It was hard to point to any real progress that all of this military activity was achieving. Lansdale wrote in mid-1966, “While the US military have been going great guns against large VC and NVA units, the hard fact is that the VC are still all over the landscape and their areas of control haven’t diminished all that much.”4 He noted that when he arrived in August 1965, there were an estimated 150,000 Vietcong in South Vietnam. Now, a year later, there were 300,000. “I simply don’t understand how anyone can figure that means we’re winning.”
