Historians point out that the military has strong reason to avoid body counts: Vietnam. Traditionally, the Army's job is to take ground and hold it, a clear way to mark victory or defeat. Bogged down in atypical warfare with no tangible measure of progress, U.S. commanders in Vietnam used the body count to show the alleged destruction of enemy forces. "To make the obvious comparison, you land in Normandy in June 1944 and you can liberate Paris in August and show that you are making progress," says historian and journalist Stanley Karnow. "You can make a measure of progress in a conventional war by showing you are pushing your front lines against the enemy. But in Vietnam, there were no front lines."

Gen. William C. Westmoreland, the man in charge of U.S. operations in Vietnam, used an increasing body count to suggest that victory might be close at hand in 1967 and 1968. But the 1968 Tet offensive proved him wrong. "Really what turned the war was when Westmoreland came back and said, 'We have killed all the enemy,'" says Bobby Muller, president of the Vietnam Veterans of American Foundation. "That is what set the stage for the 'credibility gap' when the Tet offensive broke out. It put the final lie to all these bogus representations."

It started to become clear during Vietnam that commanders anxious to show progress were hopelessly inflating body counts. Some were outright lies. Others included civilians as fallen enemy troops. "The body count was extremely unreliable because any body picked up on the field was considered the enemy," Karnow says. "It was irrelevant to win all these battles because we were up against an enemy that was willing to take unlimited losses." In Iraq today, U.S. officials have acknowledged that steady streams of foreign jihadists have been entering the war zone from neighboring countries -- fighters who are willing to blow themselves up in suicide attacks.

In at least one case in Vietnam, gauging success by body count contributed to unthinkable acts. In a series that won a 2004 Pulitzer Prize, the Toledo (Ohio) Blade exposed atrocities committed by U.S. troops in the central highlands of South Vietnam in 1967, including an Army platoon known as Tiger Force. Soldiers who fought there said some atrocities were driven by the pressure to achieve a high body count. In once instance, soldiers from the 1st Battalion, 327th Infantry were reportedly told to get 327 bodies to match the unit's moniker. Soldiers told the Blade they got the body count, in part, by killing civilians.

"When we were fighting in enemy areas, about five civilians were killed for every enemy soldier we got," Dennis Stout, a former paratrooper with the 327th, told Salon in a phone interview. "The problem is that in Iraq we are in a guerrilla war. How do you keep score? How do you prove you are wining?" asked Stout, 60, who is retired from the military and now lives in Phoenix. "There is an extreme temptation to use body counts," he said. "Once you go to body count, anyone who is dead is an enemy. It will creep into everything and the perversions will multiply with reporting actual battlefield conditions and the actions of our troops," he said. "Only terrible things can come from it."

In his 1992 autobiography, "It Doesn't Take a Hero," retired Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf strongly agreed with that view. When his superiors asked for a body count during the invasion of Grenada in 1983, he responded, "We need to stay away from this body count business. It caused us terrible trouble in Vietnam and it will cause us terrible trouble here." Regarding his experience in Vietnam and the body counts used then, Schwarzkopf wrote, "I felt like I'd been a party to a bureaucratic sham." Body counts were not used during the first Gulf War, when U.S. forces were under Schwarzkopf's command.

Besides the mysterious lack of bodies following the battle for Fallujah, at least one other recent body count story from Iraq got the military into an awkward position regarding the numbers. U.S. news outlets in March picked up a story about a joint operation by U.S. and Iraqi forces against a suspected guerrilla training camp near Lake Tharthar in central Iraq, 50 miles northwest of Baghdad. Headlines in the United States announced that 85 insurgents had been killed. MSNBC.com called it "the single biggest one-day death toll for militants in months, and the latest in a series of blows to the insurgency." In this case, the body count came via Iraqi officials and appeared to have originated from the Iraqis, not the Americans. According to the Washington Post, a spokesman for the Army's 42nd Infantry Division, Maj. Richard L. Goldenberg, confirmed the target was a training camp that appeared to contain foreign fighters. He did not provide a body count when he discussed the operation with reporters, though he did say that U.S. pilots flying above the fray had estimated there were 80 to 100 insurgents on the ground during the fighting.

But an Agence France-Presse reporter visited the battle scene the next day and reported 30 to 40 insurgents still there; they said 11 insurgents had been killed in the battle the day before.

U.S. officials later said that the insurgents must have dragged away their dead. That prompted a Washington Post reporter to wonder how 80 dead insurgents could drag away their own bodies. "I would tell you that somewhere between 11 and 80 lies an accurate number," Goldenberg told the Post. "We could spend years going back and forth on body counts," he said. "The important thing is the effect this has on the organized insurgency."

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