Vietnamese Casualties During the American War, A New Estimate (Hirschman, Preston and Vu, 1995)

A peer reviewed demographic study using retrospective kin survival data from the 1991 Vietnam Life History Survey to estimate Vietnamese deaths in the war with the United States between 1965 and 1975. The study reports a most likely national total of 882,000 dead, 655,000 adult men, 143,000 adult women and 84,000 children, with a stated range of roughly 791,000 to 1,141,000 depending on sampling assumptions. Its strength is a named, reproducible survey methodology. Its limit is that a household survey sampling four regions and projected nationally carries real sampling uncertainty, and its ten year window excludes deaths before 1965 and after 1975 that other estimates count.