Therefore that number is bullshit.
So indirect deaths don't matter?
Of course they matter. They're just impossible to quantify in terms of causality and it is unfair and spurious to assign blame to indirect deaths to the actions of one government or another. That, at least, is the reason you refuse to attribute indirect civilian deaths of Palestinians to Israelis, or the massive death toll in Iraq to the U.S. invasion, or the 300,000ish serious cancer cases and resulting deaths in Vietnam to the U.S. use of agent orange.
I dig an impassible mote around your house and I'm not responsible for your starvation?
That depends. Are you Israeli?
Honest statistics. Your number is too high and less than half of that number is civilian.
Nope. If you include combatants on both sides, the number goes up to 3.2 million.
Check your numbers. You're taking the total and assuming it's civilian and then adding the military yet again.
Nope. My original figure was the widely accepted estimate excluding combatants. That includes regular soldiers of the NVA, ARVN soldiers, Vietcong militants and those executed by both sides as spies and/or saboteurs (and excluding U.S. military and civilian casualties). That figure is about 1.5 million dead over the course of ten years. This is kind of to be expected when you drop 2.5 million tons of explosives on a 40 million people in a country the size of Montana.
Put another way: not counting the deaths caused by direct fire gun battles, it's the equivalent -- in terms of raw explosive firepower -- of hitting the East Coast of the United States with six randomly targeted thermonuclear warheads.
There was a time not too long ago when the United States was PLEASED with itself for killing so few civilians. Under the circumstances, that's probably fair. But to claim the civilian death toll never exceeded tripple digits?
That's just bullshit.
You realize most of those bombs were aimed at troops hiding in trees or suspected troops hiding in trees
BULLSHIT.
Most of those bombs were aimed at BUILDINGS AND INFRASTRUCTURE that supported the north, the majority of which was run by civilians. This means power plants, truck parks, factors, quarries, mills, warehouses, oil fields, etc.
Heavy bombs -- especially in the 1960s -- were deployed from attack aircraft like the A-6 intruder or the B-52, at a time when precision guidance was FAR from reliable and actionable intelligence on targets was hard to verify and even harder to communicate to central command groups. On top of that, Vietnam had some of craziest air defenses in the history of mankind; flak thick enough that you could walk on and missile batteries fucking EVERYWHERE. Close air support against "troops hiding in trees" came in the form of helicopter support or small, agile aircraft like the A-1 skyraider. The A-6s, A-7s, F-111s and F-14s were NOT being sent to bomb "soldiers hiding in trees" just because it was way too dangerous and time consuming to sortie heavy aircraft through the Seventh Circle of Aviation Hell that WAS the skies over Vietnam just to hit a bunch of rice pickers in the jungle who may or may not even be there when the strike rolls in. No, those heavy aircraft and bombing raids were hitting priority and strategic targets, the majority of which were in CITIES.
And no, they were NOT using the cute "Target designated by a spotter, let's drop a single bomb on him from high altitude and then wring our hands over collateral damage that we're going to blame on the enemy anyway" bullshit tactic. That's the PR tactic from a generation or two LATER, after the Gulf War. Vietnam era bombing missions RARELY involved fewer than a half dozen aircraft, and it was even more rare for a single aircraft to release less than half of its full load at a single target.
The closest they had to "precision strikes" were the Wild Weasel missions, in which fighter pilots would would basically joust with SAM batteries; you see me, you paint me with your radar, I fire an anti-radiation missile at you; you kill your radar, my missile looses lock, you light up your radar and shoot one back at me; I jam your radar, dodge your missile, fire another ARM; you kill your radar, wait for my missile to loose lock; round and round we go. Two of my great uncles were shot down doing this, one was killed, another came back with stories he doesn't like to tell. The one thing he DID tell me -- and was never shy about -- was that the bombers he was protecting blasted whole neighborhoods into parking lots. Deliberately. Repeatedly, in some cases.
