November 22, 2006
Death in Vietnam II Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 11:30 AM EST My thanks to Fred Smoler for pointing out an error in my previous post. I was working off of Christian Appy’s definitive work on the Vietnam War era military, Working-Class War: American Combat Soldiers in Vietnam. In an uncharacteristically tortured paragraph (Appy is a fine writer, but here is where I was thrown), the author wrote: “From 1966 to 1969 the percentage of draftees who died in the war doubled from 21 to 40. Almost half of the Army troops were draftees, and in combat units the proportion was commonly as high as two-thirds; late in the war it was even higher. The overall number of draftees was lower because the Marine Corps—the other service branch that did the bulk of fighting in Vietnam—was ordinarily limited to volunteers (though it did draft about 20,000 men in the Vietnam War.)”
Appy’s prose is a little confusing, but he appears to be suggesting that draftees accounted for a disproportionate share of war-related deaths. For the Army, the numbers break down as follows:
1965 28%
1966 34%
1967 57%
1968 58%
1969 62%
1970 57%
Appy explains that the “soldiers sent to Vietnam can be divided into three categories of roughly equal size: one-third draftees, one-third draft-motivated volunteers, and one-third true volunteers.” Which means that working-class men suffered a double burden: They were more likely to be drafted, and more likely to die once inducted into the service.
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