while Westmoreland’s troops were turning the countryside into a “free fire” zone. Philip Caputo, a junior Marine officer who landed with the first combat battalion at Da Nang on March 8, 1965, was later to write in his acclaimed memoir Rumors of War, “Our mission was not to win terrain or seize positions, but simply to kill: to kill communists and to kill as many of them as possible. Stack ’em like cordwood. Victory was a high body-count, defeat a low kill-ratio, war a matter of arithmetic.”11 Lansdale perceived that that was not a winning strategy, but he had no authority to alter what
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