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In the [[2003 invasion of Iraq]], the US military adopted an official policy of not counting deaths. General [[Tommy Franks]]' statement that "we don't do body counts" was widely reported. Critics claimed that Franks was only attempting to evade bad publicity, while supporters pointed to the failure of body counts to give an accurate impression of the state of the war in Vietnam. At the end of October 2005, it became public that the US military had been counting Iraqi fatalities since January 2004 but only those killed by insurgents and not those killed by the US forces.<ref>[https://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/30/international/middleeast/30civilians.html "U.S. Quietly Issues Estimate of Iraqi Civilian Casualties"], The New York Times</ref>
In the [[2003 invasion of Iraq]], the US military adopted an official policy of not counting deaths. General [[Tommy Franks]]' statement that "we don't do body counts" was widely reported. Critics claimed that Franks was only attempting to evade bad publicity, while supporters pointed to the failure of body counts to give an accurate impression of the state of the war in Vietnam. At the end of October 2005, it became public that the US military had been counting Iraqi fatalities since January 2004 but only those killed by insurgents and not those killed by the US forces.<ref>[https://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/30/international/middleeast/30civilians.html "U.S. Quietly Issues Estimate of Iraqi Civilian Casualties"], The New York Times</ref>

==Movies==
In [[censorship]], "Body count" has been used as a criterion to judge the 'shock value' of a movie, and hence its suitability for younger viewers. It is usually calculated by the number of deaths or bodies shown on-screen. This has led some directors to imply deaths instead of showing them, for example showing a group of unarmed people facing a villain, then cutting to the villain firing a gun and grinning. The victims' bodies are never shown, but the viewer will understand that they were killed.


==See also==
==See also==

Revision as of 12:30, 11 June 2018

For other uses, see Body count (disambiguation).
Edward III counting the dead after the battle of Crécy

A body count is the total number of people killed in a particular event. In combat, a body count is often based on the number of confirmed kills, but occasionally only an estimate. Often used in reference to military combat, the term can also refer to any situation involving a number of deaths, such as those of a serial killer.

The military gathers such figures for a variety of reasons, such as determining the need for continuing operations, estimating efficiency of new and old weapons systems, and planning follow-up operations.

Military use

Body count figures have a long history in military planning and propaganda. In ancient battles, the penises (and sometimes the scrotums as well) of killed and dying enemies were collected from the field to count the dead.[1]

Sassanian Empire

According to Procopius, when the Persians are about to march to a war, the king sits on the throne and many baskets are set before him. The men of the army pass along the baskets one by one, each throwing one arrow in the baskets, which are then sealed with the king's seal. When the army returns to Persia, each man takes an arrow, and the number of casualties will be determined by the number of remaining arrows.[2]

Vietnam War

Since the goal of the United States in the Vietnam War was not to conquer North Vietnam but rather to ensure the survival of the South Vietnamese government, measuring progress was difficult. All the contested territory was theoretically "held" already. Instead, the US Army used body counts to show that the US was winning the war. The Army's theory was that eventually, the Vietcong and North Vietnamese Army would lose after the attrition warfare.

According to historian Christian Appy, "search and destroy was the principal tactic; and the enemy body count was the primary measure of progress" in General Westmoreland’s war of attrition. Search and destroy was coined as a phrase in 1965 to describe missions aimed at flushing the Viet Cong out of hiding, while the body count was the measuring stick for the success of any operation. Competitions were held between units for the highest number of Vietnamese killed in action, or KIAs. Army and marine officers knew that promotions were largely based on confirmed kills. The pressure to produce confirmed kills resulted in massive fraud. One study revealed that 61 % of American commanders considered that body counts were grossly exaggerated.[2]

The Vietnamese government reported 849,000 military deaths during the war from the periods between 1955 to 1975, of which 1/3rd were non-combat deaths[3][4][5], while 58,220 Americans and about 313,000 South Vietnamese combatants died [6] in the conflict.[7] The official US Department of Defense figure was 950,765 communist forces killed in Vietnam from 1965 to 1974. Defense Department officials believed that these body count figures need to be deflated by 30 percent. It was estimated that around 220,000 civilians killed by US/ARVN battle operations were miscounted as "enemy KIA".[8] For official US military operations reports, there are no distinctions between enemy KIA and civilian KIA since it was assumed by US forces that an area declared a free-fire zone that all individuals killed regardless of whether they were combatants or civilians were considered enemy KIA.[9][10][11] Since body counts was a direct measure of operational success this often caused US battle reports to list civilians killed as enemy KIA.[12] The inclusion of civilians killed led to the enormous discrepancy between weapons seized and 'enemy KIA' during Operation Speedy Express, nearly 10,000 KIA with just 748 weapons found. Most of the enemy killed included were unarmed civilians[8].

