Iraq and Vietnam

Since we've passed the grim milestone of 1000 deaths in Iraq, I thought I'd compare the death rate in Iraq with that in Vietnam. I've used April 1965 as the starting point for Vietnam since that is when LBJ sent in the first ground combat units.

As you can see, the two conflicts don't even compare in terms of their intensity, with about 7 times the deaths in Vietnam over the same number of months. This is true even when you compare the different troop levels. In 1965, there were 184,000 U.S. forces in South Vietnam and in 1966 this number rose to 385,000. In comparison, there are about 135,000 U.S. forces in Iraq.

Vietnam		Iraq
April 1965	60	March 2003	65
May 1965	88	April 2003	73
June 1965	147	May 2003	37
July 1965	104	June 2003	30
August 1965	179	July 2003	47
September 1965	151	August 2003	35
October 1965	236	September 2003	30
November 1965	545	October 2003	43
December 1965	326	November 2003	82
January 1966	400	December 2003	40
February 1966	510	January 2004	47
March 1966	562	February 2004	20
April 1966	404	March 2004	52
May 1966	590	April 2004	135
June 1966	597	May 2004	80
July 1966	561	June 2004	42
August 1966	504	July 2004	54
September 1966	528	August 2004	66
October 1966	514	September 2004 (Up to 9/7)	23
Total	7006		1001

Sources: Iraq deaths from Iraq Coalition Casualties and Vietnam deaths from the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund (the advanced search engine on the latter allows you to find deaths by month).