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3 —————————— VIETNAM With his accomplishments on the Congo behind him and Vietnam to look forward to, Sam Adams spent a well-deserved vacation on Hoel Pond in the Adirondacks. He would have fed the chipmunks just as he had done as a child, played with his little son Clayton in the water, and enjoyed quiet afternoons reading on the cabin porch with Eleanor. At almost this exact same time, July 1965, Lyndon B. Johnson had made the decision to sharply increase the number of U.S. troops in South Vietnam. Troop levels, the president announced, were to be raised from 75,000 to 125,000. And, Johnson let it be known, whenever the U.S. commander in Vietnam, General William C. Westmoreland, wanted more soldiers they would be his for the asking. The war in Vietnam had been fully Americanized.1 Rested, Adams returned to Room 6G00 in early August, but now his desk, with his transfer from the Congo having taken effect, was in the Southeast Asia Branch. The setup of SEA was similar to what he had known in Congo and Southern Africa, with about five or six analysts covering different countries. In SEA these were South Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. And Adams would have a new boss, Edward Hauck. Hauck, as Adams quickly learned, was a veteran Vietnam-watcher and a legend at the agency, known for his impish sparkle and wide, gaptoothed , ear-to-ear grin that made him look like an Indian lacrosse player who’d taken one too many swats on the head. Hauck’s body was muscular, his head topped with a gray crew cut. But Hauck was smart and competent , and rumored to have once danced with Madame Mao Zedong. In 1942 Hauck had been pulled from Columbia University at age eighteen because of his knowledge of Japanese. He served as a Japaneselanguage officer, first in India, and then with the Chinese Nationalists in southern China. Hauck learned Chinese and was subsequently assigned to the Dixie Mission, the small American team attached to the Nationalists’ 41 Hiam_A MONUMENT TO DECEIT_text_Layout 1 1/28/14 9:43 AM Page 41 foe, Mao Zedong. Hauck was the only member of the mission who actually spoke Chinese. He saw Mao on a daily basis and conversed with the Communist leader frequently. For a while Hauck, with his Japanese and Chinese fluency, even led a Chinese Communist intelligence detachment behind Japanese lines. Only twenty-one years old and he was already an expert on Asian Communist guerrilla armies at war. Hauck thought highly of the military capabilities of the Chinese Communists. In particular , he admired their organization, tactics, and determination. After the Japanese surrender Hauck stayed on with Mao’s forces and once found himself on the receiving end of a Nationalist attack. His final task as part of the U.S. mission was to retrieve the cadaver of an American whom the Communists had just executed — John Birch. Once back home in the States, Hauck got a job in the Foreign Documents Division of the CIA. In 1951 he transferred departments to become an analyst on Indochina.2 On Adams’s first day at SEA, in early August 1965, his new boss put him on the topic of Viet Cong morale. Adams was brimming with excitement about his new responsibilities, and also with optimism regarding America’s prospects in South Vietnam. “Mr. Hauck,” he asked, “how long do you think the war is going to last? I mean, how long before we clean it up?” “The Vietnam war is going to last a long time,” Hauck answered, his cheerful expression turning sour. “In fact, the war’s going to last so long we’re going to get sick of it. We’re an impatient people, we Americans, and you wait and see what happens when our casualties go up, and stay up, for years and years. We’ll have riots in the streets, like France had in the 1950s. No, we’re not going to ‘clean it up.’ The Vietnamese Communists will. Eventually, when we tire of war, we’ll come home. Then they’ll take Saigon. I give them ten years to do it, maybe twenty.” “You’re kidding,” Adams gasped. “Wish I was,” Hauck said, smiling once again. Adams returned to his new desk at the other side of the cubicle. Good God, he thought, I’m only ten minutes into my first war, and already the boss says we’re going to...

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