Vietnam War Its History Its Statistics Part II of VI

Vietnam War Its History Its Statistics Part II

Operation Harvest Moon

Marines under fire attack Viet Cong positions during Operation Harvest Moon. December 1965. Aggressive American tactics such as this kept the enemy off balance and forced the Viet Cong onto the defensive. The North Vietnamese Army (NVA) was soon to respond.

 Myth: A disproportionate number of blacks were killed in the Vietnam War.

• 86% of the men who died in Vietnam were Caucasians, 12.5% were black, 1.2% were other races. (CACF and Westmoreland)

Sociologists Charles C. Moskos and John Sibley Butler, in their recently published book “All That We Can Be,” said they analyzed the claim that, ‘blacks were used like cannon fodder during Vietnam”, and can report definitely that this
charge is untrue. Black fatalities amounted to 12 percent of all Americans killed in Southeast Asia – A figure proportional to the number of blacks in the U.S. population at the time and slightly lower than the proportion of blacks in the Army at the close of the war.”

Myth: The war was fought largely by the poor and uneducated.

• Service men who went to Vietnam from well-to-do areas had a slightly elevated risk of dying because they were more likely to be pilots or infantry officers.
• Vietnam Veterans were the best educated forces our nation had ever sent into combat. 79% had a high school education or better. [McCaffrey]

Vietnam War Statistics

Here are statistics from the Combat Area Casualty File (CACF) as of November 1993.

The CACF is the basis for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial (The Wall):

Average age of 58,148 killed in Vietnam was 23.11 years. (Although 58,169 names are in the Nov. 93 database, only 58,148 have both event date and birth date. Event date is used instead of declared dead date for some of those who were listed as missing in action) [CACF]

Vietnam Death Stats Vietnam War History and Statistics

• The youngest man killed in Vietnam was 16 years old (RABER, PAUL J.)  [CACF]
• The oldest man killed was 62 years old (TAYLOR, KENNA CLYDE). [CACF]
• 11,465 KIA’s were less than 20 years old. [CACF]

Myth: The average age of an infantryman fighting in Vietnam was 19. Assuming KIA’s accurately represented age groups serving in Vietnam, the average age of an infantryman (MOS 11B) serving in Vietnam to be 19 years old is a myth, it is actually 22. None of the enlisted grades have an average age of less than 20. [CACF] The average man who fought in World War II was 26 years of age. [Westmoreland]

It has not gone without notice that in the movie’s, and on television that the Vietnam veteran is not portrayed as a brave soldier; rather, he is a violent psychopath who continuously experiences flashbacks of the war. Many Vietnam veterans feel that uncensored and overly negative television coverage helped turn the American public against the war and against the veterans themselves.

In Part III – We’ll look at how the war was covered by the media, and how it affected the image of the Vietnam veteran?

The Series:

1. Part 1 – Vietnam War Its History Its Statistics
2. Part 2 – Vietnam War Its History Its Statistics
3. Part 3 – Vietnam War Its History Its Statistics
4. Part 4 – Vietnam War Its History Its Statistics
5. Part 5 – Vietnam War Its History Its Statistics
6. Part 6 – Vietnam War Its History Its Statistics Part VI

Sources

Vietnam Veterans Memorial