Perspective: VIETNAM, 5.4 million war casualties

[G_j]

(offered also as background perspective for those discussing sixties anti-war activists)

grand total: approximately 5.4 million Vietnam war casualties

Vietnamese casualties are far less specific than American casualties and they were deliberately falsified prior to 1995, leading to some of the confusion. According to the Agence France Presse (French Press Agency)
as reported on http://www.rjsmith.com/kia_tbl.html , "...the true
civilian casualties of the Vietnam War were 2,000,000 in the north,
and 2,000,000 in the south. Military casualties were 1.1 million
killed and 600,000 wounded in 21 years of war. These figures were
deliberately falsified during the war by the North Vietnamese
Communists to avoid demoralizing the population."

So approximately 5.1 million total Vietnamese casualites.

And a grand total of approximately 5.4 million.

Another reference coroborrating this number is at:
http://www.chss.montclair.edu/english/furr/casualty.html

Search terms: vietnam war casualties
----------------------------------------

http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=51&ItemID=6217

From Vietnam to Fallujah

. by Fran Schor September 13, 2004

<snip>
While most studies of the war in Southeast Asia acknowledge that 4 times the tonnage of bombs was dropped on Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos than that used by the US in all theaters of operation during World War II, only a few, such as James William Gibson's The Perfect War: Technowar in Vietnam, analyze the full extent of such bombing. Not only were thousands of villages in Vietnam totally destroyed, but massive civilian deaths, numbering close to 3 million, resulted in large part from such indiscriminate bombing. Integral to the bombing strategy was the use of weapons that violated international law, such as napalm and anti-personnel fragmentation bombs. As a result of establishing free-fire zones where anything and everything could be attacked, including hospitals, US military operations led to the deliberate murder of mostly civilians.

<snip>
----------------------------------------

http://www.villagevoice.com/generic/show_print.php?id=56936&page=turse&issue=0438&printcde=MzM2NzQ1NTYzOQ==&refpage=L25ld3MvaW5kZXgucGhwP2lzc3VlPTA0MzgmcGFnZT10dXJzZSZpZD01NjkzNg==

From the National Archives: New proof of Vietnam War atrocities
Swift Boat Swill

by Nicholas Turse
September 21st, 2004 11:40 AM

John Kerry is being pilloried for his shocking Senate testimony 34 years ago that many U.S. soldiers-not just a few "rogues"-were committing atrocities against the Vietnamese. U.S. military records that were classified for decades but are now available in the National Archives back Kerry up and put the lie to his critics. Contrary to what those critics, including the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, have implied, Kerry was speaking on behalf of many soldiers when he testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on April 22, 1971, and said this:


They told stories that at times they had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in a fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam, in addition to the normal ravage of war and the normal and very particular ravaging which is done by the applied bombing power of this country.

The archives have hundreds of files of official U.S. military investigations of such atrocities committed by American soldiers. I've pored over those records-which were classified for decades-for my Columbia University dissertation and, now, this Voice article. The exact number of investigated allegations of atrocities is unknown, as is the number of such barbaric incidents that occurred but weren't investigated. Some war crimes, like the Tiger Force atrocities exposed last year by The Toledo Blade, have only come to light decades later. Others never will. But there are plentiful records to back up Kerry's 1971 testimony point by point. Following (with the names removed or abbreviated) are examples, directly from the archives:

..more..

---------------
http://www.accuracy.org/press_releases/PR082404.htm

Did the U.S. Commit War Crimes in Vietnam?

DAVID MacMICHAEL,

A disabled veteran of ten years active Marine Corps service in Korea, MacMichael was a Defense Department consultant from 1965 to 1969 in Southeast Asia. During most of that period he was attached to the office of the Special Assistant for Counter-Insurgency at the U.S. Embassy in Bangkok. In that capacity he reviewed classified reports from the U.S. mission in Vietnam. MacMichael said today: "Some Vietnam veterans are outraged that presidential candidate Kerry in his 1971 Senate testimony spoke of atrocities reportedly committed by U.S. military forces in Vietnam. There is more than a little substance to the charge. The Toledo Blade won the 2004 Pulitzer Prize by revealing that in 1967 the 101st Airborne Division created a 'Tiger Force' ordered to kill all Vietnamese males in Quang Ngi Province. According to official U.S. Army records unearthed by the Blade reporters, Tiger Force killed many hundreds of Vietnamese and, yes, soldiers of that force did proudly ware necklaces of the ears they cut from their victims. The Army did investigate and identified the perpetrators of the crimes but chose not to prosecute them."

