Body Counts
Throughout the involvement of the United States in Vietnam, its stated political goal was not the conquest of North Vietnam but rather the preservation of South Vietnam as a separate independent nation. In conducting the war this made measuring success difficult. There were few set piece battles acquiring territorial advantages from the enemy. Ostensibly all of South Vietnam was already under the control of the South Vietnamese government, although in reality the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese regulars were active in most of the rural countryside.
To measure success, US military leaders, starting with William Westmoreland, used body counts of dead enemy soldiers. Westmoreland believed that a war of attrition, killing the enemy at a high ratio in comparison to American and South Vietnamese losses, was a winning strategy. Even in a set piece battle such as the one in at Ia Drang in 1965 the number of enemy casualties was the measuring stick through which the Americans claimed victory. Since the war consisted primarily of locating and killing Viet Cong groups, the term search and destroy was applied to missions, and the reported body count was what made the mission a success or failure.
The use of the body count as the definition of success created competition between units, and led to highly exaggerated claims of enemy dead and thus victory in the field. Even at the aforementioned Ia Drang battle, Lt. Col. Moore, who led American troops and fought in the battle, later said that the estimates of enemy dead were inflated, and reduced the numbers reported to him by a third. Even the reduced number seemed to him to be higher than the true number of enemy killed. A survey of American generals who had served in Vietnam conducted in 1977 revealed that the majority found body counts to have been unrealistic and their use was a mistake.
Westmoreland used the inflated body counts in dealing with the American political leadership. He claimed that under his leadership in Vietnam American and South Vietnamese troops had won every battle in which they engaged the enemy. In fact, the Battle at Ia Drang had been a bloody fight with high American casualties, and though the Americans held the field it was at best a draw. The search and destroy strategy also gave the choice of engaging in battle to the enemy, except in the case of complete surprise, which was difficult to achieve.
Besides reporting inaccurate body counts to the press and the civilian military authorities, Westmoreland also suppressed intelligence on Viet Cong strength in order to maintain morale. This was confirmed by one of the officers, Major General Joseph McChristian, who was ordered to change the information being disseminated. Throughout his tenure in command Westmoreland advocated widening the war into Laos and Cambodia in order to stop the flow of supplies along the Ho Chi Minh trail. He was replaced in 1968 by Creighton Abrams, who shifted to the strategy of pacification.