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THE HIGH COST OF KILLING

Note: This is part of a continuing series to digitize the Vietnam War legacy of reporter/columnist
Daniel Cameron, especially work appearing in The Saigon Post. (See July 4 post for details.)
The following is from the series 'ETCETERA' and was first published October 06, 1970.

                   THE HIGH COST OF KILLING

                                      by
                                          Daniel Cameron

ETCETERA (Saigon Post, Oct. 06, 1970)

 

THE HIGH COST OF KILLING

 

by Daniel Cameron

 

In the Ho Bo Woods

 

Some grunts have education, you know. Have you been to the boonies as a G.I. Or at least an I.G. (Instant Grunt?) If so, you may have marched with a school teacher-grenade launcher,drank chlorinated water from the canteen of a biology graduate, or maybe watched an air strike with a soul brother psychology major.

 

 

PFC Bill is from Pennsylvania. Because of his intelligence he may never rise above PFC, but he's still a good guy. I bumped into him in the Ho Bo Woods of Cu Chi Province. People like PFC Bill sometimes have interesting things to say while trying to dodge the booby traps.  Bill had entered d a school of economics before entering the rice paddies.

 

We were out together on a two-platoon sweep in this wild hedgerow area near the snaky Saigon River, right in the heart of booby trap country. In a bush, our point man had discovered another of Charley's camouflaged trap doors that lead down into a series of underground tunnels. One of our tunnel rats, Private Ginger, volunteered to go down. Ginger found nobody home but came up with a rusty Chicom AK-47, a Russian K-54 pistol, two bags of rice and three cans of mackerel canned in Japan with tomato sauce. This weapons cache was Bravo Company's main find for the day. Sometimes you do better, of course. Every hole is a little different. Sometimes a lot different.

 

As usual, orders were to blow the tunnels so that Charley would have that less many hideouts and chances for mischief. Naturally, everybody knew that Charley woulld dig more holes somewhere else. That was part of the cat-and-mouse game.

 

Bill and I didn't mind so much. It would give us time to rest our over-heated selves. We sat on the edge of a bomb crater while the detonating team began work. Bill washed down his salt tablets with lukewarm canteen water. He lit a menthol cigarette from his C-ration pack and wiped gobs of sweat off his glasses. PFC Bill was in a lecture mood today, despite the Cu Chi sun.

 

"Someday," he said, "I'll have to do a thesis on the economics of Vietnam military operations. It ought to win a humor award, anyway."

 

"Why's that, Bill?"

 

"Guess how much it costs to kill one Charley boy? Just one."

 

"I'm a bad guesser."

 

"Well, my conservative calculations say it's 199 thousand dollars. Green dollars."

 

"Really?"

 

"But that was three years ago. Now, with this galloping inflation...My God."

 

Bill took off his steel pot and ammo belt. The way he reached his figure of 199 thousaand per Charley sounded very complicated. Some of the professional economy people might say the figure was too high. Then again, others might say it was too low. PFC Bill used a lot of terms from professors, and from economics books, but it all came down to one point: Hanoi is over-charging. It almost sounded as if Charley boy costs more dead than alive.

 

Ginger popped yellow smoke and we watched the Huey chopper come down with the load of explosives that had been ordered by radio. Five grunts from the first platoon helped carry out the crates of forty-pound shape charges, bangalore torpedoes, the C-4 sticks of plastique, det cords, fuses and blasting caps. These would be used to destroy five or six holes in the ground.

 

PFC Bill opened his canteen again.

 

"Put that all together," he said, "And you have a nice $10,000 firecracker. Charley, of course, paid maybe ten farmers and kids a nickel each to dig him those holes...Paid, hell. He may have just pointed his bayonet...."

 

Sure made me think, that Bill. I suppose if a man asked a thousand dollars to mow down ten cents worth of grass in my backyard, I'd wonder whether the dude has all his crap together.

 

Bill would too. Bill also seemed to think that people who trifle with $10, 000 firecrackers are a gross insult to the nation's Gross National Product. Especially when they fail to ram the firecracker up somebody's apparatus in Hanoi. (He put itworse than that.) He also felt they were a gross national insult to the grunts who had to do the actual detonating in actual booby trap country.  A grunt likes to feel that people in authority are squared-away people. It helps, anyway. A strong jaw is good, but a strong mind is maybe even better.