MacMichael added: "In 1968, Colonel George S. Patton III -- son of the World War II general -- then commanding a brigade in Vietnam, sent out Christmas cards showing dead Vietnamese stacked up Abu Ghraib-fashion with the message 'Peace on Earth' and signed by him and his wife.... And then, of course, there was My Lai. There, C Company of the 11th Brigade of the Americal Division in 1967 entered that village and methodically executed between 347 and 504 of its unarmed inhabitants, men, women and children. At least 100 of them were lined up in an irrigation ditch by Lt. William Calley and shot to death by his GIs. The slaughter only ended when the shocked crew of an Army helicopter gunship landed and forced C Company at gunpoint to cease and desist. My Lai was far from an exceptional case. In fact, it might never have come to light had not a troubled Americal Division mortarman, Tom Glen, who had not been present, heard about it and, after rotating out of Vietnam to the U.S., wrote to the U.S. commander in Vietnam, General Westmoreland. His letter only mentioned My Lai as 'part of the abusive pattern that had become routine in the Americal Division.'"

DAVID CLINE, [e-mail], www.veteransforpeace.org, www.vvaw.org, www.nhgazette.com/chickenhawks.html
Currently national president of Veterans for Peace and a longtime coordinator of Vietnam Veterans Against the War, Cline is a disabled combat veteran. He said today: "After 30 years, some people are trying to whitewash what happened in Vietnam."

S. BRIAN WILLSON, [e-mail], www.brianwillson.com
Willson is a former Air Force captain who served in Vietnam. He said today: "As head of a 40-man USAF combat security unit in Vietnam, I was separately tasked to assess 'success' of targeted bombings. I discovered egregious war crimes -- daylight terror bombings of undefended fishing and rice farming villages resulting in mass murders and maimings of hundreds of residents. Subsequently, in conversations with members of the 9th Infantry Division, I heard bravado about slaughter of 11,000 'enemy' from ground operations, though the vast majority proved to be unarmed civilians."

....more....

------------------------------------------------------

http://www.veteransforpeace.org/Tiger_force_120803.htm

Tiger Force (Vietnam) Uncovered and Exposed

Witness to Vietnam atrocities never knew about investigation

THE NEW YORKER, NOVEMBER 10, 2003
Talk of the Town, p.41

<snip>
At the height of the rampage, the Tiger Force platoon was operating a few dozen miles from a Quang Ngai hamlet that the Army called My Lai 4, and where, in March, 1968, more than five hundred Vietnamese civilians were massacred by a task force whose platoon leaders included William L. Calley, Jr. The Blade quoted a law professor as stating that My Lai might have been avoided if the senior officer corps had acted on complaints of military brutality in Quang Ngai that had been filed by at least two soldiers. The Blade further reported that in the early nineteen-seventies, after Calley's conviction for the murder of twenty-two Vietnamese civilians, in March, 1971, and while the Army was publicly insisting that My Lai was an isolated incident, senior officials in the White House and the Pentagon were provided with periodic reports on the Tiger Force inquiry.

In fact, while the Army was conducting its internal investigation of My Lai, it discovered that a second large massacre had taken place on the same day in the same area, in a hamlet known as My Khe 4, but Lieutenant General William R. Peers, who had served for more than two years in Vietnam and who led the investigation, publicly denied that there were any other incidents. "It was not brought out to me in the evidence," Peers told reporters at the close of the inquiry, and he was not challenged on that assertion, even though two Army officers who had been present at My Khe had already been charged with war crimes. Twenty years later, the Army declassified an April, 1970, memorandum to the General responding to an article I had written about My Lai. It noted that I did not appear to "possess any substantive information concerning the suppression or cover-up aspects of the incident," but that I was being aided in my reporting by someone with access to the official records. It concluded, "The need to terminate such assistance to Mr. Hersh becomes increasingly important when consideration is given to the use Mr. Hersh would make of any information he obtained concerning command reaction and efforts of suppression."

