Trying to Find Out the Numbers of Wounded Is Like Trying to Locate a Particle in Quantum Mechanics...

News&Views
The Armchair Curmudgeon
March 11, 2007

Government Perjures Itself When Quoting Wounded....


For several years now I've been harping on the fact that the government statistics for the wounded can't possibly be right; that they might be off by as much as a factor of seven or eight from the figures presently being bandied about by the Pentagon. I based my figures on the casualty figures at the unit size and then extrapolated out. And then factored those units sized figures to reflect the total number of GIs total who have been in one of the two campaign theatres...
What complicates matters is that you can't get cohesive total figures no matter what you do. When John Kerry made me a Veterans Adviser for my state, that was one of my first objectives. I discovered that the Pentagon kept track of those statistics by the branch of service involved and by whether it was an accidental wounding or in the line of duty. You can only obtain these figures by going to the Pentagon and speaking to each branch of the service.
I've also heard that there are other categories of wounded troops, too.
None of this information is volunteered by anyone so I suspect that the reason for this obfuscation is the massive understating the true numbers of troops being wounded in and out of the line of duty....or whatever other categories the government is using to avoid us finding out the truth!

Moreover, whomever I mentioned this to proved very noncommittal suggesting that I was so off base that it wasn't even appropriate to address my claims. But I had more faith in my claims than what I was hearing from anyone, including the various Veteran's organization. I had suggested a number of wounded in the 125,000 to 150,000 range which was up to seven times what the government was admitting to.

. Today, for the first time, I heard the ABC Senior Washington Analyst, George Stephanopolis, support my contention that the wounded numbers are being cast in doubt and are suspected to be much higher than has been reported.

This was supported by the new Senator Webb of Virginia, former Republican and Secretary of the Navy...who was wounded in Vietnam. In testimony, one representative of the House claimed that the VA figures are in wild disagreement with the Pentagon figures. He claimed that the figures for both Afghanistan and Iraq were over 200,000.

While not disputing those figures directly, Webb thought that they might be high. But certainly, either way, the resulting projections are much higher than the 23 or 24,000 being made available today.

This is a serious issue. It's one thing to want to keep the numbers low and quite another to deliberately lie to the American people.
We are now at the starting point for investigations that will reveal the truth.
And looking at the current track record for this government, we should not be too surprised by what we uncover..

Les Aaron
the Armchair Curmudgeon