Seven years in hell

Engelhardt is a media critic who is always worth your time.

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Sometimes it seemed that Americans in Vietnam did nothing but invent new ways of measuring success. There were, for instance, the 18 indices of the Hamlet Evaluation System, each meant to calibrate the "progress" of "pacification" in South Vietnam's 2,300 villages and almost 13,000 hamlets, focusing largely on "rural security" and "development".

Then there were the many indices of the Measurement of Progress system, its monthly reports, produced in slide form, including "strength trends of the opposing forces, efforts of friendly forces in sorties ... enemy base areas neutralized", and so on. And don't forget that there were figures by the bushel-load on every form of destruction rained down on the Vietnamese enemy - sorties flown, tonnage dropped, "truck kills", you name it. The efforts that went into creating numerical equivalents for death were endless.

For visiting congressional delegations, the commander of US forces, General William Westmoreland, had his "attrition charts", multicolored bar graphs illustrating various "trends" in death and destruction. Commanders in the field had their own sophisticated ways to codify "kill ratios"; while, on the ground, where, in dangerous circumstances, the actual counting had to be done, all of this translated, far more crudely, into the MGR, or, as the grunts sometimes said, the "Mere Gook Rule" - "If it's dead and it's Vietnamese, it's VC ." In other words, when pressure came down for the "body count", any body would do.

Back in the US, much of the frustration that had gathered in the face of mounting years of claimed progress and evident failure would focus on the "body count" of enemy dead, announced in late afternoon US military press briefings in the South Vietnamese capital, Saigon, now Ho Chi Minh City. For the element of the fantastic in those briefings (and the figures proffered), they came to be known among reporters as "the five o'clock follies".

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/II06Ak05.html