s taying the c ourse 241leave the communists unable to exercise strategic initiative. Th en West-
moreland’s troops would dictate the pace of operations, driving the
enemy away from population centers into isolated sanctuaries from
which he could do no more than mount nuisance attacks. Several times
in 1967, military commanders believed they had crossed this threshold,
and they announced it with much fanfare.
Th eir claims set off fi erce debates within the administration, fed by
doubts about the accuracy of the information on enemy losses and
arguments over which communist forces ought to be counted in the
enemy order of battle (OB). Skeptics in American intelligence
circles knew there were good reasons to question the reported number
of enemy dead. To disguise their losses, the communists removed
many from the battlefi eld. American offi cers in the fi eld, often pres-
sured by superiors to report higher totals of communist dead than
they actually found, submitted inaccurate “body counts” of VC/NVA
killed, and these fi gures were further infl ated as they moved up the
chain of command. In a war with many corrupting elements, one
former officer writes, the “body count may have been the most
corrupt—and corrupting—measure of progress in the whole mess.”
Everyone involved (except perhaps the MACV commander) knew
the system to be fl awed, but in a war of attrition, success could not
be measured in any other way. Meanwhile, Westmoreland insisted
that as many as 200,000 VC irregulars and political cadres not be
included in the enemy OB because they did little or no actual
fi ghting. Without them, of course, the NVA/VC totals seemed much
less imposing.
Finally, after extended wrangling within the administration, the pres-
ident came down on the military’s side and a special national intelli-
gence estimate published in late 1967 adopted something close to
MACV’s preferred counting system. Th e American military command
thus infl icted far greater losses on the enemy by the stroke of a pen than
it did that year in actual combat. Th e new way of calculating enemy
strength naturally did not escape criticism from a skeptical press. Still,
when coupled with evidence of tactical victories over NVA and VC
mainforce units in the latter half of 1967, the new OB fi gures might be
taken as evidence of a decline in regular communist forces in South
Vietnam.