 

Bill's war economizing covered the Vietnamizing business, too. He seemed to think that even when most American combat troops leave, it will still cost many thousands of dollars for one ARVIN to kill one Charley. At the same time it will cost the Russians and Chinese about $1.98 a piece everytime their Charley boy assasinates a village Chief or school teacher or Government official. Then we pay thousands to get the killer (sometimes getting innocent civilians who Charley boy is trained to put in our way. And in the meantime it costs the pious protesters back home maybe 29 cents a placard (with free TV network time) to tell us to stop killing the killers.

 

"I think Hanoi is overcharging something fierce," Bill said.

 

But if we left Vietnam and stopped payment altogether, Charley and his gang, like any winner, would take all and we would have shown ourselves to be history's impotent giant, or at least its biggest bungler. For if our past ten years were all a vast and vain mistake, thousands of Americans killed in their prime, thousands maimed, scores of billions of dollars washed away in the mud, the nation denounced at home and abroad, then what nation ever bungled more?

 

Sounded like the Russian Bear and the Chinese Dragon had a good thing going for them, anyway.

 

The detonating crew put ten-minute fuses on all the charges, and we cleared out of the area. The boom came as we reached the rice paddy. We all turned and watched the geyser of smoke, dust, clumps of earth and  bits of trees fly high and come down.

 

PFC Bill wiped more sweat from his glasses.

 

"We produce lots of big-bang firecrckers," he said, "but not many General MacArthurs or Colonel Rheaults."

 

Bill may send me a copy of his thesis if he ever gets it published.

 

Some grunts have education, you know.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Saigon Notes, October 06, 1970

Note:  This continues an Indochina Legacy series, digitizing (for scholars and researchers to come) the local reportage of Daniel Cameron in Vietnam. (Details in foreword to the July 4 post here.) The following appeared in The Saigon Post, October 06, 1970.

             

       SAIGON NOTES 

    by Daniel Cameron

 

                     Mail Spies at Juspao?

 

A number of persons are seriously wondering whether correspondents' mail arriving at JUSPAO is being secretly opened. They mention suspicious signs on envelopes and packages

 

Having no hard evidence yet, this column is making no charges. Are the wary individuals perhaps suffering from mild paranoia? We have no hard evidence on that either.

Of course the mail clerks, who are obviously nice kids, are not mentioned. What is spoken of are the "spooks" who roam JUSPAO.

 

                           SOME FEMALES IN SAIGON

 

Petite Eve Sharbert at AP: Southern charm is welcome in this town...Mrs. Co at JUSPAO: With legs so shapely and smooth, it's humane that she doesn't often wear the traditional ao dai...Hennie the Dutch airborne blonde: Good lines, generally speaking, but her joints seem a little constricted, her bones maybe a little tired. Too many jumps?...Gloria Emerson, New York Times: If there were no New York Times, would Gloria feel a need to invent one?...Mary, the French and English speaking reporter of Greek nationality, cultivator of confidences: She's doing herself a big favor by reducing, but will Nature allow her to complete the job?...Lisa Cronin, now Mrs. Captain Frank Wohl: Despite the bum deal she got from AP, she has Celtic vitality and big blue eyes...Anne Bryam. Editor of Overseas Weekly: Brittle but attractive, especially for an American woman in Vietnam. Is she secretly a frustrated General?..Mrs. Dennis Cook at UPI: That red Botticelli hair looks, at times, like it's on fire...Tony Pyle at AP: Friendly, we are told, and can wield a pen...Miss Nga in the JUSPAO lobby: Cute, dimply and theoretically pinchable.

 

                                       SHARON TATE AT THE EDEN

 

It was a parody of the James Bond thing, old but entertaining. Plenty of color, humor and style.

One test of a good movie is its appeal to different nationalities. This one packed in the Vietnamese and made them laugh.

Dean Martin the title role of Matt Helm, hip secret agent,(Dubbed in France, unfortunately.) Dean Martin knows how to be light and humorous without ever compromising his dignity. There's a delicious karate combat scene between Nancy Kwan and Sharon Tate.

Why must so many of the good ones die young? James Dean, Marilyn Monroe, Montgomery Clift, and now the gorgeous redhaired Sharon, daughter of an Air Force Colonel.

        

                                          OVER THE BRINK

 

Eric Cavaliero, a former religion editor for the Honolulu Advertiser, was evicted recently from the Brink Open Grille. Long hair, he was told. Yet Eric is fairly bald. But he does have some hair on the back of his head, you see. Naughty boy. Apparently he committed the cardinal MACV sin  of letting it grow a wee bit. So out he went. The Brink, you see, is "tightening up."

 

To the MACV types who are "tightening up."  If you yourselves are deathly afraid to grow hair, why not grow up? No wonder women make morons out of you.

