A new Pentagon study has found that - contrary to popular believe - almost as many middle- and upperclass American youths died in Vietnam as working-class ones.
"The belief that affluent citizens were conspicuously missing from the Vietnam War dead is harmful to all Americans," researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology concluded in a study conducted for the Army. "It demeans the sacrifices of the wealthy . . . and the nonwealthy."MIT scholars, who studied family incomes of all 58,000 American soldiers who died in war, found that affluent communities had only "marginally lower" casualty rates than the nation as a whole, while poorer cities and towns had just "marginally higher" ones.
In fact, the survey found, four wealthy communities - Beverly Hills, Calif.; Chevy Chase, Md.; Great Neck, N.Y.; and Belmont, Mass. - actually had casualty rates that exceeded the national average.
Reporting their findings in the journal Operations Research, MIT professor Arnold Barnett and two other scholars said the data offered "substantial evidence that, in terms of the bereavement it brought to America, Vietnam was not a class war."
The researchers added that "prestigious newspapers, magazines and Academy Award-winning movies (which) have depicted the conflict as a `class war' " have perpetrated a "great exaggeration."