American War--civilian casualties query
From: Charles Wheeler <charles.wheeler@uci.edu>
Date: Nov 3, 2006 10:48 AM
Subject: [Vsg] American War--civilian casualties query
Dear VSGrs:
Can someone help? I am hoping to find information on the annual estimates of Vietnamese killed (civilian and military) during the American war. All the sources with which I’m familiar only cite total figures for Vietnamese, while some cite annual stats but only for Americans (David Anderson’s guide lists RVN).
And while I am on the subject, has there been any investigative work done on these casualty compilations? What is the most reliable authority for these estimates? The figures I find vary so wildly they should be taken as unreliable. I have some Middle Eastern and American specialist colleagues who are curious (as am I) about how the current controversies over civilian casualties compare with the American War.
Charles Wheeler
Ass't Professor, History, UC Irvine
cwheeler@uci.edu
From: Hung Thai <Hung.Thai@pomona.edu>
Date: Nov 3, 2006 10:55 AM
Subject: RE: [Vsg] American War--civilian casualties query
You can contact Merli Giavanni at Madison; he's a demographer who's done a lot of estimation on casualties of war, including Vietnam.
Hung Thai
From: Dan Duffy <dduffy@email.unc.edu>
Date: Nov 3, 2006 12:09 PM
Subject: Re: [Vsg] American War--civilian casualties query
I second this query and hope Charles will let us know what the experts
think. A UK scholar whose name has gone out with daily flush of my
brain cells wrote a terrific book in the 1970s about how grand
historical disasters reliably generate unreliable numbers, but that is
ultimately a satiric, humanist, maybe tragic view, definitely not
hopeful and scientific.
In particular, did any in VN do public-health oriented, morbidity
studies comparable to the Lancet articles on Iraq, or mock up such
things retrospectively?
Dan
From: Shawn McHale <mchale@gwu.edu>
Date: Nov 3, 2006 12:44 PM
Subject: Re: [Vsg] American War--civilian casualties query
Charles,
The best demographic estimate I know is:
Charles Hirschman, Samuel Preston, and Vu Manh Loi. 1995. "Vietnamese Casualties During the American War." Population and Development Review 21: 783-812.
It gives an estimate much lower than the ones historians habituallhy use.
Dear Dr. Merli:
I am an assistant professor in history at UC Irvine, specializing in early Vietnamese history. I received your name from Hung Thai at Pomona. I am writing in hopes you might be able to help me with a question I have. I am hoping to find information on the annual estimates of Vietnamese killed (civilian and military) during the American war. All the sources with which Im familiar only cite only total estimates for Vietnamese, while some cite annual stats but only for Americans.
And while I am on the subject, has there been any investigative work done on these casualty compilations? What is the most reliable authority for these estimates? The figures I find vary so wildly they should be taken as unreliable. I have some Middle Eastern and American specialist colleagues who are curious (as am I) about how the current controversies over civilian casualties compare with the American War.
Many thanks in advance for your help.
Best regards,
Charles Wheeler
From: Giovanna Merli [mailto:gmerli@ssc.wisc.edu]
Sent: Friday, November 03, 2006 2:11 PM
To: Charles Wheeler
Subject: Re: Wars in Vietnam--civilian casualties query
Charles,
I don't know where you would or could find ANNUAL estimates of Vietnamese killed during the American war. The only estimate of the total number of Vietnamese casualties for the 1965-75 decade I know is available in the paper by Charles Hirschman, Samuel Preston and Vu Manh Loi Vietnamese Casualties during the American War: A New Estimate, published in Population and Development Review. They estimated death rates due to "war related causes" by 10-year period for Vietnam's three main wars from data collected with the kin survival method, where a sample of respondents is asked information about war and non-war deaths among their kin. The reliable estimation of annual death rates during the American war would not have been possible due to the relatively small sample of deaths they had. Using the same method, in my attached paper I estimated death rates for each war period from 1954 to 1989 from data collected as part of another data collection effort using the same kin survival method in a few sites in North Vietnam. Again, I did not provide annual estimates because of sample size concerns.
In the Hirschman et al's paper you'll also find some discussion of other sources of number of casualties during the American war. But I think you can put more confidence in the results of the Hirschman study as well as mine because these studies first assessed the plausibility and reliability of non-war mortality estimates obtained with the kin survival method (as they had reliable independent ways of doing this). This is an important step towards validation of the quality of reporting as well as coverage issues.
Does this help?
M. Giovanna
From: "Charles Wheeler" <charles.wheeler@uci.edu>
To: "'Giovanna Merli'" <gmerli@ssc.wisc.edu>
Date: Fri, 3 Nov 2006 16:16:02 -0800
Subject: [Vsg] RE: Wars in Vietnam--civilian casualties query
Dear Dr. GIOVANNA (my apologies):
Yes, this helps a lot. Just knowing what we don’t or can’t know is tremendously helpful. I have been getting this question a lot since the Lancet study on Iraqi casualties, which rekindle a persistent frustration with the rather varied figures on this conflict. I suspected a lack of data on civilian casualties, and it’s a bummer to have it confirmed, but nice to be able to say what we don’t or can’t know. Thanks a bunch.
