Reports about the end of the war in Iraq routinely describe the toll on the U.S. military the way the Pentagon does: 4,487 dead, and 32,226 wounded.
The
death count is accurate. But the wounded figure wildly understates the
number of American service members who have come back from Iraq less
than whole.
The true
number of military personnel injured over the course of our
nine-year-long fiasco in Iraq is in the hundreds of thousands -- maybe
even more than half a million -- if you take into account all the men
and women who returned from their deployments with traumatic brain
injuries, post-traumatic stress, depression, hearing loss, breathing
disorders, diseases, and other long-term health problems.
We don't have anything close to an exact number, however, because nobody's been keeping track.
The much-cited Defense Department figure comes from its tally of "wounded in action"
-- a narrowly-tailored category that only includes casualties during
combat operations who have "incurred an injury due to an external agent
or cause." That generally means they needed immediate medical treatment
after having been shot or blown up. Explicitly excluded from that
category are "injuries or death due to the elements, self-inflicted
wounds, combat fatigue" -- along with cumulative psychological and
physiological strain or many of the other wounds, maladies and losses
that are most common among Iraq veterans.
The "wounded in action" category is relatively consistent, historically, so it's still useful as a point of comparison to previous wars.
But there is no central repository of data regarding these other,
sometimes grievous, harms. We just have a few data points here and there
that indicate the magnitude.
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