Numbers had made Robert McNamara’s career. In World War II he worked in the Air Force’s “Statistical Control” effort, analyzing bombing operations and how to make them more efficient. Afterward he joined Ford, which had barely broken even for twenty years, and rose to become the first president of the company from outside the Ford family. Five weeks later he quit to become John F. Kennedy’s secretary of defense. One of the chapters in The Fog of War, Errol Morris’s 2003 documentary about him, is titled “Get the data.”
In Vietnam, the data that came most easily was the count of enemy dead.
On October 14, 1966, after visiting Vietnam from October 10 to 13, McNamara sent President Lyndon Johnson a top secret memo. “The one thing demonstrably going for us in Vietnam over the past year has been the large number of enemy killed-in-action resulting from the big military operations,” he wrote. Even allowing for exaggeration in the reports, he estimated enemy deaths at more than 60,000 a year. “The infiltration routes would seem to be one-way trails to death for the North Vietnamese.”
The next sentence turned the number around. “Yet there is no sign of an impending break in enemy morale and it appears that he can more than replace his losses by infiltration from North Vietnam and recruitment in South Vietnam.”
The rest of the memo was about what the count didn’t show. “Pacification has if anything gone backward.” The enemy’s political organization thrived in most of the country. “In the countryside, the enemy almost completely controls the night.” In what McNamara called “the important war,” the contest for the people’s cooperation, the United States was no better off, and if anything worse. He recommended leveling off at 470,000 American troops, and warned that “even many more than 470,000 would not kill the enemy off in such numbers as to break their morale so long as they think they can wait us out.”
In public the line was different. In archival footage Morris used in the film, a reporter tells McNamara that some commentators think the war is turning into a stalemate. “No, no. I think on the contrary,” he answers, and says the large-unit military operations “have continued to show very substantial progress.”
The count also had a life at the bottom of the chain. In 1970, at the request of the Army’s chief of staff, General William Westmoreland, the Army War College studied the professional climate of the officer corps, drawing on a sample of 450 officers. In debriefs recorded for the study, interviewers said one of the most violent reactions they heard was about the body count, especially from young combat officers back from Vietnam. Some said they were given quotas. Others said they were told their count was too low and sent back to do it again, or that brigade commanders had ordered it “reverified and upped.” The captains worried that the president was making decisions on totally invalid information.
“Nobody out there believes the body count,” one interviewer reported. One young officer described nearly getting into a fistfight with an adviser to the South Vietnamese army over an arm, to settle who would get credit for the body. Someone else asked why battalion commanders didn’t have a “hearts and minds” count.
The study’s conclusion put body count in a list with aircraft readiness and AWOL rates. In each, it found, there was a gap “between real accomplishments and reported accomplishments.”