For anybody of my generation, the term body count possesses a reek of association that will never quite be dispelled. The hideous photographs of Vietnamese corpses laid out as if after a shooting party, the brilliant reporting by men like Kevin Buckley on bloody campaigns like Operation Speedy Express (in which the announced toll unsettlingly exceeded the number of Vietcong who were even supposed to have been alive in the first place)—all this put body count on a moral level with collateral damage to mean slaughtered civilians, a euphemistic name for a filthy business.
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