With Americans souring on the war in Iraq, the U.S. military has started talking up the number of insurgents killed. Are we headed down the same corrupting road we did in Vietnam?
The body counts are back. For the first time since Vietnam, the U.S. military has begun regularly reporting the number of enemy killed in the war zone -- in contradiction, apparently, to prior statements by its own top brass.
"Marines Kill 100 Fighters in Sanctuary Near Syria" was a front page headline in the Washington Post last month. The body count, coming from a Marine spokesman, was carried in other major papers that day. What was striking about the factoid, besides the elegantly even number, was that it showed how the U.S. military has increasingly released body counts in reports depicting successful operations in Iraq -- despite decrees from the highest levels of the Pentagon, throughout the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, that "we don't do body counts."
As the bloody insurgency continues in Iraq, the U.S.-led counterinsurgency campaign is yielding frustratingly few tangible ways to show progress to the American people. If anything, the insurgency seems firmly entrenched, from reports of its air-conditioned underground bunkers to its own Ho Chi Minh trail. Counting enemy bodies at least offers a number to grab on to, some sense of incremental victory.
In at least one case in Vietnam, gauging success by body count contributed to unthinkable acts. In a series that won a 2004 Pulitzer Prize, the Toledo (Ohio) Blade exposed atrocities committed by U.S. troops in the central highlands of South Vietnam in 1967, including an Army platoon known as Tiger Force. Soldiers who fought there said some atrocities were driven by the pressure to achieve a high body count. In once instance, soldiers from the 1st Battalion, 327th Infantry were reportedly told to get 327 bodies to match the unit's moniker. Soldiers told the Blade they got the body count, in part, by killing civilians.
"When we were fighting in enemy areas, about five civilians were killed for every enemy soldier we got," Dennis Stout, a former paratrooper with the 327th, told Salon in a phone interview. "The problem is that in Iraq we are in a guerrilla war. How do you keep score? How do you prove you are wining?" asked Stout, 60, who is retired from the military and now lives in Phoenix. "There is an extreme temptation to use body counts," he said. "Once you go to body count, anyone who is dead is an enemy. It will creep into everything and the perversions will multiply with reporting actual battlefield conditions and the actions of our troops," he said. "Only terrible things can come from it."
