Pax Nortona – A Blog by Joel Sax
From the Land of the Lost Blunderbuss
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Bush Tops Vietnam Casualty Figures
Posted on November 13, 2003 in Occupation of Iraq
Ick! Damn that Bush works fast!
A Reuters analysis of Defense Department statistics showed on Thursday that the Vietnam War, which the Army says officially began on Dec. 11, 1961, produced a combined 392 fatal casualties from 1962 through 1964, when American troop levels in Indochina stood at just over 17,000.
By comparison, a roadside bomb attack that killed a soldier in Baghdad on Wednesday brought to 397 the tally of American dead in Iraq, where U.S. forces number about 130,000 troops — the same number reached in Vietnam by October 1965.
On the flip side, it’s hard to tell if the numbers for Iraqis killed are being inflated or undercounted. In this war, I’d suspect undercounted. In Vietnam, they regularly fed us astronomical casualty figures to let us believe that the “light at the end of the tunnel” was in sight. Then we kept crashing into brick walls.
I saw those reports. I remember.