 

                                        HURRICANE IN VIETNAM

 

The Hurricane, published by H Field Force, has put out a special Cambodia issue. The slick, glossy publication chronicles the May-June operations in Cambodia. Many color plates. Interesting stories on General Do Cao Tri.

Oddly, the most remarkable photographs are, we think, the facial close-ups of US Cambodian Commander, MIchael S. Davison, by someone named Joern. The shots, illustrating an interview, reveal big patrician features resembling a solid Roman Emperor before the period of Rome's decline.

 

                                    SPIRITUAL LIFE AT AP

 

Now that the likes of (Pulitzer Prize) Peter Arnett are gone and (Foto Chief) Horst Faas, now fat and famous, is largely gone, and Vietnam is unofficially off-limits for future Pulitzers, what does Associated Press, Saigon, do for morale food?

 

 

SAIGON NOTES, March 15, 1970

(Note: This is the second in a series for an on-going Vietnam War Legacy Project that began July 4.
My features that appeared in The Saigon Post etc will be digitized for future reference  and also posted here. (Details at July 4 post.) The following, under byline 'Daniel Cameron,' is the SAIGON NOTES  column for March 15, 1970.)

            SAIGON NOTES

               by Daniel Cameron                 

          THE 'I' HOUSE INCIDENT

 

 Most Saigon hands remember  the International House which closed down  last year on Nguyen Hue  Street. You paid a $20 membership fee and then ate low-priced steaks, drank the PX booze, played the slot machines and had companionship. American civilians went there in droves,  The place did a good business---so good, in fact, that at least two managers are being indicted  by a federal grand jury in Los Angeles. The charge is conspiracy to defraud an instrumentality of the US Government of hundreds of thousands of dollars. This is according to a recent Stateside article by CLARK MOLLENHOFF.

 

The American Embassy here is involved because it had the authority to audit the club and was also represented on the board of International House. This Board was composed of officials from various  US Federal agencies in Saigon. It had the responsibility of supervising  the club's finances and, presumably, keeping the wrong hands out of the right pockets. Although no Embassy official is implicated in any wrong-doing (aside from gross negligence) MOLLENHOFF writes:

 

"The intital investigation of International House gives a clue as to how one State Department official was able to afford Monday night parties with guest lists as long as your arm, and still repay an old credit union debt of thousands of dollars."

 

The International House was not an agency of the US Government. It was a private club managed by non-Government managers. As an American official explained to us, it wound up becoming a 'baby' of federal agencies here because that was the only way it could get duty-free food and liquor. He said that without these duty-free privileges the club would not have been able to serve its 5000 members at bargain rates.

 

"There was a need for such a club," he said. "Almost everybody wanted it. And so we let ourselves take the responsibility for the financial supervision."

 

According to MOLLENHOFF, a Justice Department audit says that "much of the fraud was apparent, but nobody paid any attention to the evidence."

 

State Department auditors say the records are missing, equipment is missing, money is missing and it's almost impossible to reconstuct financial transactions.

 

While official members of International House were meeting regularly in Saigon, non-officials with hot hands  were apparently having a good time operating slot machine rackets, equipment-purchase rackets  and kick-back rackets. Liquor, meat and other foods would be bought from "favored" vendors for as much as 30 or 40 percent more than the going market price. The vendors split the amount of the overpricing with "key club employees."

 

An American official tells me, "We had no idea what was going on."

 

The funny or sad part is that he was probably being perfectly honest in his reply. Did the Board of International House ever anticipate such possibilities for hot hands in the "I" House?

 

Apparently not.

 

MOLLENHOFF writes: "The US Embassy had the authority to audit the club, but it did not have the specific responsibility to conduct periodic audits. Consequently the club personnel operated with little or no supervision."

 

ps. Information suitable for this column can be mailed to The Saigon Post. Or leave name on bulletin board at JUSPAO , 145

Nguyen Hue St.

 

 

Saigon Notes

 

ANNOUNCEMENT/////////This begins a little Legacy Project from the war in Vietnam (and Cambodia.) It will  digitize and upload one man's experiences and observations, especially those recorded in the very controversial (and independent) column, SAIGON NOTES, and the earlier series, ETCETERA that appeared in the Saigon Post.  These comprise over 150 articles under the byline 'DANIEL CAMERON.'  Later I may add some of the "well-behaved"  reportage done for NEWSDAY, THE CHICAGO TRIBUNE, The CHICAGO SUN-TIMES and finally for CBS after its entire staff fled in the famous panic during the 'Story of the Decade,' i.e. the Fall of Saigon (including the  in-house  story that remains in the CBS Memory Hole to this day.) 

