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Originally Posted by jviehe
Can you quote me some numbers to back that up? How many civilians were killed in US bombing. How many were killed after the war?
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Wiki has a decent article in Vietnam War deaths in general, Vietnamese and American.
Vietnam War casualties - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The important figure is for total war dead, but I'll isolate bombing dead in a moment.
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Because it was the country most devastated by the war, South Vietnam suffered the bulk of the estimated 500,000[9] to 2,000,000[10] civilian deaths sustained by the entire Vietnamese population during the conflict; out of a possible median of 1,200,000 dead for the whole country,[11] considering the above figures for North Vietnamese losses, in South Vietnam itself about one million civilians likely died.
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And for Operation Rolling Thunder in the north:
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According to the Vietnamese government, 1,100,000 North Vietnamese Army and National Front for the Liberation of Vietnam military personnel died in the conflict.[1] (Technically, some of these dead were South Vietnamese members of the NLF, but it would be impossible to separate their constituency from the total.) Estimates of civilian deaths caused by American bombing in Operation Rolling Thunder range from 52,000[2] to 182,000.[3] Complete statistics for the 1972 bombings are unavailable. Overall figures for North Vietnamese civilian dead range from 50,000[4] to "hundreds of thousands."
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The Pentagon estimates 15,000 civilians killed, and a total of 171,500 killed in the "Cease-Fire War" that resulted in the final victory of Hanoi. I've found estimates of 65,000 Vietnamese executed for political reasons after the war, I'm not sure how accurate those are. I cannot find a good toll of accidental deaths of "boat people," nor of deaths in reeducation camps (that the death toll in those camps was not high, is generally agreed, and all of the prisoners were released in 1978, so that they spent a maximum of 3 years). The term "the killing fields" refers to Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, not to Vietnam; the Khmer Rouge were so awful that Vietnam actually invaded the country in 1978 to topple them.
Including the civilian war casualties and the executions, and fudging upward a bit for those unaccounted for, I think an estimated 100,000 civilian deaths would not be unreasonable, almost all of them in the first few years after the war ended.