John Dean, the former White House counsel to President Nixon, acknowledged that he had received a series of reports from the Army on the status of pending war-crimes investigations, including My Lai, but that they gave no hint of the extent of the crimes. "It doesn't get to the top unless there's a problem," he told me last month. "I had no knowledge of My Lai"-that is, its full horror--"until it hit the press."

In war-crimes investigations, the disparity between the facts and the military's official versions of them has repeatedly been exposed, often with bruising consequences, by an independent press. The Blade's extraordinary investigation of Tiger Force, however, remains all but invisible. None of the four major television networks have picked it up (although CBS and NBC have been in touch with the Blade), and most major newspapers have either ignored the story or limited themselves to publishing an Associated Press summary. In a column published on the first day of the series, Ron Royhab, the Blade's executive editor, pointedly wrote that the decision to run the Vietnam stories now had "nothing to do" with the current military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. As he told me, "We can't have this kind of information and sit on it, because then we'd be a party to a coverup." There is, of course, a hesitancy in time of war--and, in particular, during an increasingly unpopular war against an entrenched guerrilla enemy, to publish stories that could be interpreted as undermining military morale. And news organizations instinctively debunk scoops nom their competitors, especially those in smaller markets. It may be that others in the media are planning to do their own Tiger Force investigations. Let's hope so. Terrible things always happen in war, and the responsibility of the press is to do exactly what the Blade has done-to find, verify, and publish the truth.

-Seymour M Hersh

---------------------------
Martin Luther King Jr.,
Beyond Vietnam
http://www.aavw.org/special_features/speeches_speech_king01.html

[Redstone]

1. It was a fucking nightmare. People are still dying from mines and UEO.

That country pretty much lost a generation of young men, as did England, France, and Germany during WW I.

Not a lot of Americans want of think of that, if they indeed know it.

As much as some of us Americans suffered individually, and though there was some cost to the country in general, it is nothing compared to the way Viet Nam was ravaged.

And Cambodia suffered, and (probably least-publicized of all), poor little Laos was so pulverized that it has never really recovered.

And now it's happening again. I think if Americans were aware of the full extent of our destruction of the country of Iraq, they'd want to vomit, then hide their faces in shame.

But most Americans don't want to know, do they?

Redstone

[RethugAssKicker]

3. No they don't give a shit.

but yet, were there to liberate them because we "love" them.

[G_j]

4. Laos was pulverized

literally

heartbreaking, & they are still digging up (and be killed by) anti-personnel bombs.

[G_j]

12. 6 million conventional bombs and likely over 100 million cluster bomblets

http://www.mcc.org/clusterbomb/report/laos_appendix.html

Appendix 1: Laos
November 2000
Titus Peachey

Virgil Wiebe

The AirWar

From 1964 to 1973, Laos endured one of the most intensive bombing campaigns in history, as the US attempted to destroy the social and economic infrastructure of the Pathet Lao communist forces. Part of the larger war in Indochina, the US bombing attempted to block the flow of supplies over the Ho chi Minh trail which went through southern Laos. In addition, the US bombed northern Laos in support of Royal Lao Government military campaigns.

