Vietnam as a class war: Myth or reality?

This article reports an extension of the analyses of the fatalities in the Vietnam War presented by Barnett, Stanley, and Shore (1992) as printed in the September‐October 1992 Operations Research. The additional analyses involved an examination of results by Barnett et al. in numeric as well as percentage form and a consideration of how the revised analyses generalize to the population of all American fatalities in Vietnam. These analyses yielded a different conclusion about the role of economic class in the fatalities in the Vietnam War than those drawn by Barnett et al. They suggested that the term class war was not supported by their data analyses. Our analyses indicate that their conclusion is incorrect. The lower class sacrificed considerably more lives than the upper class.