and some of his top military leaders was held there in 1967. Yet the United
States sent several thousand Guamanians to fight with American forces in
Vietnam. Seventy of them died. Drawn from a population of only 111,000,
Guam's death rate was considerably higher even than that of Dorchester,
Massachusetts.
This still does not exhaust the range of places we might look for "Ameri-
can" casualties. There were, of course, the "Free World forces" recruited
by and, in most cases, financed by the United States. These "third country
forces" from South Korea, Australia, New Zealand, Thailand, and the
Philippines reached a peak of about 60,000 troops (U.S. forces rose to
550,000). The U.S. government pointed to them as evidence ofa united,
multinational, free-world effort to resist communist aggression. But only
Australia and New Zealand paid to send their troops to Vietnam. They
had a force of 7,000 men and lost 469 in combat. The other nations received
so much money in return for their military intervention that their forces
were essentially mercenary. The Philippine government of Ferdinand
Marcos, for example, received the equivalent of $26,000 for each of the
2,000 men it sent to Vietnam to carry out noncombat, civic action pro-
grams. South Korea's participation was by far the largest among the U .S.-
sponsored third countries. It deployed a force of 50,000 men. In return,
the Korean government enjoyed substantial increases in aid, and its sol-
diers were paid roughly 20 times what they earned at home. More than
4,000 of them lost their lives. 10
The South Vietnamese military was also essentially the product of
American intervention. For twenty-one years the United States com-
mitted billions of dollars to the creation of an anticommunist government
in southern Vietnam and to the recruitment, training, and arming of a
military to support it. Throughout the long war against southern guer-
rillas and North Vietnamese regulars, about 250,000 South Vietnamese
government forces were killed. The United States bears responsibility for
these lives and for those of third country forces because their military
participation was almost wholly dependent on American initiatives.
In this sense, perhaps we need to take another step. Perhaps all viet-
namese deaths, enemyand ally, civilian and combatant, should be consid-
ered American as well as Vietnamese casualties. To do so is simply to
acknowledge that their fates were largely determined by American inter-
vention. After all, without American intervention (according to almost all
intelligence reports at the time and historians since), Vietnamese unifica-
tion under Ho Chi Minh would have occurred with little resistance.11
However one measures American responsibility for Indochinese casu-
alties, every effort should be made to grasp the enormity of those losses.
From 1961 to 1975 1.5 to 2 million Vietnamese were killed. Estimates of
Cambodian and Laotian deaths are even less precise, but certainly the
figure is in the hundreds of thousands. Imagine a memorial to the Indo-
chinese who died in what they call the American, not the Vietnam, War. If
similar to the Vietnam Memorial, with every name etched in granite, it
would have to be forty times larger than the wall in Washington. Even
such an enormous list of names would not put into perspective the scale of
loss in Indochina. These are small countries with a combined wartime
..Had the United States lost the same
the Vietnam Memorial would list the names of 8
Americans.
insist that we recognize the disparity in casualties between the
Indochina is not to diminish the tragedy or significance
losses, nor does it deflect attention from our effort to under-
American soldiers. Without some awareness of the war's full de-
we cannot begin to understand their experience. As one
.: "That's what I can't get out of my head-the bodies. ..all
bodies. Back then we didn't give a shit about the dead Vietnamese.
'Hey, they're just gooks, don't mean nothin'.' You got so cold
You could even joke about it, mess around with the
without feeling much of anything. It's not like
You can't just put it out of your mind. Now I carry those bodies
fucking day. It's a heavy load, man, a heavy fucking load."l2
VIETNAM GENERATION'S MILITARY MINORITY:
PROFILE
Johnson, and Nixon sent 3 million American soldiers
.of 17 million. In the early 1960s they went by
helicopter units, Green Beret teams, counterinsurgency
advisers by the American command. They fought a dis-
, on the edge of American consciousness. Beyond the
government, few predicted that hundreds of thou-
in a massive buildup that took the American presence
(
geocities.com/yaoleechenb2)