A Full Division’s Worth of Casualties
A Full Division’s Worth of Casualties
By David Hackworth
January 2004
David Hackworth says that we have taken a full division’s worth of casualties in Iraq so far…
Even I — and I deal with that beleaguered land seven days a week — was staggered when a Pentagon source gave me a copy of a Nov. 30 dispatch showing that since George W. Bush unleashed the dogs of war, our armed forces have taken 14,000 casualties in Iraq — about the number of warriors in a line tank division.
We have the equivalent of five combat divisions plus support for a total of about 135,000 troops deployed in the Iraqi theater of operations, which means we’ve lost the equivalent of a fighting division since March. At least 10 percent of the total number of Joes and Jills available to the theater commander to fight or support the occupation effort have been evacuated back to the USA!
Lt. Col. Scott D. Ross of the U.S. military’s Transportation Command told me that as of Dec. 23, his outfit had evacuated 3,255 battle-injured casualties and 18,717 non-battle injuries. Of the battle casualties, 473 died and 3,255 were wounded by hostile fire. Following are the major categories of the non-battle evacuations:
* Orthopedic surgery — 3,907
* General surgery — 1,995
* Internal medicine — 1,291
* Psychiatric — 1,167
* Neurology — 1,002
* Gynecological — 491
Sources say that most of the gynecological evacuations are pregnancy-related, although the exact figure can’t be confirmed — Pentagon pregnancy counts are kept closer to the vest than the number of nuke warheads in the U.S. arsenal. Ross cautioned that his total of 21,972 evacuees could be higher than other reports because “in some cases, the same service member may be counted more than once.”
The Pentagon has never won prizes for the accuracy of its reporting, but I think it’s safe to say that so far somewhere between 14,000 and 22,000 soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines have been medically evacuated from Iraq to the USA…
The scary thing is the 18,000 “non-battle injuries” evacuated out of the theater of operations in seven months. 18000/135000 * 12/7 = .228, which means that in a year 23% of this bunch of guys and gals in their twenties and thirties are having non-war related medical misadventures serious enough to require treatment back in Germany or the USA. That’s an unbelievably large accident/disease rate, and makes me very worried about what might really be going on.
The cream of the U.S. army are not military police. They should not be used as military police. Those in the Pentagon and the White House whose policies have turned them into military police should be… they should be sent to the Pakistan-Afghanistan border as undercover agents in the hunt for Osama bin Laden.
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