> Several months ago I posted a Veterans For Commonsense article which
> stated that, as of the time of writing, 7,500 American soldiers had been
> evacuated from Iraq due to serious injury or illness.
> Yesterday, a report from NPR's Daniel Zwerdling on the difficulty of
> getting firm information about the wounded quoted an Army spokesman as
> saying that approximately 9,000 GIs have been evacuated as of December,
> 2003.
>
> So we now know that a huge number of GIs have left the field, many of
> whom are surely permanently disabled, disfigured or otherwise damaged
> for life.
I'm not sure about this, Dwayne. I used to be big on this story, but it doesn't seem to check out like it ought to.
To start with, it seems that for every GI evacuated for being wounded, 5 are evacuated for reasons of illness. I'm still not positive why this is be the case, but there seems a fair amount of confirmation that it is the case.
That pretty much accounts for the size of the 9,000 figure: 1500 wounded, and 7500 ill. And 1500 wounded is pretty much in line with the general estimate of 5-10 wounded a day.
Now 5-10 wounded a day is a story. But it's not a hidden story.
There was a plausible argument put forth a few months ago that a much higher percentage of Iraq's wounded are seriously wounded because of body armor -- that is, their body armor is protecting them from being killed by shielding their vitals, but the result is that while guys who would have died in earlier wars were now living, they were losing arms and legs that the armor wasn't shielding. And while that's better than dying, it's still heartbreaking and demoralizing, especially for kids who are young and athletic.
But so far, the facts don't seem to bear that out. There were several articles on this subject in October. All seemed to agree that all amputees would eventually come through Walter Reed Hospital because that was where all the special programs were for amputees. But by the end of October, the highest figure cited by any of the articles for all the amputee cases that WR had dealt with was 52. I think at that point the total wounded was around 1200. That would mean the percentage of wounded who lost a limb was around 4%. Is that an unusually high percentage of seriously wounded among the wounded? It doesn't seem so. It's also several times smaller than the number of people who have died. So if people haven't been put off by the deaths, I don't think they'll change their mind because of the seriously wounded.
Michael