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 pr inted in the September-October 1992 Operations Research. The additiona l analyses involved an examination of results by Barnett et al. in num eric as well as percentage form and a consideration of how the revised analyses generalize to the population of all American fatalities in V ietnam. These analyses yielded a different conclusion about the role o f economic class the fatalities in the Vietnam War than those drawn by Barnett et al. They suggested that the term class war was not support ed by their data analyses. Our analyses indicate that their conclusion is incorrect. The lower class sacrificed considerably more lives than the upper class.