John Donnell, the author with Hickey of the unfavorable Strategic Hamlet Program report, arrived. Donnell was to be Zasloff’s partner on the new ARPA project, examining communist motivation and morale. The success of the program relied on getting accurate information from POWs, and Donnell spoke Vietnamese. Zasloff also hired local academics to act as interpreters, French-speaking Vietnamese intellectuals who were considered wealthy by national standards. The Vietnamese interpreters were often invited to the Zasloffs’ dinner parties and were asked to share their thoughts and perceptions. The interpreters were candid and open, admitting freely that they knew almost nothing about Vietnamese peasants who lived in villages outside Saigon. They were all citizens of the same country, but with very little in common. Most farmers, the interpreters said, lacked dreams and aspirations and were generally content. Most had no ambition to do anything but farm. All the peasants wanted out of this life, the interpreters said, was to live with their families in peace, in rural villages, without being harassed or disturbed.
The interpreters set out with Zasloff and Donnell to interview prisoners of war in the secret CIA prisons across the South. The group interviewed prisoners inside the notorious Chi Hoa prison in Saigon as well as in many smaller detention centers out in the provinces. Most of the POW interviews were done with either Zasloff or Donnell and one Vietnamese interpreter, who also acted as a stenographer or note taker. There were no uniformed officials present, which meant the prisoners often loosened up and spoke freely.
“We interviewed all kinds of prisoners,” Zasloff recalled. “Some from the North and some from the South.” Most of the northern-born fighters had made their way to the South along the Ho Chi Minh Trail. While their histories unfolded, the initial assumptions of the interpreters from Saigon began to change, including the preconception that all
a Vietnamese farmer wanted was to own a small plot of land and be left in peace. As work progressed, the RAND researchers started to learn more about what was actually fueling the insurgency. It was a relatively simple answer that was echoed among the prisoners. What motivated Vietcong fighters, the prisoners said, was injustice, “grievances the peasants held against the Saigon government.” The prisoners told Zasloff and Donnell they believed that through communism, they could have a better life, one that was not based on corruption. The prisoners expressed “ardent aspirations they had for education, economic opportunity, equality and justice for themselves and their descendants,” Zasloff and Donnell wrote.
The POWs also talked of being tortured by the government of South Vietnam. Some prisoners showed the RAND analysts scars they claimed were the results of incessant torture by prison guards. They spoke of being forced to watch summary executions of fellow prisoners, without explanation or trial. There was no way to verify the veracity of what they were told, but Zasloff and Donnell felt compelled to report these Geneva Convention violations to Guy Pauker at RAND. When Pauker forwarded the information on to the Pentagon in a memo titled “Treatment of POWs, Defectors and Suspects in South Vietnam,” Seymour Deitchman got involved.
He asked questions: How did Zasloff and Donnell know that the prisoners were not lying? Why believe a prisoner in the first place? Instead of looking into Zasloff and Donnell’s claims, Deitchman later commissioned a RAND study on how to detect when a Vietcong prisoner was telling a lie. In “Estimating from Misclassified Data,” RAND analyst S. James Press used a probability theorem called Bayes’ theorem to refute the idea that POW interviews could always be trusted. “The motivation for the work had its genesis in a desire to compensate for incorrect answers that might be found in prisoner-of-war interviews,” Press wrote. After forty-eight pages of mathematical calculations that placed Vietcong POWs’ answers in hypothetical categories, Press concluded, “It is clear that if hostile subjects were aiming at an optimal strategy, they would lie independently of all the categories.”