Maybe a more “honest” way to assess fatality numbers from the two was would be to look at the average fatalities per day for the entire course of each war. This way no one can accuse you of comparing apples and oranges by comparing vastly different phases of the wars with each other.

Here are the numbers that I calculated:

Vietnam War:
Length: 2,800 days
Deaths: 58,226
Deaths per day: 20.795

Iraq War:
Length: 1,100 days
Deaths: 2,302
Deaths per day: 2.093

There were 10 times more deaths per day, on average, in the Vietnam War than in the Iraq war. I agree that this doesn’t by any means imply that the Vietnam war was somehow “worse” but I think it does give a feel for the the difference in magnitude between the numbers of lives lost in the two conflicts.

The length of each war in the above data is based on the duration of major combat operations (August 1965 to March 1973 for Vietnam, March 2003 to Present for Iraq). Even if the end of “major combat operations” for Iraq is considered to be the infamous “Mission Accomplished” day there is still a huge disparity between both wars:

Iraq War (up to “mission accomplished”):
Length: 42 days (3/19/03 to 5/1/03)
Deaths: 137
Deaths per day: 3.262

Still many times more lives were lost each day, on average, in Vietnam than during the phase of the Iraq war in which most of the intense fighting occurred.

This is just another way of looking at the figures.

You said, “The number of wounded in Viet Nam was about equal to the number of deaths.”

I’m not sure what you mean, and maybe I’m misinterpreting you statement, but in Vietman there were over 58,000 deaths and over 300,000 wounded.

Despite the fact that there were more troops in Vietnam at the time, a more comparable period would be between 1965 - 1968 and 2003 -2005.