Vietnam War body count controversy

See also: Body count

The Vietnam War body count controversy centers on the counting of enemy dead by the US forces during the Vietnam War with issues around killing and counting unarmed civilians as enemy combatants as well as inflating the number of actual enemy KIA. For search and destroy operations, as the objective was not to hold territory or secure populations victory was assessed by having a higher enemy body count. Promotions were also assessed by this, leading to this.

Overview

Since the goal of the United States in the Vietnam War was not to conquer North Vietnam but rather to ensure the survival of the South Vietnamese government, measuring progress was difficult. All the contested territory was theoretically "held" already. Instead, the US Army used body counts to show that the US was winning the war. The Army's theory was that eventually, the Viet Cong (VC) and People's Army of Vietnam (PAVN) would lose after the attrition warfare.

According to historian Christian Appy, "search and destroy was the principal tactic; and the enemy body count was the primary measure of progress" in General Westmoreland’s war of attrition. Search and destroy was coined as a phrase in 1965 to describe missions aimed at flushing the VC out of hiding, while the body count was the measuring stick for the success of any operation. Since the early stages of the war did not seek to hold territory, assessments of whether an operation was considered a victory or not was entirely based on having a higher enemy killed ratio for US commanders. Competitions were held between units for the highest number of VC/PAVN killed in action, or KIAs. Army and marine officers knew that promotions were largely based on confirmed kills. The pressure to produce confirmed kills resulted in massive fraud. One study revealed that 61% of American commanders considered that body counts were grossly exaggerated.

Killing and Counting Unarmed Civilians

It was estimated that around 220,000 civilians killed by US/ARVN operations were miscounted as "enemy KIA" as when free-fire zones were declared it was erroneously assumed all individuals were enemy combatants For official US military operations reports, there are no distinctions between enemy KIA and civilian KIA since it was assumed by US forces that an area declared a free-fire zone that all individuals killed regardless of whether they were combatants or civilians were considered enemy KIA. Since body counts was a direct measure of operational success this often caused US battle reports to list civilians killed as enemy KIA. The inclusion of civilians killed led to the enormous discrepancy between weapons seized and 'enemy KIA' during Operation Speedy Express, nearly 10,000 KIA with just 748 weapons found. Most of the enemy killed included were unarmed civilians. The My Lai Massacre and Son Thang massacre both reported women and children deliberately killed as "enemy combatants", while civilians killed during the Thuy Bo massacre deliberately or not were also counted as enemy combatants.

Former Marine Officer and later war-time corresponding Philip Caputo in the book A Rumor of War noted:

General Westmoreland’s strategy of attrition also had an important effect on our behavior. Our mission was not to win terrain or seize positions, but simply to kill: to kill communists and as many of them as possible. Stack ’em like cordwood. Victory was a high body-count, defeat a low kill-ratio, war a matter of arithmetic. The pressure on unit commanders to produce enemy corpses was intense, and they in turn communicated it to their troops. This led to such practices as counting civilians as Viet Cong. ‘If it’s dead and Vietnamese, it’s VC,’ was our rule of thumb in the bush. It is not surprising, therefore, that some men acquired a contempt for human life and predilection for taking it.

Christian Appy in Working Class War documents widespread atrocities committed by US forces, especially towards the latter 'withdrawal' period as well. Accidental or deliberate killings through napalming, artillery and others were reported to have frequently either been re-attributed to the PAVN/VC or claimed as "VC" casualties by US forces. Other reported incidents include the ambushing or attacking unarmed groups of men such as fishermen or farmers which were reported as "Viet Cong" as well as any civilians wearing black pajamas and civilians running away from helicopters, including women and children who were again reported as "enemy combatants" KIA. One notable example of this was the reported killing of hundreds of unarmed civilians by Tiger Force, following grievous losses from a PAVN ambush, in which the unit proceeded to kill countless women, children and crippled individuals during Operation Wheeler/Wallowa. Journalist Jonathan Schell who reported on Operation Cedar Falls observed the general inability of US forces to discern VC from unarmed civilians during, based on tacit ignorance of the culture and the murder of civilians on whim or suspicion, for example in which a man riding a bicycle past a patrol near his town was shot and subsequently declared a VC, and the shooting of a woman carrying medical supplies, who was then declared an enemy combatant serving as a medic post-mortem.

