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Soon after the first sure kill, a Vietnamese lieutenant came to me excitedly reporting another sure KIA. "Show me," I said. "Too far, too dangerous," he replied. I repeated the rule. He shook his finger as if to say, I'll show you. Half an hour later, he returned and handed me a handkerchief. I opened it and gaped at a pair of freshly cut ears.
That night around the campfire, I summoned the company commanders and senior noncoms. The rules needed refinement. A kill meant a whole body, not component parts. No ears. And no more mutilation of the enemy.
Six months later, coming out of the A Shau Valley , Powell stepped into a punji trap, and a dung-tipped spike ran through his right foot. He recovered quickly enough, but his days as a field adviser were over. "It would be dishonest to say I hated to leave combat,'' recalls Powell. "But by the time I was injured, I had become the battalion commander in all but name. I had taken the same risks, slept on the same ground and eaten from the same pots as these men and had spilled my blood with them. Shared death, terror and small triumphs in the A Shau Valley linked me closely to men with whom I could barely converse. I left my comrades with more than a tinge of regret.'' He was reassigned to 1st arvn Division Headquarters in Hue, where he worked as an assistant adviser on the operations staff.
When I left the A Shau Valley, I shifted from a worm's-eye to a bird's-eye view of the war, and the new vantage point was not comforting. One of my assignments was to feed data to a division intelligence officer who was trying to predict when mortar attacks were most likely to occur. He worked behind a green door marked no entry doing something called "regression analysis." My data got through the door, but not me. I was not cleared to enter. One day the officer finally emerged. There were, he reported, periods when we could predict increased levels of mortar fire with considerable certainty. When was that? By the dark of the moon. Well, knock me over with a rice ball. Weeks of statistical analysis had taught this guy what any arvn private could have told him in five seconds. It is more dangerous out there when it is dark.
The McNamara-era analytic measurements that were to dominate American thinking about Vietnam were just coming into vogue. We rated a hamlet as "secure" when it had a certain number of feet of fence around it, a militia to guard it and a village chief who had not been killed by the Viet Cong in the past three weeks. While I was in the Be Luong base camp, Secretary McNamara had made a visit to South Vietnam. "Every quantitative measurement ," he concluded after 48 hours there, "shows that we are winning the war." Measure it and it has meaning. Measure it and it is real. Yet nothing I had witnessed in the A Shau Valley indicated we were beating the Viet Cong. Beating them? Most of the time we could not even find them.