BRIEFINGS: A RITUAL OF NONCOMMUNICATION

ON first visiting Southeast Asia, a reporter, or any other designated VIP, usually undergoes a ritual of purification. Arriving at the Hawaii headquarters of the Commander in Chief Pacific Forces, he is led to a closely guarded building. Within its cavernous, arctic-cool auditorium, he is guided to a leather swivel chair beating a plaque with his name. On a table is a plump leather notebook full of blank paper awaiting his use. Standing in front of him, as august as an altar, is a divided projection screen. Above the screen, a row of clocks record the time in distant parts of the world. Then bemedaled officers march briskly front and center to a lectern, there to deliver, like preachers, resonant, reassuring explications of the U.S. military role in Asia. The visitor, like a churchgoer, may be awed. But he is more likely to be bored, and to feel that he has not learned much he did not know before.

But then that may be the unadmitted purpose of the CINCPAC briefing. Like all similar productions sponsored by the military, it is more a reaffirmation of faith than a revelation of fact. Such is the notoriety of the presentation that some reportorial wits rate briefings on a scale: CINCPAC equals zero. Not that many other briefings rank much higher; correspondents in Viet Nam, for example, long ago dubbed their daily briefings in Saigon the "5 O'Clock (now 4:30) Follies." To the press, military briefings have become more show than substance--a bewildering melange of abbreviations and acronyms, of charts, maps, slides and the ubiquitous collapsible pointer that briefers wave in military rhythm. All that is missing from this mixed-media presentation is a rock background, and maybe the reason is that no one has thought of it yet.

To Make a Case

The theoretical purpose of a briefing is to convey necessary information in as concise and clear a manner as possible. As the sheer volume of information has multiplied, it has become essential to provide those who need to know with comprehensible summaries. Not just the military, but much of the Federal Government and many big corporations use the briefing as a convenient tool to make a case or sell a product. Nowhere, though, has it become more a way of life than in the U.S. armed forces; the military has subjected the briefing form to all the spit and polish of a full-dress parade. Simplification, indeed oversimplification, has been ritualized, and the military sometimes gives the impression of enjoying the ritual more than its purpose, which is to communicate.

The Viet Nam war, in particular, has exposed the weaknesses of the briefing ritual. The requirement of brevity means that briefers must rely heavily on hard facts and statistics, even when dealing with subjects that defy quantification. Time and again, military briefers in Viet Nam have "proved" that the war was being won with the help of impressive "body counts" of enemy dead that were impossible to verify, let alone dispute. With the aid of computers, U.S. officials were equally sanguine about stating to the decimal point how many villages were "secure" in Viet Nam. Such was the faith in the quantity of weaponry unloaded on the Communists that military briefers would confidently announce in detail the damage that had been done, when in fact they had no way of knowing for sure. Passed on to higher headquarters, summaries of misleading summaries contributed to the deepening U.S. military involvement in Viet Nam. As described in the current issue of the Atlantic by former Under Secretary of the Air Force Townsend Hoopes, Dean Acheson told Lyndon Johnson to his face that he had been consistently misinformed by "canned briefings" from the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

No Departure

A saying in Viet Nam is that there are only two ways to make general: by fighting or by briefing. It is no secret that General Earle Wheeler owed his elevation to Army Chief of Staff partly to the fact that he impressed President Kennedy with his skill as a briefer. Without exception, an officer is briefed before he goes on a mission and debriefed after it. Base commanders take great pride in showing off their briefing rooms and their graphics departments, which turn out an unending stream of impressive audio-visual aids. "When we briefed General Westmoreland," recalls one officer in Viet Nam, "we knew that we must fill at least 30 minutes even if the information did not require it. So we made our charts more complicated, our graphs more detailed. It all took up time." But it has impressed the South Vietnamese, who have become as adept as their allies at briefing. On this front, at least, the U.S. can be confident of withdrawing without a South Vietnamese collapse.

As in any ritual, the military briefer is not supposed to depart from traditional practice. His performance is frequently inspected as closely as his uniform for flaws. He must speak in a neutral, colorless voice that nonetheless conveys enthusiasm. He must not stumble in his grammar or pronunciation; ambitious junior officers understandably devote many idle hours to perfecting their delivery. A briefing may begin with a comment intended to jolt the audience into paying attention, or at least staying awake. It might, for example, start with the statement: "We have won the war in Viet Nam." Or, depending on the audience and the need for additions to the military budget: "We are losing the war in Viet Nam." If the briefer is in the Air Force, he makes three points--no more, no less. If he has only two, then he must contrive a third.

While giving his briefing, the sneaker is often scrutinized by a superior officer, who will dress him down if he does not finish on time, loses eye contact with his audience, or uses slang. Strong men tapped to be briefers for top brass have been known to tremble or vomit before performing, as if they were going into combat. Had he lived to see them, Philosopher William James might have found a new moral equivalent of war in briefings. The same kind of detailed planning goes into them, the same energy; and casualties could be reckoned in terms of those briefed to death.

Military briefings are meant to be not only as dramatic as possible but redolent with knowing jargon. One of the more ingenious examples of the craft takes place on a windswept crag overlooking the Demilitarized Zone in Korea. For the benefit of important visitors, a demonstration of enemy tactics is staged by G.I.s. Playing the part of North Koreans, they slip up to some barbed wire surrounded by mock-up mines. One G.I. snips the wire with a captured enemy wire cutter, thus demonstrating how North Koreans make sneak attacks on U.S. and South Korean patrols. During the show, the briefing officer may say something like "Toe says a Katusa came to OP Mazie with a signal from Cincunc at Uncmac." Translation: "Tactical Operations Center says a Korean attached to the U.S. Army came to Observation Post Mazie with a message from the Commander in Chief of the United Nations Command at United Nations Command Military Assistance Commission."

How to Say It

Experience has shown that the best, meaning the most informative, briefings are delivered not by trained professionals in the art but by men who simply know their business. In Saigon this year, a group of visiting U.S. businessmen was growing visibly restless in the course of a lavish briefing. Sensing their discomfort, General Creighton Abrams broke in to start talking informally about the war; although he said nothing new, his familiarity with the reality of war brought the meeting to life. The lesson is that personal communication is better than canned chatter.

It is probably too much to expect that the military could return to the casual, off-the-cuff talk as a substitute for the prepared briefing. To begin with, the Army would no doubt have as much trouble disposing of all its audio-visual gadgets as it has dumping its excess nerve gas. More of them, unfortunately, are yet to come. The services have begun purchasing a new computer that briefs automatically without the aid of human voice or hand. At the push of a button, curtains part to reveal a screen, and the show goes on. When it ends, the computer closes the curtains and turns on the lights in the auditorium.

That kind of McLuhanesque gadget might seem to be the ultimate in efficiency, but its acceptance by the military epitomizes the failure of briefings. Even without benefit of computer, the armed-services style of communication has become a ritual recitation of memorized details, a reduction of experience to a set of quantifiable data. The supposedly hard fact has been glorified; the untidy, elusive concept has been smudged into a supposedly measurable statistic.

As perfected by the armed forces, the briefing creates a perfect, Platonic world--insular and self-contained, impervious to facts or thoughts that might spoil the symmetry. Every prospective doubt is silenced with a persuasive number--and Americans are peculiarly prone to believe that figures, from batting averages to traffic fatalities, never lie. Yet when facts are thrust together in an arbitrary manner, they can be more misleading than an outright lie. Military briefers are, of course, instructed not to lie, and for the most part, they do not; the problem is that the gritty reality of truth too often escapes the ritual of presentation.

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