Best regards,
Charles Wheeler
From: vsg-bounces@mailman1.u.washington.edu [mailto:vsg-bounces@mailman1.u.washington.edu] On Behalf Of Charles Hirschman
Sent: Sunday, November 05, 2006 10:47 AM
To: Vietnam Studies Group; 'Giovanna Merli'
Cc: vsg@u.washington.edu
Subject: Re: [Vsg] RE: Wars in Vietnam--civilian casualties query
Charles,
Counts of wartime causalities are rarely "facts" that can be taken can taken at face value. Even ignoring the biased body counts issued by armies and their sponsors, very few counties outside of the developed world have complete vital statistics reporting of deaths even during peacetime. Demographers and epidemiologists, however, have developed rather ingenious methods of estimating mortality based on household surveys. I will not describe the methods and assumptions here (they are available in the published articles), but the main point is the methods are quite reliable though there is a wide margin of error. These studies (using a variety of methods) have been used to estimate mortality in a number of wartime societies, including Iraq, Darfur, Vietnam, Cambodia and elsewhere. In general, the results are crude estimates that can rarely be broken down by year or specific geography, but they are the best sources of information on the horrific costs of war.
Charles Hirschman
Department of Sociology, Box 353340
University of Washington
Seattle, WA 98195-3340
Tel: 206-543-5035
Email: charles@u.washington.edu
Webpage: http://faculty.washington.edu/charles/
From: "Charles Wheeler" <charles.wheeler@uci.edu>
To: "'Charles Hirschman'" <charles@u.washington.edu>, "'Vietnam Studies Group'" <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Subject: RE: [Vsg] RE: Wars in Vietnam--civilian casualties query
Date: Tue, 7 Nov 2006 16:10:24 -0800
Dear Charles, Shawn, Dan, Hung, Merli Giovanni and others who have written to me about this:
Thanks so much for your help on this matter. It helped answer some questions, and got me thinking. I am not a war historian, but find myself often pegged as the representative war "authority" because I specialize on Vietnam. I try to remind folks that Vietnam is a country and not a war, but I also feel a responsibility to keep up on this war in order to represent the Vietnamese who bore, or rather bear, the suffering it has caused.
I’ve developed this sense from the emails and conversations I’ve had about this--here on the VSG list and elsewhere--that a study of this whole business of counting the dead ought to involve a study of the qualitative as well as quantitative. I am not a demographer, but I find Charles and his cohort’s analysis pretty solid. And yet I know a number of people who are or would be very unhappy with this estimate of 1.2 million. And I think that the question on their minds is not, “how many people died?” but rather, “How many people suffered, and how much so?" I sense hidden in its subtext a cost-benefit query.
Some insist on low numbers, because low numbers help lower the perceived "quantity" of suffering to a level that dips below some imagined level of moral toleration. Others argue the number is higher, following the same logic, fearing that the public will find low-ball estimates morally acceptable.
But do the numbers change the issue at all? The 1.2 million that Hirschman and his cohort conclude is still a horrific sum when you stop to consider it against the estimated population of Vietnam in 1970 of 42 million, especially when you keep in mind that death is only one facet of a wide array of suffering in all its forms during wartime, as many have so thoughtfully pointed out to me. Wounds of unspeakable variety, environmental destruction, malnutrition, disease, social dislocation, and no doubt mental illness (something no one mentions), not to mention the horrors that still occur, from unexploded ordinance to Agent Orange defects. If 1.2 million is the figure we can come to using the most careful quantitative methods, then that's confirmation enough for me that this war’s impact was monstrous. Does it need to be higher than this to elicit grief?
This non-specialist suspects Charles and his cohort did about as well as any demographer could, and thanks for bringing this to my attention. I hope to see continued efforts at providing the qualitative works that give these numbers a palpable humanity that my students can’t escape. The work of Willem Sebold, and his essay ON THE NATURAL HISTORY OF DESTRUCTION, on the fire-bombings of Germany and their aftermath, comes to mind.
Again, thanks to everyone.
Best,
Charles
From: Marc J. Gilbert
To: Vietnam Studies Group ; Charles Hirschman
Sent: Wednesday, November 08, 2006 2:30 PM
Subject: RE: [Vsg] RE: Wars in Vietnam--civilian casualties query
During the American War, so-called solation payments were made by the US to survivors of RVN citizens killed. I do not think anyone has yet employed them in statistical surveys. Lady Borton’s After Sorrow (Viking, 1995) certainly provides some qualitative insight.
Marc