> Wow, the official line is more like 2,000 wounded. What accounts for
> the discrepancy?
According to the New York Times article on Sunday:
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/16/national/16WOUN.html
More than 6,800 have been evacuated from Iraq for medical reasons,
including disease and "nonbattle injuries," the Army said.
This implies that the difference is that the 2000 are wounded and the rest of the 6800 (or 7500) are sick or injured but not wounded. Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that all the hospitals in Iraq suck thanks to sanctions and looting.
At any rate, the military is giving out the higher totals, not hiding them; that's where both articles got them. Of course the military could be counting as "nonbattle injuries" things the rest of us would call battle injuries, but that would be a different game of three card monte.
But while we're on the subject, both articles contain an implicit statistic that's beginning to bug me in the in the opposite direction. Dwayne's LAT article says
Since April, when the first casualties began arriving, more than 1,875
have been treated at Walter Reed . . . in the 1991 Persian Gulf War,
just 10 amputees were treated at Walter Reed compared with the 50 in
this war.
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/iraq/la-na-wounded9nov09,1,963909.story or http://www.veteransforcommonsense.org/newsArticle.asp?id=1275
The New York Times article uses similar but slightly higher figures:
By Friday, the Defense Department said, 1,994 had been wounded in
action, with 342 more injured . . . Already, 58 amputees have been
treated at Walter Reed
Both articles give the impression that all amputees eventually end up at Walter Reed because of its state-of-the-art amputee center.
But these figures don't seem to support the argument (which both of these articles make, and which seems to make sense on its face) that body armor paradoxically leads to more amputations because now more people live who earlier would have died. 60 amputations out of 2000 wounded is 3%. On the face of it, that doesn't seem to support the idea that body armor leads to an enormous percentage of seriously wounded among the wounded.
I'm fond of that argument, but this doesn't seem to support it. Unless the numbers are wrong somehow, of course.
Michael