OFFICER CASUALTIES

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The training for American officers is thought by most foreign military authorities to be the best in the world. With few exceptions, almost all of the 6,600 commissioned officers who died in Vietnam were graduates of the service academies, college Reserve Officers Training Corps (ROTC), or the Officer Candidate School (OCS) programs. The major service academies and other military colleges provided close to 900 of the Vietnam officer casualties: the U.S. Military Academy, 278; the U.S. Air Force Academy, 205; the U.S. Naval Academy, 130; Texas A & M, 112; The Citadel, 66; Virginia Military Institute, 43; Virginia Polytechnic Institute, 26; Norwich University, 19.

ARMY AND MARINE OFFICER CASUALTIES BY RANK AND AGE

Officer casualties in Vietnam, including warrant officers, numbered 7,874, or 13.5 percent of all casualties. The Army lost the greatest number of officers – 4,635 or 59 percent of all officer casualties. Ninety-one percent of these Army officers were warrant officers, second lieutenants, first lieutenants or captains. This was a reflection of the role of warrant officers as helicopter pilots (of the 1,277 warrant officer casualties, 95 percent were Army helicopter pilots), and of the young lieutenants and captains as combat platoon leaders or company commanders.

The same profile holds true for the Marine Corps, where 87 percent of all officer casualties (821 of 938) were warrant officers, lieutenants or captains. Army and Marine officer casualties were also quite young. Fully 50 percent were in the 17- to 24-year age group, and astonishingly, there were 764 Army officer casualties who were 21 or younger.

NAVY AND AIR FORCE OFFICER CASUALTIES BY RANK AND AGE

Quite a different profile emerges among the Navy and Air force officer corps. The Air Force lost the highest percentage of officers. Of 2,590 total Air Force casualties, 1,674 or 65 percent were officers. Many of them, as experienced pilots, were older (two thirds were thirty or older) and many were high ranking. Almost 50 percent were majors, lieutenant-colonels, colonels and three were generals. The Navy had a similar profile: 55 percent of its 622 officer casualties were 30 years of age or older, and 45 percent were ranked at lieutenant commander or above when they died. It should be emphasized that 55 percent of all Navy and Air Force officer casualties came as a result of reconnaissance and bombing sorties into North Vietnam, Laos, Thailand and Cambodia. As a result, it was mainly the families of Navy and Air Force pilots and crewmen who suffered the great agony of the POW (prisoner of war) and MIA (missing in action) experience that came out of the Vietnam War.

MAKEUP OF FORCES

The makeup of U.S. combat forces in Vietnam has long been the subject of controversy among social scientists. The feeling is that the poor, the undereducated and the minorities made up the vast majority of the combat arms during that war. This makeup, they say, was the very antithesis of what we stand for as a democracy — a shameful corruption of our values and our historical sense of fairness and social justice. There is some truth to this, but it is instructive to look at what the DOD database reveals in terms of race, ethnicity, national origin, religious preference and casualties by U.S. geographic areas.

CASUALTIES BY RACE: ENLISTED MEN

Of all enlisted men who died in Vietnam, blacks made up 14.1 percent of the total. This came at a time when blacks made up 11 percent of the male population nationwide. However, if officer casualties are added to the total, then this overrepresentation is reduced to 12.5 percent of all casualties. Of the 7,262 blacks who died, 6,955, or 96 percent, were Army and Marine enlisted men. The combination of the selective service policies with the skills and aptitude testing of both volunteers and draftees (in which blacks scored noticeably lower) conspired to assign blacks in greater numbers to the combat units of the Army and Marine Corps. Early in the war (1965 and 1966) when blacks made up about 11 percent of our Vietnam force, black casualties soared to more than 20 percent of the total. Black leaders, including Martin Luther King Jr., protested, and President Johnson ordered black participation in combat units cut back. As a result, the black casualty rate was reduced to 11.5 percent by 1969.

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