Body Count Inflation

In the summer of 1970, H. Norman Schwarzkopf writes, "the Army War College issued a scathing report," that, among other things, "criticised the Army's obsession with meaningless statistics and was especially damning on the subject of body counts in Vietnam. A young captain had told the investigators a sickening story: he'd been under so much pressure from headquarters to boost his numbers that he'd nearly gotten into a fistfight with a South Vietnamese officer over whose unit would take credit for various enemy body parts. Many officers admitted they had simply inflated their reports to placate headquarters."

The junior officers queried in the 1970 "Study on Military Professionalism" (seemingly the study that Schwarzkopf refers to) had particularly violent reactions to instructions on the body count. "They told of being given quotas and being told to go out and recount until they had sufficient numbers. “Nobody out there believes the body count,” was the reportedly common response."

In Lewis Sorley's book A Better War, published in 1999 after studies of voluminous previously-secret papers of Creighton Abrams, he writes "Body count may have been the most corrupt - and corrupting - measure of progress in the whole mess. Certainly the consensus of senior Army leaders, the generals who commanded in Vietnam, strongly indicates that it was. A survey found that sixty-one percent of officers believed that the body count was often inflated. Typical comments by the respondents were that it was "a fake - totally worthless," that "the immensity of the false reporting is a blot on the honor of the Army," and that they were grossly exaggerated by many units primarily because of the incredible interest shown by people like McNamara and Westmoreland."

Secretary of Defense Charles Hagel states that U.S. commanders on the ground inflated body counts since this was how their success was judged."You used that body count, commanding officers did, as the metric and measurement of how successful you were...", hence providing a positive incentive for deliberate fabrication. During the Battle of Dak To and the Battle of the Slopes, one company commander alleges after losing 78 men while finding 10 enemy bodies, the "enemy body count" figures was deliberately re-written as 475 by General William Westmoreland and released as official operational reports.

Shelby Stanton states that accurate assessments of PAVN and VC losses were largely impossible due to lack of corresponding statistics, the fact that allied ground units were often unable to confirm artillery and aerial kills and gamesmanship practised by units under pressure to "produce results." American losses were subject to statistical manipulation as well. For instance, dying soldiers put aboard medical evacuation helicopters were often counted as only wounded in unit after-action tables.

Author Mark Woodruff states that when the Vietnamese Government released its actual losses in April 1995 as being 1.1 million dead, US body count figures he claimed they had actually underestimated communist losses.

Estimates of Total Casualties

See also: Vietnam War casualties

The Vietnamese government reported 849,000 military deaths during the war for the period between 1955 and 1975, of which 1/3 were non-combat deaths, (it is unclear whether or not this figure includes the 300-330,000 PAVN/VC soldiers missing in the war), while 58,220 Americans and about 313,000 South Vietnamese combatants died in the conflict. The official US Department of Defense figure was 950,765 communist forces killed in Vietnam from 1965 to 1974. Defense Department officials believed that these body count figures need to be deflated by 30 percent.

Lewis Sorley in A Better War cites Douglas Pike with a figure of 900,000 PAVN/VC dead by 1973 and states that during a 1974 visit by Admiral Elmo Zumwalt to North Vietnam, PAVN General Võ Nguyên Giáp advised Zumwalt that the North had 330,000 missing. Jim Webb claims that the Vietnamese lost over 1.1m soldiers. Geoffrey Ward and Ken Burns in the book The Vietnam War state over a million casualties were reported as well.{[rp|193}}