But Who Hath Measured the Ground?

IT is no secret that several officers in the U.S. command's secret information-gathering center in Saigon keep Japanese-made "laughing bags" on their desks. The little battery-operated noise boxes emit an 18-second burst of hysterical laughter at the push of a button. Officers have been known to push the button during working hours--quite possibly in response to the latest batch of statistics to arrive from the battlefields or hamlets of Indochina.

The statistical body counts of enemy soldiers killed and wounded and reports of "secure" towns and villages are not exactly a laughing matter. They have played a major--and all too often misleading--role in the history of the Viet Nam War.

The U.S. command in Saigon, for example, announced last week that 708,544 enemy troops have been killed in Viet Nam since 1961--more than the total number of Communist troops estimated to be in all of Indochina at present (650,000). "If the figures are not true," says a U.S. embassy source in Saigon, "then we are not hitting them as hard as we think. If the figures are true, then they demonstrate a frightening commitment on the part of the enemy." In Cambodia, similarly, more than 22,500 Communists have been reported killed since the allied invasion began last April. Allowing for a ratio of two men wounded for every man killed, this would raise the number of enemy casualties to 67,500. But U.S. intelligence analysts estimate that the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong started out with some 40,000 troops in Cambodia last April, that they now have slightly less than 60,000 there, and that the rate of reinforcement has not been exceptionally high since last spring.

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The Viet Nam War, in short, has produced its own version of the Orwellian Newspeak: Newcount. TIME Correspondent David Greenway recalls overhearing an American company commander, whose men had just found three enemy bodies, discussing with his platoon leaders what number to report to the battalion commander. "They decided on 20," writes Greenway. "But when I got back to Danang, I found the figure sent to Saigon on this engagement had grown to 32."

In Laos last month, practically all 250 members of two companies of the ARVN 6th Airborne Battalion were killed or captured. Their loss has never been reported. One Vietnamese official said privately of ARVN officers: "They want to see how much the correspondents know before they provide the figures. The ratio is almost always said to be five enemy killed to one government soldier killed. We never get the real figure."

Helicopter loss figures seem no more reliable. As of last week, reported the U.S. command, 38 helicopters had been lost over Laos in combat and two destroyed in a mid-air collision since Feb. 8. The fact is, about 200 helicopters had been lost over Laos by week's end. The command, it seems, reports only those choppers that are totally destroyed and cannot be retrieved.

It is in the highly touted "Hamlet Evaluation System" that Newcount has reached its zenith. In late 1969, HES reported that 92.6% of the countryside was under government control. Amid general ridicule, the figure was "revised" to 87.9%. Last week President Thieu announced that 99.8% of the population and 99.4% of the hamlets and villages were controlled by the government. Yet even if the hamlets rated A (for fully government-controlled), few ranking officials would care to spend the night lest the Communists stage a lethal raid.

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The problem with such unreliable --and often deliberately falsified--figures is that they ultimately prove counterproductive. Pacification, for instance, has enjoyed considerable success so far. So has Vietnamization, though the reviews of that effort will necessarily be tentative for some time. But both have been merchandised with such hyperbole that skeptics tend to discount even legitimate claims.

Nor can anyone be sure to what extent the propagandization of statistics has influenced U.S. policymakers. As early as 1962, then Defense Secretary Robert McNamara said: "Every quantitative measurement we have shows we're winning this war." But those quantitative measurements had very likely been hoked up all along the line--from squad level to company to battalion and on up to McNamara's office.

The deception, sometimes deliberate, sometimes unintentional, has not ended. Two weeks ago, at a press conference called to justify the incursion into Laos, Defense Secretary Melvin Laird and Lieut. General John W. Vogt Jr. displayed a hunk of the pipeline that carries gas from North Viet Nam down the Ho Chi Minh Trail. They implied that it had been seized by the South Vietnamese during the current drive into Laos. Last week the Pentagon admitted that the piping had actually been brought back by South Vietnamese commandos after an earlier, unannounced raid. It "probably would have been better," Laird acknowledged, if he had made the true facts clear in the first place.

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The most basic criticism of Newcount centers on the notion that success or defeat can be measured by counting bodies. South Vietnamese troops may well be doing better than their critics will ever willingly concede, but faked body counts and phony pacification figures are not the way to prove it. The North Vietnamese sustained three times as many casualties as the French at Dienbienphu. As a former U.S. adviser in Viet Nam notes, it is patently absurd to suppose that, "when the South Vietnamese are chasing each other aboard a helicopter to get off a hill, they are going to stop everything to say, 'And incidentally, sir, exactly 1,250 of the enemy lie dead outside these perimeters.' "

The situation calls to mind a line from Shakespeare's Henry V. When a messenger arrives with the dismaying news that the English are precisely 1,500 paces from the French army's tents at Agincourt, the Constable of France asks: "Who hath measured the ground?"

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