During the war, the US dropped over 6 million conventional bombs and likely well over a 100 million cluster bomblets.<1> The 580,000 bombing missions flown over Laos equaled one bombing mission every eight minutes ‘round the clock, for nine full years. In Xieng Khouang Province, one of the most heavily bombed areas, an estimated 300,000 tons of bombs were dropped, equaling more than two tons per inhabitant. A 1971 US Information Service refugee survey found that at least 80% of the victims were civilians.<2>

Because of the air war, many Lao villagers fled to the larger cities where they lived in refugee camps. A significant number, however, stayed near their villages, living in caves and forests in order to escape the bombing. Many of these villagers lived in caves for years, doing their field work under cover of darkness, and hiding their cooking fires so they would not be seen by the bombers. Villagers in Xieng Khouang repeatedly assert that the air war did not distinguish between military and civilian targets, and that any sign of life or activity risked an attack by the bombers.<3>


After the War

When the war ended, tens of thousands of Lao villagers returned to their homes. In most cases, everything had been destroyed. They had to rebuild their homes, repair the paddy dikes in their rice fields, and open up the soil with shovels and hoes. They carried on this intensive work in the midst of a staggering array of still-lethal unexploded ordnance which littered the soil. Unknown to them, their villages had become one vast, unmarked minefield. Indeed, the population tended to resettle along the roads for easier access to markets and health care. Ironically, these were the areas of heaviest bombing, and consequently the areas most infested with unexploded ordnance. According to estimates of ordnance clearance agencies working in Laos, “there were probably in excess of nine million BLU 26 bomblets still unexploded at the end of the war.”<4>

..more..

[preciousdove]

2. Look at Desert Storm death totals now and factor in the DU

(depleted uranium). Slow agonizing deaths ahead for millions.

[Toots]

5. IMO anyone who saw actual combat in Vietnam and say they did not witness

any war crimes is a LIAR. War Crimes were standard procedure for every unit I was familiar with.

[ArkDem]

9. .

[RaleighNCDUer]

6. And to think that I would quote the 2 million figure as something

really awful. I never thought that it was the 'good' spin on the true numbers. I'm astonished that the Vietnamese ever even considered normalizing relations with us, much less that they actually did it.

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

7. Thanks g_j. Another great post. Recommended.

There's been a helluva lot of revisionist history floating around here.

Nice to see something that even touches on the sheer horror of what we did in SE Asia.

[G_j]

8. I am curious as what has been taught in schools

about Vietnam to the generation(s) of soldiers currently enlisted in the military. Some in my generation decided that after Vietnam one would have to be a fool to put on a uniform and blindly take orders from their dishonest government. I am not really familiar with the Vietnam history taught since then, but I can only think it has been revisionist, as you say.

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

10. Nor am I. But, there's a lot of accepted myths that I see even here.

Such as, "We could have won, if only.."

The old and discredited nonsense about protestors spitting on the returning troops.

Jane Fonda was a "traitor".

The war was a "mistake" rather than the genocide it was.

The military wasn't allowed to achieve "victory". One of the more laughable ones, considering they outnumbered the enemy by about 10-1, had infinitely more hardware, and, by their own estimate killed the entire NVA and VC three times over.

If my experience in boot camp in 1961 as to how military history is "taught" by the military, GI Joe comic books serves as the accepted guidelines.

[Blue_In_AK]

11. I don't know what they're teaching today...

but I do know that my oldest daughter's American history book (she graduated in 1990) was all "rah-rah" about the Vietnam War, and relegated the anti-war sentiment to a couple of paragraphs, stating that the opposition was from the "fringes," i.e., only a few hippies and student radicals. I took my daughter to see "Born on the Fourth of July" and she was amazed. I had always told her about the protest marches and so on that I had participated in, but she had no idea that the war was so horrible or that there was so much unrest here at home at the time. That was a real eye-opener for her.

[G_j]

14. to most Americans

Holocaust denial is considered to be way beyond the pale,
though Vietnam denial seems to be mainstream.

[OmmmSweetOmmm]

13. Why are we always being fed the lie that we're a great country?

We have had a history of bloodletting that keeps going on and on and on.

I watched the mini series, Into The West, and not did one episode go by that I wasn't reduced to tears by the murderous behavior of our government and the military following orders.

This is all so sickening to me.........

[G_j]

15. sick of sickness

There is nothing better than to know that you don't know.
Not knowing, yet thinking you know --
This is sickness.
Only when you are sick of being sick
Can you be cured.
The sage's not being sick
Is because he is sick of sickness.
Therefore he is not sick.

-Lao Tzu