Saw this on the internet (so it must be true!), but is this even possible? Were soldiers sent in harm’s way on day one? It doesn’t say they were killed in combat with the VC, maybe it was a helicopter crash or even a jeep turn over, but its still a pretty high number.
It also said 1447 soldiers died on their last (scheduled) day in Vietnam. Were guys fighting right up to the day they were to ship out?
Yes, accidents account for some. Also, there were numerous mortar attacks on bases, so some soldiers were actually killed right there and not in the jungle fighting per se. Considering the fact that the official death toll is 58,220, a little less than a thousand isn’t an unduly high number.
This is interesting.
National Archives: Vietnam War U.S. Military Fatal Casualty Statistics
ACCIDENT: 9,107
DECLARED DEAD: 1,201
DIED OF WOUNDS: 5,299
HOMICIDE: 236
ILLNESS: 938
KILLED IN ACTION: 40,934
PRESUMED DEAD (BODY REMAINS RECOVERED): 32
PRESUMED DEAD (BODY REMAINS NOT RECOVERED): 91
SELF-INFLICTED: 382
Total Records: 58,220
My friends father died in a B52 crash at their base right near the end of the war. His name is very close to the end of the wall in DC. the plane was shot up and they tried to land because one guy was hurt and not able to bail out.
I don’t know…997/58,220 works out to about 1.7%. I’ve never served in the military, but losing 1.7% of your troops upon arrival sounds like a big problem to me.
Table I in this paper (the third page of the PDF) indicates an overall mortality rate of 2,231 per 100,000 person-years in that theater. If I’m reading the table properly, that means we were losing 2.23% of our personnel for every year they were in Vietnam.
If ≈1.7% were dying on their first day and ≈2.55% died on their last day, that’s 4.25% in total on those two days alone.
Per the same table, about 2,610,000 Americans were sent to Vietnam. 58,220/2,610,000 works out to ≈2.23%. I think that checks out.
Check my math, but if either of the first day/last day numbers were right, we’d have lost enormously more soldiers than we actually did.
I don’t have the figures but I agree with the OP that the numbers sound very suspicious.
A soldier’s first day in Vietnam and his last scheduled day in Vietnam would not have been typical days in terms of what he was doing. And it seems very unlikely that anything he was doing on those particular days would have increased his chances of dying. The opposite would seem more likely; that a soldier on his first day in Vietnam or on a day which was pre-scheduled to be his last day in Vietnam would had a much lower chance of being killed than he would have had on a typical day of military service in Vietnam.
EdelweissPirate’s number-crunching seems to support my instinctive feeling.
It’s probably true, but it’s also probably misleading.
For example, how many of those are pilots who were shot down and killed on their first or last mission over Vietnam? Were there any plane crashes of incoming or leaving troops (a-la Frank Burns) that might have skewed the numbers quite a bit? One transport/airliner crash killing 100+ servicemen would skew that number pretty hard.
Also, keep in mind that about 2.7 million men served in Vietnam, so another way of looking at it is that 0.04% of incoming troops were killed on their first day.
It’s not just on the internet. Google reveals many books that give those figures (along with those on the “last day”). However, none of them that I looked at cite a primary source for the figures. Several websites on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall present those figures among a bunch of other statistics (although one say “unconfirmed” about the figures.) The Memorial site itself doesn’t provide any such figures.
At least one site says the figure for the first day “in combat,” not “in country,” which makes much more sense. I think it’s highly implausible that many soldiers were sent into combat their very first day in the country, or had the bases they landed at attacked.
Based on present evidence, my guess is that this is a garbled factoid that has been repeated from site to site. It would be interesting to find the first source for that figure.
It’s extremely unlikely that a pilot would have been sent on a mission on his “first day in country.” This rationale makes more sense if you were talking about “first day in combat,” which I think is the most likely original form of the supposed statistic.
There’s also a mathematical oddity to this issue. Every soldier has a “first day” in country (or in combat). Not every soldier has a 100th, or 200th, or 300th day. So “first day” casualties may be a misleading statistic.
Another consideration was that rotations in Vietnam were relatively short, one year in general, and six months for officers in command positions. This meant there would be a disproportionate number of “first” or “last” days compared to longer periods of service, as well as the fact many soldiers would be inexperienced.
I agree- it’s probably first day in combat. I was originally thinking more like a B-52 crew or Navy pilots who wouldn’t ever be ‘in-country’ so to speak, so getting killed on their first day in Vietnam is entirely possible.
997 is not 1.7% of troops, it’s 1.7% of *casualties *<< 1.7% of troops
Nitpick: LTC Henry Blake, Burns returned stateside and also promoted.
Yup—thanks for catching that. I barely slept last night. Oof.
Good point.
I wonder if there is a simple grammatical issue here: “in country” as opposed to “in the country”?
I seem to remember that the soldiers in Vietnam used the phrase “in country” to mean “in the bush”— ie. that they were out in the jungle, on patrol and away from base camp.
If that’s true, then it seems possible that some soldiers died on their first day in combat , which was also their first day in country.But not their first day in the country.