During the Vietnam Era, Hispanics veteran causalities from all the service branches, were disproportionately higher, in reference to our representation of U.S. population. The Hispanic population during this rate count, was less than 5% of the total population based the on census data for this Vietnam Era time period. This meant that one of every five deaths was a Hispanic death.
In Vietnam, from 1957-1995, Hispanics died at higher rate over 20% of the 58,178 fatalities, even though we only represented 5% of U.S. population. This equates to over 11,635 Vietnam Hispanics deaths that emotionally and financially destroyed mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, wives, children as well as the extended family of the multi-generations. A death was worth $10,000 to the government.
The number of enlisted who died were 50,312 (86.47%) and 7,878 officers (13.53%).
A breakdown of deaths by service branch is 38,196 Army (65.65%), Navy. 2,555 (4.39%), Air Force 2,583 (4.43%), Marine Corps 14,837 (25.50%), and Coast Guard 7 (.03%).
The death rates by the Department of Defense did not provide specific ethnic identification for Hispanics this time period.
The deaths were misleading by clumping all Hispanic deaths into the White Race, which led to research all deaths to confirm the real disproportional rate. This research did an individual assessment by name and state.