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Originally Posted by lookout123
Actually, most of the senior military leadership were NCO's and Jr Officers in Viet Nam - the war of the body count. They saw firsthand what happens when body counts are a priority. body counts make the headlines, then they take on a life of their own. at some points in the war there were body count expectations, so patrols would go out, pop off their loads and because it was impossible to accurately count the dead in the jungle - they applied a simple formula - X number of rounds multiplied by XX% = # of dead enemies.
as young men they saw the foolishness of such methods and refused to allow it under their command, first in Desert Storm, then Afghanistan, then Iraq.
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Minor point: The Vietnam body count was about enemy combatants. The controversy in this case is about civilian ones. I don't think our boys would go shoot off rounds in the streets of Baghdad to inflate the counts.
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Macavity, Macavity, there's no on like Macavity,
He's broken every human law, he breaks the law of gravity. - T.S. Eliot, Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats
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