 Well, I'm pretty depressed reading all these proposals, but they're tough, aren't they? They are, that's right, but I think we're at a point of a fairly tough decision. There's quite a range of proposals there, but we purposely made no effort to compromise any of our views because we wanted you to see the range of view. Two or three things that I want you to explore. First, assuming we do everything we can to extend of our resources, can we really have any assurance that we win? I mean, assuming we have all the big bombers and all the powerful payloads and everything else, can three Vietcong come in and tear us up and continue this thing indefinitely and I'll never really bring it to an end. That's one thing I want to look at. The second thing I want you to look at really from your people's standpoint and talking to them, can we really, without getting any further authority from the Congress, have all our support, our sufficient overwhelming support to work successfully, to fight successfully? In other words, you know the friend you talked to about the pause, you know the Mansfields and you know the Clarks and those men carry the deal of weight. And this fellow we talked to the other day here at lunch has the deal of weight. His people have this view normally, but he's got cancer in my judgment. I've never told anybody, but I saw him yesterday coughing several times. And he went home that very day and he had been back since, had a stomach upset and he can't carry on much for us. Then we have to rely on the younger crowd and that's made up of the McGoverns and the Clarks and the other folks. I don't know, I don't believe that if you ask them to go in with you, I think you'd have a long debate. And if you don't ask them, I think you'll have a long debate about not having asked them with this kind of a commitment. And even though there's some record behind this, we know ourselves and our own conscience. When we asked this resolution, we had no intention of committing this many ground troops and we're doing so now and we know it's going to be bad and the question is do we just want to do it out on the limb by ourselves? I don't know whether those men have ever thought in making their calculations one, whether we can win with the kind of training we have and the kind of power. And two, I don't know whether they've taken into their calculations whether we can have a united support here at home. I think, Mr. President, there's two thoughts on it. First, if we do go as far as my paper suggested, sending numbers of men out there, we ought to call up reserves. You have authority to do that without additional legislation, but I doubt that you would want to use it. Almost surely, if we called up reserves, you would want to go to the Congress to get additional authority. This would be a vehicle for drawing together support. Now, you'd say, well, yes, but it also might lead to extended debate and devices. But I think we could avoid that. I really think if we were to go to Clarkson and McGoverns and the churches and say to them, now, this is our situation, we cannot win with our existing commitment. We must increase it if we're going to win in this limited term we define, in a limited way we define when it requires additional troops. Along with that approach, we are continuing this political initiative to probe for a willingness to negotiate a reasonable settlement here. I think you'd get it from them, and that's a vehicle by which you both get the authority to call up the reserves and also tie them into the whole program. Now, that makes sense. I don't know that you want to go that far, and I'm not pressing you to. It's my judgment you should, but my judgment may be an error here. In any event, in these papers that you have, we did try to show you the whole spectrum of thought amongst them. There's a risk to generally agree with you. I think he would say, yes, he very definitely does. He's a hard liner on this in the sense that he doesn't want to give up South Vietnam under any circumstances, even if it means going to general war. Now, he doesn't think we ought to go to general war. He thinks we ought to try to avoid it, but if that's what's required to hold South Vietnam, he would go to general war. He would say, as a footnote, military commanders always ask for more than they need. For God's sakes, don't take what they request as an absolute ironclad requirement. I don't disagree with that point. I do think in this situation we're talking about that this request for 34 U.S. battalions and 10 non-U.S., a total of 44 battalions, comes pretty close to the minimum requirement when you see what's happening out there. But I'm perfectly willing to accept that qualifying statement that everybody asked for more than one, and we've got it. When you put these people in, and you really do go all out, you call up your reserves and everything else, can you do anything to restore your communication and your railroad? Yes, I think so, not immediately, but I think you can. I think that by the end of the year, we ought to have that railroad open, for example, and we ought to have the major highways open. That road, Route 19, that runs from Quinan up to Placo, and the Route 1, which runs along the coast, the railroad running along the coast, the Route 9, which runs up parallel to the 17th parallel, and a number of the other major routes I would think would be open by the end of the year, the route into the lot, for example, from Saigon. What are we doing? Do we have our CBs and people, engineers, after working on it, as they tear them up, do we go in and try to repair them? Yes, no problem. As you can't send an engineering company into an area that isn't secure unless you send combat troops with them, we just don't have the combat troops to do that. Among the items that we would send out there would be more engineering troops, I've forgotten what number it is on my list, just down on that memo that you have, indicating we recognize the need for more engineering troops, but there's no need to send them until we get combat troops to support the more secure country for them to work in. Who do you think I ought to talk these plans over with in arriving at the judgment? Well, frankly, I haven't given thought to it, I shouldn't have, but I haven't. Let me think about that and I'll have some ideas later today. What has happened up there in the last 48 hours? Well? Looks like we've killed 6,700. We killed a large number, I'd say, over the last three or four days. It looks to be on the order. Yeah, at least 500. 300. I tried another set, 200, and then they're miscellaneous, but I'm not quite sure over what period that is. That 200 was over a period of at least three days. So I think that, well, anyhow, we killed a lot of them last. And they continue losses like this? Well, this is a good question, and that relates to what I suggested to you yesterday, that my own feeling is that of the numbers that are killed by the Air Force actions, and a great bulk of these people are killed that way, I would think that 75% are probably not from what we call the regular or irregular guerrilla force. Can we inquire about that and ask them in their count to specify if the can of the women and children is contrasted with the fighting people? Right. Okay. Back then.