58,148 were killed in Vietnam, 75,000 severely disabled, 23,214 were 100% disabled, 5,283 lost limbs and 1,081 sustained multiple amputations. [7], R. J. Rummel's mid-range estimate in 1997 was that the total deaths due to the Vietnam War totaled 2,450,000 from 195475. Between October 1966 and June 1969, 246,000 soldiers were recruited through Project 100,000, of whom 41% were black; black people only made up about 11% of the population of the US. My Lai (4) and My Khe (4) (collectively the My Lai Massacre) claimed the largest number of victims with 420 and 90 respectively, and in five other places a total of about 100 civilians were executed. Kennedys expansion stemmed in part from Cold War-era fears about the domino theory: if communism took hold in Vietnam, it would topple democracies throughout the whole of Southeast Asia, it was thought. In my report I described them as so many women between fifteen and twenty-five and so many childrenusually in their mothers' arms or very close to themand so many old people." Civilian deaths are still ongoing because of the use of unexploded ordnances left behind from the war. Although demographers have developed a reper- He recalled the attack and said, "We go in, and the helicopter started . The riot at the Long Binh Jail is the most publicized of thousands of racial incidents reported in South Vietnam between 1968 and 1971. 1-86-NARA-NARA or 1-866-272-6272, Record Group 330: Records of the Office of the Secretary of Defense, Record Group 407: Records of the Adjutant General's Office, Collection COFF: Richard Coffelt, Richard Arnold, and David Argabright Collection. We searched NARA's Access to Archival Databases (AAD) and located the following databases pertaining to Vietnam War casualties: Records with Unit Information on Military Personnel Who Died During the Vietnam War database in the Richard Coffelt, Richard Arnold, and David Argabright Collection (COFF) Vietnam Conflict Extract Data File of the . Cobra helicopters totaled 1,110,716 flight hours in Vietnam. Once a unit assignment has been determined, a link to the individual's memorial page is included in the appropriate Unit Index. The United States provided funding and troops to the South Vietnamese effort to prevent Communism from spreading further in East Asia. [66][67] After the U.S.'s withdrawal from the conflict, the Pentagon estimated PAVN/VC deaths at 39,000 in 1973 and 61,000 in 1974. 3% were Asian, 7 or . The 2nd Marine Brigade reportedly perpetrated the Binh Tai Massacre on 9 October 1966. The number of these "boat people" leaving Vietnam and arriving safely in another country totalled almost 800,000 between 1975 and 1995. The term casualty in warfare can often be confusing. Another potential limitation is the relatively small sample size of the study. 7. Corrections? The Vietnam War was a long, deadly . By Spencer C. Tucker ", Viet Cong and Peoples Army of Vietnam use of terror in the Vietnam War, Provisional Revolutionary Government of South Vietnam, United Nations High Commission for Refugees, Vietnamese Casualties During the American War: A New Estimate, "Fifty years of violent war deaths from Vietnam to Bosnia: analysis of data from the world health survey programme", "20 Years After Victory, Vietnamese Communists Ponder How to Celebrate", http://www.pcr.uu.se/research/ucdp/datasets/ucdp_prio_armed_conflict_dataset/, http://apps.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a032189.pdf, Countering Terrorism and Insurgency in the 21st Century, Final Solutions: Mass Killing and Genocide in the 20th Century. Commander George L. Jackson said, "In response to this criticism, the Department of Defense took steps to readjust force levels in order to achieve an equitable proportion and employment of Negroes in Vietnam." More than 58,000 American casualties of the Vietnam War are commemorated on the Vietnam Wall in Washington, DC. Fighting continued on a lesser scale for some time afterwards and refugee numbers rose sharply due to the continued conflict, but the development of a strong trading market in the 80s helped the nation become more unified. [11][23]:106 R.J. Rummel estimated that ARVN suffered between 219,000 and 313,000 deaths during the war, including in 1975 and prior to 1960. In addition to patrolling, Navy PBRs participated with . Enrolling in a course lets you earn progress by passing quizzes and exams. The names of those who gave their lives and of those who remain missing are inscribed in the order they . 