Body Count
Combatants Killed in Action: 1,382,430
Combatants Wounded in Action: 1,772,465
Combatants MIA/POW: 2,503 (Allied Forces)

Civilians Killed, Vietnamese: 2,000,000 *
Civilians Killed, Allied: 1,000 (est.)

by: Don Poss
© 1995

There were 10 million Americans under arms during the [Vietnam] war. Of the 2.7 million Americans served in the Vietnam war, 300,000 were wounded in action, and 75,000 were disabled. Of the casualties listed on The Wall, approximately 1,300 remain missing in action. "The average age was 19, America's youngest combatants." Note: The quote was written by Country Joe McDonald in 1991 for the Community Memory Alameda County War Memorial Project (\doc\web\97\06\vietnam.txt).

McNamara's "mistakes" In Retrospect [https://199.172.47.21/ZMag/articles/oldchom.htm]: A level of moral blindness that is hard to capture in words By Noam Chomsky "As the 20th anniversary approached, the government of Vietnam released new figures on casualties, generally accepted here and conforming to earlier estimates. The Communists declared, in an official press release to Agence France, that we had actually killed 1.1 million NVA soldiers. Hanoi reported in an official press release to Agence France, that 2 million civilians had been killed, the overwhelming majority in the south, along with 1.1 million North Vietnamese and southern resistance fighters ("Viet Cong," in the terminology of U.S. propaganda). It listed an additional 300,000 missing in action. Washington reports 225,000 killed in the army of its client regime ("South Vietnam"). The CIA estimates 600,000 Cambodians killed during the U.S. phase of what the one independent governmental inquiry (Finland) calls the "Decade of Genocide" in Cambodia: 1969 through 1978. Tens if not hundreds of thousands more were killed in Laos, mainly by U.S. attacks that were in large part unrelated to the war in Vietnam, Washington conceded."

The toll in Indochina also includes the 58,169 U.S. soldiers killed and 2,000 MIAs, along with more than 5,000 killed from Australia, New Zealand, South Korea, Thailand, and elsewhere.