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The U.S. Veteran Dispatch has uncovered Pentagon records revealing that the United States suffered nearly 20,000 more fatalities during the Vietnam War era than the 58,182 servicemen whose names are engraved on the National Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C.
According to a U.S. Army file called TAGCEN which contains over 293,000 Army casualty records, there are 19,644 U.S. Army servicemen who were killed or died between January 1, 1965 and December 31, 1975 that are not counted as Vietnam war dead because their death certificates were written in other countries, including the United States.
There are two versions of TAGCEN, one for public use and one for internal government use.
To verify the information presented in this article, U.S. Army casualty records were cross-referenced between the Pentagon's Combat Area Casualties Current File (CACCF) and the TAGCEN file dating between the years 1965 and 1975.
There is a difference between the files of approximately 500 Vietnam service records, which means the 19,644 number could be 500 higher.
The CACCF file contains 58,200 plus records of men from all services who are listed as died in Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War. Those names are chiseled into the National Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall in Washington, D.C. and the CACCF file is available to the public.
Of the total names in the CACCF file, 37,942 are of Army killed or missing during the time frame January 1, 1965 to December 31, 1975 and are listed on The Wall.
When the 37,942 is subtracted from the 57,586 Army dead or missing the Pentagon has recorded in TAGCEN for 1965 to 1975, there is a difference of 19,644 Army dead.
Casualty records and files which record the Marine Corps, Air Force, Navy and Coast Guard killed and wounded outside of the Vietnam War zone during the 1965-75 time frame remain unavailable. The number of servicemen from those branches whose deaths were recorded in other countries is believed to be significantly high.
If casualty files for those branches were made public and added to the Army casualties, it is estimated that the number of fatalities could be as high as 30,000 more than the Vietnam-era dead claimed by the Pentagon.
It has long been known that servicemen who died outside Vietnam as a result of wounds they received in Southeast Asia were not counted as Vietnam war dead, but the exact number of those casualties has never been made public.
Even if a number of the fatalities are not related to the Vietnam combat area, there is no way the United States lost 30,000 servicemen from 1965 to 1975 because of accidents, crime, health problems, etc.
From January 1965 until December 1975, Pentagon records show 57,586 U.S.
Army servicemen died in the following countries:
North Vietnam — 11
South Vietnam — 37,259
Cambodia — 421
Czechoslovakia — 14
France — 31
Germany — 2,329
Italy — 36
Japan — 66
Laos — 134
Mexico — 11
Okinawa — 50
Panama — 49
South Korea — 438
Thailand — 167
United States — 16,004
Classified — 71
Other Countries such as Albania, Belgium, , Liberia, Venezuela, etc. — 495
Total — 57,586
In June, to help further explore these findings, the U.S. Veteran Dispatch posted the casualty figures on several internet newsgroups which deal with the Vietnam War. There were a number of responses, some which challenged the validity of our sources and some which offered more information.
On the newsgroup alt.war.vietnam, one respondent (cuith@aol.com) posted the following message.
Cuith: "Below is part of a letter written to me by Richard Clark, who was in my Cap unit and got hit by an AK round through his lungs at what we called the `Alamo.' I found him after 29 years. Thank God for the internet and websites. This might explain some of the casualties in USA.
`Doc, the going home. Time to talk about the military hospital system between Danang and Great Lakes. After being holed at the Alamo, they took me to 1st Medical Bn., Danang.
Triage consisted of sitting in a semi-reclining wooden lawn chair in a sort of emergency room where they cut your clothes off you, verify your identity and ask questions. Then lay naked on a stretcher carried by Vietnamese women (in the dark), along side the paved LZ. Busy place. In line for surgery with your personal effects on your stretcher.
`Four days later I woke to the shock of post-exploratory surgery. There must have been 30 men in my ward. Easily 1/4 died after surgery. Some things are just too bad to fix.
`One week to stabilize and then out to the USS Sanctuary.
`There I had some rib resections done(with a spinal), and stayed aboard for about 10 days. Here again were about 15 men in my ward. I can remember 5 that I watched die not more than 6 feet away with the MD's and corpsmen working to revive them.
`Then we docked at Subic Bay. Bus to Clarke AF base. More dead.
`Fly to Yokosuka, Japan. Stabilize there. Fewer died there.
`Fly to Elmendorf, Alaska. We stayed on the ground about 2 hours while a couple of men were off-loaded there that had died during the flight.
`Then to Glenview Naval Air Station and bus to Great Lakes.
`Bus. It always stays with me like a bus, anyway. We would drop off the dead at stops just like a bus.
`People kept dying.
`The worst was that we always believed that if men could get to Danang alive, they lived. Always.
` Some of us were so badly hurt that nothing was going to keep us alive. Some just gave up because they just couldn't hurt anymore.
`An Army SFC died that way. Hell of a brave man and the corpsman was screaming at him not to let go. He reminded him of his wife and kids, but the SFC would just shake his head and fade.'
"Dick is 100% disabled living in Minnesota. Hope to visit him this year. He wants me to go back to Vietnam with him to the old Cap Ba hamlets next year. This might explain why you have a few that died in the US.
"Greg, a Cap Doc."
The list below is an example of the Army casualties by year in South Vietnam and the United States.
Note as the number of Army personnel killed in South Vietnam began to climb in 1965, the Army dead in the United States increased correspondingly until 1971 when more soldiers died in the United States than in Vietnam.
Even though by 1973 the U.S. was backing out of the Vietnam War and U.S.
casualties in Vietnam had dropped significantly, Army soldiers continued to die
back home in the States.
1965
South Vietnam - 1,080
United States - 0
1966
South Vietnam - 3,770
United States - 714
1967
South Vietnam - 6,470
United States - 1,588
1968
South Vietnam - 10,595
United States - 1,887
1969
South Vietnam - 8,192
United States - 2,068
1970
South Vietnam - 4,643
United States - 1,876
1971
South Vietnam - 2,066
United States - 2,193
1972
South Vietnam - 362
United States - 1,795
1973
South Vietnam - 26
United States - 1,508
1974
South Vietnam - 40
United States - 1,231
1975
South Vietnam - 13
United States - 1,134