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For the musical group, see Body Count.

Body count refers to the total number of people killed in a particular event.

Contents 1 Military use 1.1 Vietnam War 1.2 2003 invasion of Iraq 2 Movies 3 External links

Body count figures have a long history in military planning and propaganda. The military gathers such figures for a variety of reasons, such as determining the need for continuing operations, estimating efficiency of new and old weapons systems, and planning follow-up operations.

Since the goal of the United States in the Vietnam War was not to conquer North Vietnam but rather to ensure the survival of the South Vietnamese government, measuring progress was difficult. All the contested territory was theoretically "held" already. Instead, the U.S. army used body counts to show that the U.S. was winning the war. The Army's theory was that eventually, the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese Army would lose due to attrition.

Ho Chi Minh said, in reference to the French, "You can kill ten of our men for every one we kill of yours. But even at those odds, you will lose and we will win." Most analysis of war casualties indicates that the U.S. army inflicted considerably better than a ten-to-one ratio of American deaths against Vietnamese deaths, but in spite of this, Ho Chi Minh proved correct in that the US eventually faced a humiliating defeat.

In the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the US military adopted an official policy of not counting deaths. General Tommy Franks' statement that "we don't do body counts" was widely reported. Critics claimed that Franks was only attempting to evade bad publicity, while supporters pointed to the failure of body counts to give an accurate impression of the state of the war in Vietnam. Various conflicting reports of the number of civilian deaths have surfaced. Iraq itself claims that around 12,000 deaths occurred in 2006 [1] and perhaps ~16,000 since the invasion. The United Nations has also kept track, and they report 26,782 deaths in the first ten months of 2006.[2] Several independent groups of researchers have also attempted to gather accounts of civilian deaths, with the most widely circulated project based on Google rank being the Iraq Body Count project. As of the beginning of 2007, they estimate between 52613 and 58199 civilian deaths since the occupation. The highest estimate at this time comes from a survey by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, which has estimated 600,000 Iraqi deaths due to the war.

At the end of October 2005 it became public that the US military had been counting Iraqi fatalitites since January 2004, though only those killed by insurgents and not those killed by the US forces [3] [4].

In censorship, "Body count" has been used as a criterion to judge the 'shock value' of a movie, and hence its suitability for younger viewers. It is usually calculated by the number of deaths or bodies shown on-screen. This has led some directors to imply deaths instead of showing them, for example showing a group of unarmed people facing a villain, then cutting to the villain firing a gun and grinning. The victims' bodies are never shown, but the viewer will understand that they were brutally murdered. However, it can be argued that the suffering and the pain of victims should be shown in order to demonstrate that violence is bad – only showing the perpetrators fulfilling their act of violence, even with them showing their joy, could lead people to the assumption that violence is joyful and painless.

• Movie Body Counts