This is Jocco podcast number 218 with Echo Charles and me,

Jocco Willink. Good evening, Echo. Good evening.

In the Marine Corps in Vietnam, first and second lieutenants made up about 65%

of the Marine officers killed in action. Now if you add captains, Marine Corps

captains, O3s onto that, you get to about 85% of all marine officers killed in

Vietnam were in these relatively junior ranking officers. These were the

POTUNE and company commanders. And if you go to 1968, 1968 was the year with

the highest number of Americans killed in action in Vietnam. 16,899.

That's over 1400 per month. 1400 per month killed in action. Now to put that

in perspective a little bit during the heaviest fighting when I was in Iraq,

which was in 2006, there was 823 Americans killed. Now obviously every single

loss is a tragedy. But during the Vietnam War, the tragedy was 20X.

That number 20X more people killed in 1968 in Vietnam than there were in Iraq in

2006. That is just a it's just a different level. Now in total in Vietnam,

there were 14,836 Marines killed. 1387 of those were officers. So that's

basically 10% of the Marines killed were officers and as I already said, 85% of

more of these junior officers. Now if you just run that mouth out a little bit,

there's generally around going to be one officer in an infantry pituit.

There's going to be around 40 guys, which means that these officers make up for

about 2.5% of Marines. And then again, just by my estimation, just some rough

math, that means that these young Marine officers were about four times more

likely to be killed than the enlisted guys. And you if you think about that,

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