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American Casualties 500,000 When Injuries and Illnesses
are Included
June 24, 2010, Los Angeles, CA (Los
Angeles Times) - Here's an eye-popping number: A blogger
and writer claims American military casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan
now exceed 500,000.
That's if you count certain injuries and diseases including mental
illness that he alleges the Department of Defense doesn't include in its
official combat-related casualty toll in an effort to soften U.S.
military losses in the wars and win funding for them from the Congress.
VCS Note: Internal
VA reports obtained by VCS confirm LA Times article:
Consequences of
Iraq and Afghanistan Wars, as of June 24, 2010
* 537,099:
U.S. Veteran Patients Treated at VA
* 489,369: U.S. Veteran
Disability Claims Filed Against VA
For example, cases of traumatic brain injury and Post-Traumatic
Stress Disorder, or PTSD, as a result of serving in Iraq and Afghanistan
are excluded from the official list of casualties.
"Under this
scheme, chronic injuries and many acute internal injuries such as
hearing impairment, back injuries, mild traumatic brain injuries, mental
health problems and a host of diseases suffered by personnel in Iraq
and Afghanistan are usually not counted as being war-related regardless
of how debilitating they are," writes Matthew Nasuti in an article
published on the Afghan news site and media organization Kabul Press.
"They are either generally lumped into the category of 'non-hostile
wounded' or simply not counted at all."
Masuti is a former Air
Force captain and Los Angeles deputy city attorney who worked for the
State Department in Iraq for a spell. He's now a critic of the U.S.
efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The writer claims that 95% of
injured soldiers, sailors, Marines and airmen were not reported as
casualties due to what he refers to as the Pentagon's "fudging the
numbers" in a bid to win funding from American lawmakers to finance the
wars.
"Wounded in action is narrowly defined to essentially be an injury
directly caused by an adversary," he writes. "So called 'friendly fire'
injuries and deaths would apparently not be counted. The emphasis is on
acute injuries caused by enemy munitions which pierce or penetrate."
He
cites sources such as the Department of Veterans Affairs, the New
England Journal of Medicine and the Navy to conclude that the more than
170,000 U.S. soldiers suffer from hearing damage, the 130,000 or more
cases of milder brain injuries, and the 200,000 troops suffering from
mental problems are left out of the casualty count.
If they were
to be included in the Pentagon's official numbers of 5,500 troop deaths
and 38,000 injuries, the total American military casualty toll in Iraq
and Afghanistan would amount to well over 500,000.
And it doesn't
end there. The 500,000 tally would increase significantly if one also
added to the count what Nasuti claims are around 30,000 cases of serious
disease and hundreds of accident injuries and suicides, among many
other types of disease and injury-related military casualties.
Skeptics
would maybe argue that a soldier suffering from a gastrointestinal
disease from having eaten bad meals in Iraq and Afghanistan and minor
roadway accident injuries do not belong in the tally along with troops
who have been killed in ambushes with insurgents.
But Natusi
writes that it's important not to leave these types of injuries out in
order to show the real image of the war and its effects on U.S. troops.
Not
only do the aforementioned injuries deserve to be formally recognized
as casualties as a sign of respect for the soldiers serving in the
battlefield, but leaving them out of the count distorts the overall
toll, the writer concludes.
"These casualties are real and are a
direct result of fighting two wars," he writes. "The soldiers, sailors,
marines and airmen who have suffered these combat injuries deserve to be
recognized and the American people deserve a proper accounting of the
mounting costs of their two seemingly endless wars. That accounting
begins with an honest casualty count."
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