you stated that in excess of 11,000 American troops were killed by friendly fire during Viet Nam. Could you tell me where you got that statistic?

Thanks,

A155MM

Heard from some place recently that it was like 5,000 or 10% and it was a combination of friendly fire and fragging. Seems hard to believe that even; but then I remember that movie about Vietnam and a jungle fight at night. It was dark and there were white shots from all over Where or who was the enemy?

Very accurate analysis; unezero.

A155MM, entry Vietnam War, 1954-75 on pg.864,§1 in "The Hutchinson Paperpack Encyclopedia" 1990 edition 1st publishred in Great BritaiN, Arrow Reference .ISBN 0-09-978200-6

"56,555 US SOLDIERS WERE KILLED 1961-75, A FIFTH OF THEM BY THEIR OWN TROOPS"

I was confused with the discreepancies in the number of deaths and dates of the war in the two referencies I used.: According to" The New American DESK ENCYCLOPEDIA" August 1997, 4th edition ISBN 0-451-19320-2, entry " Vietnam Veterans Memorial" in Washington D.C. " on pg.1341§2:

"The names of nearly 58,000 US service personnel who died in the Vietnam War are carved in granite in the order of deaths from 1959 to 1975."

BTW: I've been a reference book collector since age 14. I cried when I had to sell off my 1300 volume reference collection to two Maryland collegesand a universitiy to move to Hungary for love.

2

Calculating friendly fire deaths is a tricky proposition at best. If you remove the number of non-combat deaths; (training accidents, illness etc.) the number killed in Viet Nam can drop as low as 48,000. That alone skews the friendly fire percentages up to the 25% range. If you add Reservists, National Guardsmen and Active Duty Personnel killed stateside during Viet Nam to the equation; the percentage goes down.

I've read one study after another over the years and I can't say anyone has pinned it down exactly. You just about have to decide which parameters you want to use and pick a number from there.

As I said, impossible to acccurately account for the number of "friendly fire" deaths. Intentional or otherwise.

Impossible to even approximate. It's a given that such things happen, but there's too much chaos on the battlefield to even make an educated guess.

In the case of Vietnam I guess that one could have looked at the diameter of the bullet wounds on a KIA, as the North Vietnamese and VC primarily used a 7.62 Warsaw Pact cartridge, and we used a 5.56 round. But even that would go out the window because the enemy also used captured M-16s, and anything else they could get their hands on.

As for dertermining the origin of fragmentation wounds, forget it. No post mortem will tell anything but that the person was killed by fragmentation wounds.

Eyewitness accounts may be somewhat useful, but as I said, a firefight is a very confused affair. And one is generally too directly focused on engaging the enemy to notice anything else.

One can make educated estimates here by a percentage based formula, but essentially it boils down to being some asshole's opinion.

As I also said, shit happens. War is a very messy, confused business.

After reading y'alls accounts over the past few years -- I rarely ever comment. It's something I can't even imagine having to experience. But it's a wonder that there aren't more vets out there that aren't completely insane. I don't think the human mind was meant to be a witness or take part in things like that.

I agree; after reading of fighting I decided it is like a game of cowboys and indians only real life crazy. What does fighting have to do with anything civil ???

Hey, it was just a shitty job that one had to do. I used to be tense and apprehensive before a firefight, and scared shitless, drained, and washed out after one was over. But to my surprise and horror, I actually enjoyed it when we were in one. As long as one could shoot back anyhow. Nothing quite compares to a good rush of adrenaline.

I liked hunting the little bastards. There was always a grim sense of satisfaction in taking them down, because you knew that when you did at least these partucular people would no longer constitute a threat to your person.

Of course, more always took their place.

As I said before Unebug, most of us would have preferrred to have been elsewhere, and doing something else. But there was also a certain insane attraction to combat. At least for me anyhow. I hated the war, but liked mixing it up when the shit started.

I could have just been sick in the head though.

Maybe that's the attraction to combat. It is the ultimate high stakes game, and man has been lightly brushed with only the thinnest veneer of civilization.

It doesn't take much to revert back to one's primal instincts. A couple of rounds close to the head will generally remove the average individual's civilized imstincts.

We're not really all that far removed from our savage ancestors.