DUPE

[kskiska]

Nearly 17,000 service members medically evacuated from Iraq and Afghanistan are absent from public Pentagon casualty reports commonly cited by newspapers, according to military data reviewed by United Press International. Most don't fit the definition of casualties, according to the Pentagon, but a veterans' advocate said they should all be counted.

The Pentagon has reported 1,019 dead and 7,245 wounded from Iraq.

The military has evacuated 16,765 individual service members from Iraq and Afghanistan for injuries and ailments not directly related to combat, according to the U.S. Transportation Command, which is responsible for the medical evacuations. Most are from Operation Iraqi Freedom.

The Pentagon's public casualty reports, available at www.defenselink.mil, list only service members who died or were wounded in action. The Pentagon's own definition of a war casualty provided to UPI in December describes a casualty as, "Any person who is lost to the organization by having been declared dead, duty status/whereabouts unknown, missing, ill, or injured."

The casualty reports do list soldiers who died in non-combat-related incidents or died from illness. But service members injured or ailing from the same non-combat causes (the majority that appear to be "lost to the organization")are not reflected in those Pentagon reports.

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http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1000630846

[LisaM]

1. This is interesting, because I remember about 8 months ago

NPR was interviewing people to see if they knew how many soldiers had been injured in Iraq, and people were guessing 2000 or 3000 (number of soldiers killed, at the time, was around 675.) The actual answer THEN was about 9000.

Suddenly, months later, all the figures were a couple of thousand lower than the 9000 reported by NPR - even by other NPR reporters - and I thought I had imagined the previous numbers. It appears that I did not.

I wish I could remember who did that piece, all those months ago.

[nolabels]

2. So does this mean the chances of getting injured in Iraq are 1 in 10

Off the top of my head math, but them numbers do seem to be getting up there.

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(snip)
http://www.iol.co.za/index.php?set_id=6&click_id=2813