True Numbers of Wounded May Blow You Away!

PreAmble: When I wrote this, I didn't include what the government considers "suicides" or those injured or killed in car accidents--whatever that means!--which seems to be kind of a catch all since most deaths are vehicle-related ie. mpg hits vehicle; road side bomb devastates convoy, etc. I was also much more conservative than I had first realized. What I was talking about gave a margin of plus or minus 20%! Now, to get a grip on what those figures mean, just imagine if we had suffered the loss or serious wounding of nearly half the troops sent to Europe! Would that cause some serious discussion.

We are being denied our basic truths here.

And it is long overdue that an Executive panel be empowered to look into the real figures for dead and wounded in this meaningless war. I'll be damned if their dying should be in vain!

les Aaron...



My estimates for Iraqi Wounded May Be Way Too Conservative!
It’s time for an investigation!

Last year, we heard projects of war wounded that ran between 12,000 and 15,000.
That sounds like a lot of wounded men considering that we had about 130,000 troops active in Iraq and not all of them assigned to combat roles.

Yet as the civilian adviser to Kerry for Veterans Affairs in Southern Delaware, I discovered that it was virtually impossible to get the true figures.

The reason: Each service reports its own wounded. On top of that, accidental wounds are separated from wounds incurred during combat which further serves to complicate the question.

Why, I wondered, would they go through so much trouble to complicate the process of getting answers to what seemed for all intents and purposes a pretty straight-forward question. Based on what I saw and was hearing, I had a feeling that our projections were totally off and I said so. In fact, according to my projections, I suggested that we may be off by 300% in the number of totally wounded and I made that announcement more than six months ago.

I left it at that. But tonight, I got some new input. I was watching Tom Brokaw’s To War and Back on NBC where he chronicles the experience of just an average group going to war.
In the original group of National Guard from upper New York State, the show covered the war experiences of just seven men.

In the end, of the seven who went to war, three came home unscathed physically, three bore life-changing wounds, and one died.

That means of the seven, 57% were either killed or wounded. Was that an anomaly? . Not according to the fact that they were a pretty average group doing a pretty average job under combat conditions. That got me to thinking. For the sake of argument, let’s say that even if they were 20% off from the norm, let’s deduct 20% from our total to cover probability. Let’s assume then that only 46% of troops were either dead or wounded.

Now, we have been in Iraq about 3 years. Since the average tour is 12 months, let’s extrapolate that that means only 400,000 troops got to serve in this theatre; that’s extremely conservative because we know that such rotations typically involve many more men than just the gross numbers quoted by the military to fill out the ranks both prior to and after a rotation.. If we apply our yardstick of 46% of 400,000 troops, That means that 184,000 troops may have been killed or wounded; but we already know that only 2,100 troops have been killed. In other words, this rough estimate means that nearly 182,000 troops could be lying injured in field bases through-out the world with no one being the wiser.

What all of this means is that my minimal estimate of nearly 50-55,000 wounded may be off by a factor of nearly four; it would mean that the government’s estimates are off by an error of more than 90%. That’s a big error any way you slice it! And this doesn’t take into consideration the fact that the number of incidents has increased from a few to literally hundreds per day, upping the ante. I think based upon these rough calculations, a new investigation into the truth about the wounded is justified. And I think it can be achieved now before we are overwhelmed with dead and wounded we didn’t even know about.

Les Aaron
http://www.lesaaron.blogspot.com/