Vietnamese dead
About 1.3-3.8 million, scholarly range -- the centre of the ledger.
Vietnamese civilian and military deaths dominate any honest ledger. The wide 1.3-3.8 million band reflects poor records and politics of counting.
US wounded, PTSD recognition (a later medical-political story), and Australian/ROK losses sit beside that larger number -- not instead of it.
Bands
US dead
About 58,000; wounded far higher.
Allied dead
ROK about 5,000; Australia 521; others smaller.
Laos/Cambodia
Bombing and later genocide (Cambodia) as connected regional costs.
Diaspora
Hundreds of thousands of boat people; a demographic cost and a new overseas Vietnam.
Regions
North Vietnam
Bombing, mobilisation, and a party-state at war.
South Vietnam
The political prize; uneven control even at US peak.
Laos
Trail and the "secret war" -- among the most bombed places per capita.
Cambodia
Sihanouk, Lon Nol, US incursion, then Khmer Rouge catastrophe.
United States
Draft, campuses, and a veterans' crisis that recast civil-military trust.
ROK / Australia
Allied societies with their own casualty lists and later debates.
Key numbers
US combat peak1965-1973
US deathsabout 58,000
Vietnamese deathsabout 1.3-3.8 million
Saigon falls30 Apr 1975
Makers
US defence industry
Helicopters, fighters, and a procurement boom -- historical political economy.
Hanoi's suppliers
Soviet and Chinese aid as the PAVN's industrial rear.
ARVN dependence
A force designed around US spare parts and munitions.
Press corps
Saigon bureaus as a de facto institution of the war.
Veterans' medicine
VA and later PTSD frameworks -- an after-war industry of care.
UXO clearance NGOs
A decades-long cleanup sector in the three states.
Dioxin contamination and UXO are decades-long costs in the central provinces and along the trail.
The refugee diaspora remade California, Sydney and Toronto as much as it emptied southern cities.