This means that the US spent approximately 2.6 million man years in Vietnam.
There were 58k US soldier deaths with 2.4k more MIAs and 114 POWs who died in captivity. Let us round off and say 60k deaths.
60k/2.6M = .0231 deaths per man year.
Now let us overestimate on all counts in order to try and make the Iraqi war look remotely as dangerous as Vietnam. Let us say we have had an average of 200,000 troops for 4 months. This would be 67k man years.
150/67k = .0022
It looks to me as though Vietnam was at least 10 times more dangerous than Iraq.
Moreover, when quoting an argument I used earlier, the life table in the Actuarial Math Book (Ver. 2 - pg 60) says that in 1979, the mortality rate for a 20yo was .00120
So it seems to me that being a soldier in Iraq is less than twice as dangerous as not being a soldier, and more than ten times as dangerous as being a soldier in Vietnam.