 

In general the period covered ranges from late 1969, when President Nixon began to 'Vietnamize' the Democrats' war, gradually phasing out US forces, to the fateful Spring of 1975, when most Americans were gone, Nixon had been Watergated out of office, and Congress refused emergency aid to the South Vietnamese as Hanoi's Communist Army rolled South, less than two years after the famous Paris Ceasefire and Peace Accords of Nixon's Henry Kissinger and Hanoi's Le Duc Tho.

 

The digitizing project will start today with the very first SAIGON NOTES (September 28, 1970) reproduced at http://www.gringoman.com / These re-printings will be somewhat redacted for clarity.   The originals are  full of typos. (Unfortunately, the Chinese typesetter sweating in his underwear in a wartime basement  did not have even a GED in English.)

 

Note to ideologues of any stripe: In Saigon everyone read these columns and not a few were offended, especially members of the crack Saigon press corps, like NEWSWEAK. If you are not offended right away, just be patient. Of course I wouldn't write exactly like this today, being slightly more civilized. I certainly wouldn't be so mean to a poor Gloria Emerson, late of the NY Times. But the historical record compels me, in the main,  to stick to the original, even when it offends even me. (Typo-cluttered originals are microfilmed somewhere or other by someone or other.)

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1970. NOTICE: 'Saigon Notes' by Daniel Cameron makes its debut in The Saigon Post starting Monday, September 28. The columns will be a regular feature on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. The views expressed in the column are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Saigon Post.

 

                                        SAIGON NOTES

                     ENTER SIR ROBERT

Great Britain's distinguished Southeast Asia man, Sir Robert Thompson, advisor to President Nixon and author of NO EXIT FROM VIETNAM, returned to Saigon recently.

Discreet, as ever.

 

                                       EXIT JAMES STERBA

 

James Sterba of the NY Times is probably one of the finest young reporters in Vietnam, Now that he's going home very soon, we hear that he's spending much more time at the pinochle table than in briefing rooms. Sterba completed a very good article recently about the G.I. use of marijuana and drugs in Vietnam. But persons who read both claim that he may have been surpassed by 'STEEL POT IN A MARIJUANA CONVOY' which appeared in the little old Saigon Post, September 18 and 19. Sorry 'bout that, Jim. But nobody will hear about it Stateside, or in JUSPAO's Vietnam Round-up. No sweat.

 

                                        DIAMOND DADDY DILEMNA

 

Now that a Stateside diamond salesman is going to take over The Overseas Weekly,the outfit's local staff may have to do some uncomfortable soul=searching. Indications are that Diamond Daddy plans to castrate the hard-hitting publication, turning it into a respectable eunuch which he feels will make friends with military commanders and money with G.I.s The current staff may have to go along with Diamond Daddy or face unemployment. In such a dilemna, what would you all do, buckeroos?

 

                                         CLYDE AND CHARLEY

 

According to senior North Vietnamese defectors, the word coming down from COSVN headquarters to all echelons and branches is: economize, economize, economize. The Allied sweeps into Cambodia and the closing of the Sihanoukville port to Red supplies have painfully damaged Red logistics. The problem is compounded by China's unwillingness to let Russian supplies enter North Vietnam through China, which may quadruple the Kremlin's transportation costs. It's reported that in An Xuyen and Dinh Tuong Provinces of South Vietnam, Red forces are being directed to use their AK-47's only under specific orders. The non-automatic weapon is now the common weapon, using less ammo.

 

                                          FOR MISS GLORIA EMERSON

 

"The concept of trying to help  others is an alien one to most Vietnamese, who distrust such attempts."

This New Yorker insight is from a September 14 NY Times article by Miss Emerson. The article was about social welfare or charity projects in Vietnam. Miss Emerson's smug, reckless generalization about Vietnamese character was either deliberate slander or sheer obtuseness. We prefer to think she is intelligent (aren't NY Timers by definition intelligent?) so we'll suggest slander. We don't demand unusual perception and  insight from US correspondents, but we hope for basic education. Gloria, dear, maybe you were just confusing "trying to help others" with the concept of organized charity? Maybe you know that organized charity is a peculaiarity mainly of the Anglo-American world? You've been around a little, haven't you? Most of the world, dear, sees the practice of philanthropic NY socialites  in a slightly different way than you may see them. Your description may get by with New york provincials, but what about others?