On their return trip to Washington, D.C., Krulak and Mendenhall were to bring John Mecklin and Rufus Phillips back from Saigon to report. Mecklin was the United States Information Service (USIS) director, while Phillips served as the director of rural programs for United States Operations Mission (USOM) and as an advisor for the Strategic Hamlet Program.[1] The State Department sent the Saigon embassy a detailed cable containing questions about Vietnamese public opinion across all strata of society. In Krulak's words, the objective was to observe "the effect of recent events upon the attitudes of the Vietnamese in general, and upon the war effort against the Viet Cong".[6]