13,091. Trade between the two nations ultimately resumed in the 1990s. Not all mines were detonated during the war and as a result they are still being either dug up or mistakenly stepped on today. Civilian deaths caused by both sides amounted to a significant percentage of total deaths. Vietnam War: 1964-1973: 58,220: 153,303: 5,283: 1:2.6: 1:29.0 (0.03) Persian Gulf War: the Vietnam War). She has an M.S.Ed. Shelby L. Stanton, 'The Rise and Fall of an American Army,' Spa Books, 1989, xvi. Democide is the murder of persons by or at the behest of governments. Those who argue that the United States opponents won the war cite the United States overall objectives and outcomes. Many were never directly involved in the fighting, but rather were only caught in the crosshairs of South Vietnamese and North Vietnamese forces. The Vietnam War began mainly over political conflict between Ho Chi Minh's Communist state of North Vietnam and the U.S.-supported democracy of South Vietnam. Reference Information Paper 103", "From the Archives: President Nixon welcomes Marines home from Vietnam", "MILITARY: Marine unit that suffered most casualties coming home", https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=American_units_with_the_highest_percentage_of_casualties_per_conflict&oldid=1125722100, This page was last edited on 5 December 2022, at 13:58. It's a sober fact we're meant to be reminded of on Memorial Day, particularly in light of the nearly 7,000 U.S. troops killed, and the many more wounded, over the last decade in our most recent and ongoing conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. 11,465 of those killed were younger than 20 years old. In general we index the memorials at the lowest practical unit level. "[56] Another Marine commander, Gen. Robert E. Cushman Jr., added, "we had a big problem with atrocities attributed to them, which I sent on down to Saigon. Chart and statistics of US death/wounded in war as well as amputation ratios in the Afghanistan war compared with other major operations. Based on unit surveys, . Get unlimited access to over 84,000 lessons. . [25][30], 18.2 million gallons of Agent Orange, some of which was contaminated with Dioxin, was sprayed by the U.S. military over more than 10% of Southern Vietnam[31] as part of the U.S. herbicidal warfare program Operation Ranch Hand during the Vietnam War, from 1961 to 1971. The officially-reported numbers and categories below cover American Vietnam War deaths by age group, branch of service, service component, type of death, reason for death, race, religion, sex, state/protectorate and deaths by war year (including post . Accurate assessments of PAVN/VC losses, he wrote, were 'largely impossible due to lack of disclosure by the Vietnamese government, terrain, destruction of remains by firepower, and [inability] to confirm artillery and aerial kills.' [26], RJ Rummel estimated that American forces killed around 5,500 people in democide between 1960 and 1972, from a range of between 4,000 and 10,000. It is still a concern in Southeast Asia today. This stemmed from the United States' involvement in the Cold War, which the United States fought to preserve democracy against the forces of Communism springing up in countries such as the Soviet Union and China. For details of the total number of Australians who died during the Vietnam War, 1962- 1975, please refer to Deaths as a result of service with Australian units.. Statistics: Total Australian service casualties in the Vietnam War, 1962-72 Articles from Britannica Encyclopedias for elementary and high school students. Furthermore, domestic unrest and the financial cost of war made peaceand troop withdrawalsa necessity, not a choice. [40][37] Sometimes civilian casualties from airstrikes or artillery barrages against villages were reported as "enemies killed". The human costs of the long conflict were harsh for all involved. Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, but his successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, continued the work that Kennedy had started. By the height of the Vietnam War in the late 1960's, the U.S. Air Force had 1,900 medics conducting medical operations in Southeast Asia. Combat Area Casualties Dataset. [53][54] A separate study was carried out by RAND Corporation employee Terry Rambo, who conducted interviews in 1970 on reported Korean atrocities in ARVN/civilian areas. By 1969 more than 500,000 U.S. military personnel were stationed in Vietnam. The battle was later dramatized in the film We Were Soldiers. [5], In 1995, the Vietnamese government released its estimate of war deaths for the more lengthy period of 195575. Called