Working

by Robert A. Caro

There were 23,000 American troops in Vietnam when Lyndon Johnson took office. By the end of 1965, there would be 184,000 there. By the end of his presidency, there would be 586,000 there. There were before the war ended 58,000 American dead, and that’s the figure you keep hearing when people talk, 58,000 dead. But what of the others? The number of seriously wounded, defined as seriously wounded Americans, was 288,000. Blinded, for instance, amputations, for instance, young men waking up in a hospital and looking down at the place where their legs used to be. Plus the Vietnamese dead. I’ve been trying for years to get accurate figures on that: the South Vietnamese civilians, South Vietnamese soldiers, North Vietnamese civilians, North Vietnamese soldiers, who died in that war. I don’t yet have figures that I regard as reliable, but I’m going to get them. I can say now that the number is more than two million. We dropped more bombs on Vietnam than we dropped on Germany in all of World War II. And we dropped some of them on little villages, where the B-52s that were bombing them flew so high that not only were they invisible, but you couldn’t hear them from the ground, so these villages never knew they were being bombed until the bombs actually hit.