Cost of War

Cost at War To attempt to measure the costs of war is to handle the quicksilver of suffering with clumsy fingers. Although much of the toll is beyond quantifying, some reckoning is possible. The Library of Congress has just completed a study for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that provides a partial accounting of Viet Nam expenditures.

Only World War II cost the U.S. more in money; Viet Nam has cost $490 for every American man, woman and child. Since major U.S. intervention began in 1965, 5.5 million tons of bombs, rockets and cannon shells have been dropped on Viet Nam, Laos and Cambodia--more than twice the total the U.S. used in World War II. Nearly one-seventh of South Viet Nam's land area has been sprayed with plant-killing herbicides. One expert estimates that defoliation has destroyed as much commercial timber as South Viet Nam uses in 31 years.

The human toll is, of course, more staggering. Through the February 1971 cutoff date of the study, 53,915 Americans died in Viet Nam--44,610 of them killed in combat--and 149,154 were wounded seriously enough to be hospitalized. The study reports that 472,013, or 2.6% of the total population of South Viet Nam, have been killed or seriously wounded while serving in South Viet Nam's armed forces. Going by the U.S. "body count" figures, the number of Viet Cong and North Vietnamese soldiers killed (714,984) equals 3.45% of the population of North Viet Nam. Civilian deaths in South Viet Nam, described in the report as "very approximate," number 325,000. According to the South Vietnamese government, 30% of the dead were children under the age of 13.

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