Daniel Endsley's Vietnam Journal letters

We were supposed to spend only the morning on briefings, but it took all day. I had planned to take my radio back and demand a replacement today, but now it will have to wait until after the trip.

Early in the morning we headed over to the airport area for a Psy Op / Pol War briefing from a major Shaffer and a few other people he roped in to help. The Vietnamese have organized army cadres for psychological operations and political warfare, which oddly (by our standards) includes the chaplain corps because of the services that a chaplain traditionally offers. This is all patterned after the Chinese Nationalists, who apparently pioneered the concept. They certainly couldn't pattern themselves after us because we have never had anything of the sort and probably never will.

I asked a young captain his impression of who carries out the information function best - the thousands of civilian functionaries in VIS or the mere handful of cadres he says are at the disposal of the military side. The military he said. This seemed pretty impressive until I discovered that the figures are a bit off and the military also use thousands.

That was the Vietnamese side, described by Americans advising the Vietnamese. Next we were set for MACV J-3-11, and I can't tell you what those mean exactly, except that this is the political warfare side of MACV. The greeting at the gate was a little different; our military leader had called in all of our - MPC (Military Payment Certificates), apparently as an anti-black market move. If we came on we could not leave until the process was complete. This sounded bad, but it was only 10 a.m. and the briefing seemed important, so we went in.

Apparently there is a rule here that no one can have more than $150 worth of MPC at a time without a very good explanation. The object of the exercise, as I understand it, is to catch people with more, and make them lose it.

The three of us turned our money in to a major fellow, expecting to get the new stuff after the briefings were over. The lieutenant Colonel who heads that section gave us a very bad briefing during which he read from a prepared text stamped secret and showed about 20 slides all showing different aspects of the titles of organization. Again we learned what the organization is supposed to be like, not what it actually is like.

We were all finished not long after lunch, but our money wasn't ready and we couldn't leave until we got it. We were there a total of seven hours before we were able to break out. i got madder and madder, and began to say progressively snottier things about how the Army does things, but everyone agreed. More important I got the impression that the section doesn't work much. The CO did a few things, the enlisted clerk worked - a [unintelligible] major did some chores not related to [unintelligible]. Everyone else sat around and gabbed.