| According to data carried on the website icasualties.org, the number of Americans killed, wounded, and medivac'd out of the country due to serious injury, disease, and combat-related psychiatric illness has now surpassed 61,000. That total includes 97 American women soldiers who've been killed and unspecified hundreds more women soldiers who have been wounded. It doesn't include most of the hundreds of thousands of American soldiers who've returned from Iraq afflicted with PTSD, but only those who cracked while they were there and had to be medivac'd out of the combat zone. And it doesn't include the 130 American soldiers who committed suicide over there.
Here are the cold numbers for the senseless war that Joe Lieberman, Chris Shays, George Bush, Dick Cheney and the rest of their neocon cabal forced us into:
killed in action: 3,859
wounded: 28,451
medivac'd out with serious injuries or disease: 29,584
Total: 61,894.
That also doesn't include the 17% of all soldiers who suffer "mild traumatic brain injury," or most of the 30% of all troops deployed to Iraq who suffer from PTSD, which now numbers in the hundreds of thousands. And the suicides only account for a quarter of all "non-hostile" deaths suffered by military members in Iraq. Furthermore, the figures for wounded and injured medivac'd out are only up to the beginning of October, more than a month ago in the deadliest year yet of this war.
Shame on those who sent them into that war and who still pretend that it is worth the dying. |
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