http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/world/iraq/memorial/20031113-1423-iraq-usa-vietnam.htmlU.S. war dead in Iraq exceed early Vietnam years
PHILADELPHIA – The U.S. death toll in Iraq has surpassed the number of American soldiers killed during the first three years of the Vietnam War, the brutal Cold War conflict that cast a shadow over U.S. affairs for more than a generation.
A Reuters analysis of U.S. Defense Department statistics showed Thursday that the Vietnam War, which the Army says officially began on Dec. 11, 1961, produced a combined 392 fatal casualties from 1962 through 1964, when American troop levels in Indochina stood at just over 17,000.
By comparison, a roadside bomb attack that killed a soldier in Baghdad Wednesday brought to 397 the tally of American dead in Iraq, where U.S. forces currently number about 130,000 troops – the same number reached in Vietnam by October 1965.
The casualty count for Iraq apparently surpassed the Vietnam figure last Sunday, when a U.S. soldier killed in a rocket-propelled grenade attack south of Baghdad became the conflict's 393rd American casualty since Operation Iraqi Freedom began on March 20.
more