Vietnam had it's body counts...
Up to now, we had resisted that temptation in this war.
Keeping score is an obsession peculiar to the bureaucratic mind, and a way of justifying the unquantifiable with the alleged objectivity of statistics. Keeping track of things mathematically is valid in the hard sciences, but in the social sciences its utility is easily perverted (even by the most scrupulously honest of bean-counters) by subjective interpretation of the results, or by unconscious bias when gathering the data. Garbage in, garbage out.