| Image from Dave Young: "Computing War Narratives: The Hamlet Evaluation System in Vietnam" found via Google 12.12.19 |
War Story #6. The HES Report.
We entered the Vietnam War with enthusiasm. It was the age of McNamara’s Whiz Kids. Systems Analysis reigned. We were sure we could outdo the French with our modern weapons and airmobile tactics. We were naïve ‘managers of violence.’ When soldiers arrived in Vietnam, they were given a wallet card that read, ‘Soldier, this is why you are in Vietnam: to win the hearts and minds of the Vietnamese people!’ I guess about 90% of these soldiers were 18 or 19 year-old draftees. It was their first life adventure after high school and away from their parents’ homes. They spoke not the language and understood not the culture. Too many opined that ‘when you have them by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow.’ Worst of all, our national leaders did not have a clue that you cannot install Western-style democracy at gunpoint.
By 1968, it was clear that we could not prevail, a lesson that we did not learn and have been repeating since 2003. Richard Nixon was elected President, and Melvin Laird became Secretary of Defense. They pursued a Vietnamization policy aimed at turning the war over to the South Vietnamese. It was clear that body counts, bombs dropped, rounds fired, roads built, etc., were not appropriate measures of success. Enter the HES report. HES stands for Hamlet Evaluation System. It assigned a letter grade to every village and hamlet. ‘A’ meant secure: no VC threat, and the scale ran down to E—basically VC controlled. There was no F, since failure was not an option—all jurisdictions were ‘contested.’
In my short stay in Kien Thien District, Chuong Thien Province, during the 1972 VC/NVA Easter offensive, I had to complete the district’s quarterly HES Report. We were given a computer printout (you remember the large folded sheets with the holes on the edges) with 3,600 questions to be answered by interviewing the village and hamlet chiefs. The answers called for multiple choice and yes or no responses. We would go out each day by sampan with 2 people from the US district team (‘Co Van Mys’ or American Advisors), and the district chief along with his minions. It seemed a little surreal to me to be filling out a computer printout on a crude table in a tin-roofed shack with chickens pecking at the dirt floor.
I had also done the previous (much shorter) monthly report and, especially since I was not language trained, I wondered how accurate the responses were. One question in particular asked if friendly artillery had impacted within 1,000 meters of the village or hamlet center. I saw no maps in the villages and hamlets, and there were obviously no distance markers. When asked, no records were consulted. The answers (always ‘No’) came off the cuff. I had doubts, especially after going on a ‘MedCap’ mission in a B Hamlet. There was only one E-5 medic in our entire province apart from A Korean doctor who was doing cleft palate surgeries. During this mission, I was told that the VC also did the same thing but after dark. Only two People’s Self Defense Force members had weapons, and we were told that no one else could be trusted with them.
On my first tour in 1967, I was charged with revising the MACV regulation on protecting aircraft from friendly artillery fire. In 1972 I saw how this operated ‘down in the weeds.’ The district had a 105mm howitzer section (2 guns). When they fired, the US team broadcast warnings to friendly aircraft. I got the idea of being able to answer the friendly artillery fire question in the HES report with some accuracy. I had my sergeant draw a 1000 meter radius circle around all the village and hamlet centers and plot the targets for the artillery warnings on his map. This gave us the ability to answer at least one HES question objectively.
When our quarterly report was turned in, the district as a whole went down one letter grade (to a C). The Deputy Province Advisor, a State Department civilian, said that this was a result of Major Warnock being overly pessimistic. Events proved differently. In March, the Kien Thien District headquarters itself was nearly overrun by the VC (as I have earlier described), and we had 27 B-52 strikes in the Province that month.
Besides learning something of ‘counter-insurgency operations,’ I learned something about how accurate ‘objective’ evaluations may be.
While searching Google for an image to accompany Dad's story, I ran across Dave Young's interesting paper in addition to several other assessments of the HES report. The HES report clearly had its issues to put it mildly, but it is of interest as an early form of data mining and I would recommend Dave's article for anyone interested in reading more. https://machineresearch.wordpress.com/2016/09/26/dave-young/
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