4 - The Black Vault

THE BDM CORPORATION
Ron Bartek, USMA 66, CPT, S2, 25th Infantry Division
"LTG Fwell ordered body count quotas for battalions
and said that this pressure caused officers to
inflate them and dehumanize the troops."
"Mr. Michael O'Meara, CPT, S-3, 25th Infantry Division
1969 ".. 'body count mania" caused grossly inflated
figures to be reported and cauzdd commanders to needlessly
seek contact with the enemy in order to achieve
a body count."
An equivalent phenomenon deflated American losses. Michael Herr notes
in Despatches (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977), p. 95:
The very best of our divisions, the Ist Air Cavalry,
was blooded in the Ia Drang that autumn, and while the
official number of dead was relkased at around 300, I
never met anyone who had been there, including officers
of the Cavalry, who would settle for less than three or
even four times that figure.
Jerry Samuels of the 65th Engr. Bn. 25th Infpntry Division (1969)
recalls:
They don't differentiate between VC or civiliavs. When
those body counts come in-like I tay, I was radio
operator and I had to call in, body counts-those body
counts come in and everybody who was killed in a
village, civilian, or otherwise, is VC body count.
Men, wcmen, and children, tne whole bit. If there's aR
airstrike on a village and it's wiped out, if three
hundred people lived in the village, it's VC body
count. If there's, say, a U.S. patrol out, a comnpany
patrol, and they make contact with two snipers and they
end up blowing away the whule village, it's written up
in the Stars and Stripes as an engagement between a
three hundred-man VC outfit and an American company
with maybe one U.S. wounded and three hundred "enemy"
dead.
In Roger Neville Williams, The New Exiles (New York: Liveright Publishars,
1971), p. 277.
Senator Frank Church entered another example from an anonymous source
into the Congressional Record:
They said my battalion (250 men) killed or captured 175
Viet Cong. However, I have seen only two bodies and
about eight prisoners in all of our actions. Even
accounting for the ones dragged away after they're dead
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