The Federal Casualty File Lists 226 Vietnam War Dead From New Hampshire. More Than Two in Five Were 20 or Younger.

Independent New Hampshire Journalism · Northfield, NH

The National Archives’ copy of the Defense Department file puts New Hampshire’s losses at 30.6 for every 100,000 residents counted in the 1970 census, above the figure for the states as a whole. Sixty-two died in 1968. Five National Guard noncommissioned officers from New Hampshire share a single date in August 1969.

The Defense Department’s casualty file for the Vietnam War holds 58,220 records of U.S. military members who died in the conflict. For 226 of them, the home state of record is New Hampshire. The first of those deaths is dated June 13, 1962, and the last Dec. 27, 1972. One hundred of the 226 were 20 or younger when they died.

The file is the Vietnam Conflict Extract Data File of the Defense Casualty Analysis System, a snapshot dated April 29, 2008. The Defense Manpower Data Center, in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, created it, and the records were transferred to the National Archives that year. The Archives publishes summary tables from it, including a count by home state, and offers the full file for download. Granite State Report downloaded the file, reproduced the Archives’ published national tables from it count for count, and then counted the New Hampshire records by year, age, branch, cause and hometown. The Archives labels its tables “for informational purposes only, not official statistics,” and the same caution applies to the counts here.

The years of heaviest loss

New Hampshire’s deaths follow the national curve. The file lists one New Hampshire death in 1962 and none in 1963 or 1964. Seven came in 1965, the year the national count rose from 216 to 1,928. From 1966 through 1969 the file lists 186 New Hampshire deaths, 82 percent of the state’s total. The single worst year was 1968, with 62, the same year that was worst nationally, when 16,899 died.

Measured against the population

A raw count favors big states, so Granite State Report set each state’s count against its population in the 1970 census. That is a rough yardstick: it divides deaths among all residents, not among the much smaller number who served. By that measure New Hampshire’s 226 deaths come to 30.6 for every 100,000 residents. For the 50 states and the District of Columbia together, the file’s 57,662 deaths with those homes of record come to 28.4. New Hampshire ranks 21st of the 51. In New England, only Maine’s figure was higher.

Young, enlisted and mostly Army

Granite State Report computed each person’s age from the birth date and the incident or death date in the file. The youngest New Hampshire service member was 18; the oldest, 52. The median was 21. Seventeen were 18, 34 were 19 and 49 were 20, a combined 100, or 44 percent. Across the whole file the share 20 or younger is also 44 percent.

Most were in the four lowest enlisted pay grades. Of the 226, 183 were enlisted, 32 were commissioned officers and 11 were warrant officers. Those grades, E-1 through E-4, account for 138. One hundred fifty had never married, and 76 were married.

The Army lost 133 New Hampshire service members, the Marine Corps 70, the Air Force 14 and the Navy nine. The Marines’ share of New Hampshire’s dead, 31 percent, is larger than their share of the national total, about 26 percent.

The file also records each person’s service component. For New Hampshire it codes 154 as regular, 34 as “Selected Service,” 32 as reserve and six as National Guard. Nationally, “Selected Service” accounts for 17,671 records, about 30 percent; in New Hampshire it accounts for 15 percent. The code table that accompanies the file lists the term without defining it, so Granite State Report does not treat it as an exact count of any group.

How they died

The file classes 180 of the New Hampshire deaths as hostile and 46 as non-hostile. Of the hostile deaths, 146 were killed in action, 28 died of wounds, and six were declared dead. The non-hostile deaths were 41 accidents and five illnesses. The hostile share, 80 percent, is close to the national 81 percent.

The most common cause the file records is small arms fire, for 58 deaths. Grenades account for 33, explosive devices 29, and artillery, mortar or rocket fire 19. Helicopter crashes account for 24 (17 crew, seven passengers), and fixed-wing aircraft crashes 14 (10 crew, four passengers). The file gives the cause as unknown for 20. Two hundred sixteen of the deaths are placed in South Vietnam, five in North Vietnam, four in Laos and one in Cambodia.

One day in August 1969

Six of the 226 are coded as National Guard. All six served in the 3rd Battalion, 197th Artillery, according to the unit field in the file. One, a sergeant first class, died of an infectious disease on Feb. 26, 1969. The other five, three sergeants, a staff sergeant and a sergeant first class in the battalion’s Battery A, share an incident date of Aug. 26, 1969, and the file records each as killed in action by a grenade. Those five are the largest number of New Hampshire deaths the file assigns to any single date.

Across the whole file, 97 records are coded National Guard. New Hampshire’s six are tied with California for the fifth-most of any state, behind Kansas, Hawaii, Iowa and Kentucky.

Where they came from

Every one of New Hampshire’s 10 counties appears in the file. Hillsborough County accounts for 72 of the 226, followed by Rockingham with 43, Merrimack 26, Strafford 21, Cheshire 18, Grafton 12, Coös 11, Belknap 10, Sullivan nine and Carroll four. By the city field, Manchester has 38, Nashua 18, Concord 13, Dover 11, Portsmouth 10 and Laconia eight.

What the count can and cannot show

The state in this file is the home of record, the state the service listed for each member. It is not always where a person was born or grew up, and a state memorial or a town roll may use different rules and arrive at a different number. The file’s year comes from its “incident or death date,” which the Archives says is either the actual date of death or the date of the incident. The Archives also notes that the file holds 27 more records than an older casualty file it replaced, and that its tables are informational, not official statistics.

The figures per resident use the 1970 census because it is the census closest to the war’s deadliest years, 1966 through 1969. They describe how heavily each state’s losses fell on its population, not how likely any one person in uniform was to die.

Granite State Report’s look at the state’s living veterans, drawn from Census Bureau surveys, is “Census Surveys Put New Hampshire’s Veterans at 114,826 in 2010 and 81,535 in 2024. More Than Half Were 65 or Older.”

— Granite State Report

Fact check

Editor’s note. Casualty counts, dates, ages, branches, components, causes, units and hometowns are drawn from the Defense Casualty Analysis System’s Vietnam Conflict Extract Data File, as of April 29, 2008, published by the National Archives under identifier 2240992, with its accompanying documentation and code tables, and checked against the Archives’ Vietnam War U.S. Military Fatal Casualty Statistics page. State populations are from the U.S. Census Bureau’s historical apportionment data for 1970. Counts, ages, shares and rates are Granite State Report arithmetic from those sources.

Corrections: Granite State Report corrects verified errors promptly and appends a dated note identifying what changed and when. The corrections policy and the corrections register are public, and correction notes are never removed.