About 58,000 American soldiers were killed during the Vietnam War, and another 304,000 were wounded. Without a doubt, the war took a terrible toll on the United States. But since most of the fighting took place in Vietnam, the Vietnamese land and people paid a much heavier price for the war. An estimated 4 million Vietnamese were killed or wounded on both sides of the conflict, including as many as 1.3 million civilians (people not involved in the military, including women and children) in South Vietnam.
Much of the death and destruction resulted from bombing. The U.S. military used more than 14 million tons of explosives during the Vietnam War, mostly on the South Vietnamese countryside. This meant that American planes dropped more than twice as many bombs as U.S. forces had used during World War II (1939–45)—all on an area about the size of California. The U.S. military also sprayed millions of gallons of defoliants (chemical agents that killed or burned crops, forests, and other vegetation) on the South Vietnamese land during the war.