the American War in Vietnam (or, in full, the War Against the Americans to Save the Nation), the war was also part of a larger regional conflict (see Indochina wars) and a manifestation of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union and their respective allies. The most prominent of these events were the Hu Massacre and the M Lai Massacre. Please refer to the appropriate style manual or other sources if you have any questions. Encyclopedia of the Vietnam War: A Political, Social, and Military History. ", 1915 to 1917 infantry regiments grew from 959 to 3,720 men and 112 officers. During that period, they stated, they lost 849,018 killed plus approximately 232,000 missing and 463,000 wounded. The U.S. National Archives shows that 58,220 U.S. soldiers perished. Before the Second World War, Vietnam was occupied by the colonial French empire. The sum of those totals is 3,091,000 war deaths between 195575. In 1980 Richard set out to determine the unit of assignment for each Army soldier who died in Vietnam. Casualties - US vs NVA/VC. Lewy reduced the number of Viet Cong (VC) and People's Army of Vietnam (PAVN) battle deaths claimed by the U.S. by 30 percent (in accordance with the opinion of United States Department of Defense officials), and assumed that one third of the reported battle deaths of the PAVN/VC may have actually been civilians. 0. All three men died in spring of 2020 of COVID-19 after . Meanwhile, the United States, its military demoralized and its civilian electorate deeply divided, began a process of coming to terms with defeat in what had been its longest and most controversial war. In the summer of 2017, I was a U.S. Army lieutenant in the 101st Airborne Division at Fort Campbell, Kentucky. The Vietnam War death toll is estimated to be around 3.8 million casualties in total. Rummel does not give a medium or high estimate. [18], R. J. Rummel estimated that PAVN/VC forces killed around 164,000 civilians in democide between 1954 and 1975 in South Vietnam, from a range of between 106,000 and 227,000, plus another 50,000 killed in North Vietnam. [92], African Americans suffered disproportionately high casualty rates in Vietnam. [42] This might partially explain the discrepancies between recovered weapons and body-count figures, along with exaggeration, although the NVA and VC also went to great lengths to recover weapons from the battlefield. [15][16][17] Walter Mead estimates that approximately 365,000 Vietnamese civilians to have died as a result of the war during the period of American involvement. * The 143 men subsequently declared dead between 1973 and 2002 are not included in these totals. According to the Department of Veterans Affairs, we are losing an estimated 500 Vietnam veterans every day. [46], The ROK Capital Division reportedly perpetrated the Bnh An/Ty Vinh massacre in February/March 1966. Both American/South Vietnamese forces and the Viet Cong can be held accountable for the number of civilian deaths, but the Viet Cong had a larger hand in overtaking villages and using more offensive military tactics to draw out the South Vietnamese forces. The South Vietnamese government, on the other hand, fought to preserve a Vietnam more closely aligned with the West. [21] During the peak war years, another scholar Guenter Lewy attributed almost a third of civilian deaths to the VC. The terms of this expansion included yet more funding and arms, but a key alteration was the commitment of U.S. soldiers to the region. [104], Following the end of the war, many refugees fled Vietnam by boat and ship. As a member, you'll also get unlimited access to over 84,000 from Johns Hopkins and his MA and Encyclopaedia Britannica's editors oversee subject areas in which they have extensive knowledge, whether from years of experience gained by working on that content or via study for an advanced degree. [4] 49. The Vietnam War was fought in Vietnamese territory between mainly South Vietnam/the United States and the Viet Cong of North Vietnam. Few Marines units were involved in the U.S. military actions in Cambodia or Laos, and while 1. st. . The Australians committed more forces to the war in Vietnam than any other foreign contributor (except for the United States, that is). In the midst of an intense 3-week fight against the North Vietnamese Army in the province of Kontum, South Vietnam, elements of the U.S. Army 173d Airborne Brigade and the 503d Infantry Regiment assaulted a battalion of North Vietnamese soldiers entrenched on a hill outside the village . 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