Records About the Ground Combat Operations by the Army During the Vietnam Conflict

Records of specific combat operations are categorized into one of three types: 1) large unit operations or named operations involving three or more companies; 2) small unit actions involving less than three companies but not less than a fire team (generally, the lowest level infantry unit); and 3) enemy initiated acts against friendly personnel or property. Records that contain summary information are of two types: 1) weekly statistical summaries, and 2) weekly summaries of small unit actions.

Specific combat operations and statistical summaries from specific weeks may have more than one record. If the operation or weekly summary has more than one record, then data in the first five fields (message date, data type, par agraph number, military region, and part) repeat in each related record. The series general notes contain further information about the database structure.Records of specific combat operations include information on the type of military operation, nationalities of the armed forces involved, the province in which the operation took place, and the starting and ending times and dates of the operation.

Additional information includes the Universal Transverse Mercator (UTM) grid coordinates and mission objective data (e.g., military sites, geographical features, structures, personnel, equipment and supplies); the number and size of the units involved; the identification of battalions, brigades/regiments, and divisions; and the personnel and property losses suffered by both enemy and friendly forces. Operations categorized as large unit operations also include the name of the operation; additional provinces in which the operation took place; "battalion days" calculated from the number of days of operation and the total number of battalions involved; the number of days in which friendly forces were in contact with enemy forces; and the number of air missions, including type of aircraft, and naval missions supporting the operation, if applicable.Weekly statistical summaries of combat operations include the time period, the total number of enemy attacks, enemy terrorist incidents, enemy sabotage incidents, enemy propaganda incidents, enemy harassment incidents, anti-aircraft incidents, and the Republic of Vietnam (RVN) Corp Area in which the incidents occurred.

Other statistics include the ratios of friendly weapons lost and casualties versus enemy weapons lost and personnel killed, manpower statistics for regular, regional, and popular RVN armed forces, and total personnel losses in the four RVN Corp Areas. Records that focus specifically on weekly summaries of small unit actions include the number of actions, size of the units involved in the actions, identity of the forces involved, the number of actions which result in either contact with the enemy or daytime contact with the enemy, and the number of actions which resulted in either no contact with the enemy or night-time contact with the enemy.

The Data Processing Division acquired this series from the National Military Command System Support Center in approximately 1970. This data comprises government records extracted from the Archival Research Catalog (ARC). See the ARC catalog entry for this series for more information on this data and how to order it.