Weird.

My wife ran across a PBS Newshour article from 2019 claiming 90,220 American servicemen and women died in the Vietnam War.

I’m not sure where they got that number. They claim their sources are the Department of Defense and the Department of Veterans Affairs.

The actual number from the Department of Defense is 58,220.

I’ve been to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington. There aren’t ninety thousand names on the wall.

The Vietnam Conflict Extract Data File of the Defense Casualty Analysis System (DCAS) Extract Files contains records of 58,220 U.S. military fatal casualties of the Vietnam War. These records were transferred into the custody of the National Archives and Records Administration in 2008. The earliest casualty record contains a date of death of June 8, 1956, and the most recent casualty record contains a date of death of May 28, 2006. The Defense Casualty Analysis System Extract Files were created by the Defense Manpower Data Center (DMDC) of the Office of the Secretary of Defense.

(National Archives, more at the link)

archives.gov