In the summer of 1970, H. Norman Schwarzkopf writes, "the Army War College issued a scathing report," that, among other things, "criticised the Army's obsession with meaningless statistics and was especially damning on the subject of body counts in Vietnam. A young captain had told the investigators a sickening story: he'd been under so much pressure from headquarters to boost his numbers that he'd nearly gotten into a fistfight with a South Vietnamese officer over whose unit would take credit for various enemy body parts. Many officers admitted they had simply inflated their reports to placate headquarters."[13]

The junior officers queried in the 1970 "Study on Military Professionalism" (seemingly the study that Schwarzkopf refers to) had particularly violent reactions to instructions on the body count.[14] "They told of being given quotas and being told to go out and recount until they had sufficient numbers. “Nobody out there believes the body count,” was the reportedly common response."

In Lewis Sorley's book "A Better War", published in 1999 after studies of voluminous previously-secret papers of Creighton Abrams, he writes "Body count may have been the most corrupt - and corrupting - measure of progress in the whole mess. Certainly the consensus of senior Army leaders, the generals who commanded in Vietnam, strongly indicates that it was. Sixty-one percent, when polled on the matter, siad that the body count "was often inflated." Typical comments by the respondents were that it was "a fake - totally worthless," that "the immensity of the false reporting is a blot on the honor of the Army," and that they were grossly exaggerated by many units primarily because of the incredible interest shown by people like McNamara and Westmoreland."[15]

Secretary of Defense Charles Hagel states that U.S. commanders on the ground did this often since this was how their success was judged."You used that body count, commanding officers did, as the metric and measurement of how successful you were...", hence providing a positive incentive for deliberate fabrication[16]. During the Battle of Dak To, one company commander alleges after losing 78 men while finding 10 enemy bodies, the "enemy body count" figures was deliberately re-written as 475 by William Westmoreland and released as official operational reports[17].

Iraq War

Main article: Casualties of the Iraq War

In the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the US military adopted an official policy of not counting deaths. General Tommy Franks' statement that "we don't do body counts" was widely reported. Critics claimed that Franks was only attempting to evade bad publicity, while supporters pointed to the failure of body counts to give an accurate impression of the state of the war in Vietnam. At the end of October 2005, it became public that the US military had been counting Iraqi fatalities since January 2004 but only those killed by insurgents and not those killed by the US forces.[18]

See also

Look up body count in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

References

  1. ^ "Holy Bible, 1 Samuel 18:25-27". New International Version. Retrieved 11 May 2014.
  2. ^ Prokopios, The Wars of Justinian, translated by H. B. Dewing, Hackett Publishing, 2014, ISBN 9781624661723, page
  3. ^ "CÔNG TÁC TÌM KIẾM, QUY TẬP HÀI CỐT LIỆT SĨ TỪ NAY ĐẾN NĂM 2020 VÀ NHỮNG NĂM TIẾP THEO, Bộ Quốc phòng Việt Nam".
  4. ^ "Công tác tìm kiếm, quy tập hài cốt liệt sĩ từ nay đến năm 2020 và những năn tiếp theo". Ministry of National Defense - Government of Vietnam. {{cite web}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |dead-url= (help)
  5. ^ NAM, ĐẢNG CỘNG SẢN VIỆT. "Đời đời nhớ ơn các anh hùng liệt sĩ!". dangcongsan.vn (in Vietnamese). Retrieved 2018-06-11.
  6. ^ Rummel, R.J (1997[1]
  7. ^ Thayer, Thomas C (1985). War Without Fronts: The American Experience in Vietnam. Boulder: Westview Press. p.106.
  8. ^ a b Bellamy, Alex J. (2017-09-29). East Asia's Other Miracle: Explaining the Decline of Mass Atrocities. Oxford University Press. pp. 33–34. ISBN 9780191083785.
  9. ^ https://thevietnamwar.info/free-fire-zone/
  10. ^ "Declassification of the BDM Study, "The Strategic Lessons Learned in Vietnam"" (PDF). Defense Technical Center. p. 225-234. {{cite web}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |dead-url= (help)
  11. ^ Appy, Christian (1993). Working-Class War: American Combat Soldiers and Vietnam. http://projectsmrj.pbworks.com/f/Working+Class+War+-+Christian+Appy.pdf: UNC Chapel Hill. p. 273. {{cite book}}: External link in |location= (help)
  12. ^ "Body Count in Vietnam | HistoryNet". www.historynet.com. Retrieved 2018-06-04.
  13. ^ Schwarzkopf/Petre, "It Doesn't Take A Hero," Bantam Books, 1992, 204.
  14. ^ "The On-Going Battle for the Soul of the Army | Small Wars Journal". smallwarsjournal.com. Retrieved 2018-05-31.
  15. ^ Douglas Kinnard, "The War Managers," p.75, quoted in Sorley, "A Better War: The Unexplained Victories and Final Tragedy of America's Last Years in Vietnam," Harcount Brace and Company, 1999, 21-22.
  16. ^ Patricia Sullivan (5 August 2009). "A Vietnam War That Never Ends". Retrieved 17 August 2011.
  17. ^ Ward, Geoffrey C. (2017). The Vietnam War: An Intimate History. Alfred A. Knopf. p. 193. ISBN 9780307700254.
  18. ^ "U.S. Quietly Issues Estimate of Iraqi Civilian Casualties", The New York Times
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