Math lesson: there's about 500,000 troops in the US Army. 2000 of the Iraq war fatalities are army.

[Bucky]

Let's think about this. The averge person probably knows about 500 people. So do this thought experiment. If out of the 500 people you know personally, two were dead by violent means over the last three and a half years, how would you feel? Stressed? We haven't finished yet.

What if, in addition to those two violent deaths another 14 of your acquaintances were injured by that same violence over the same 43 months, five of whom were injured so badly they had to leave their jobs and never return? Two or three of them even recieved life altering injuries--loss of a leg, or arm, or eye, or neurologic motor functions. These acquaintances will never recover.

In that same time period another five friends of yours were injured in non-hostile accidents resulting from the circumstances in which they work and had to leave their jobs. Also, another 16 succombed to diseases found in their work environment which also require them to quit their jobs, leave the area, and never return.

This is what our troops are going thru because of an optional vanity war. These statistics assume that injuries and deaths are equally distributed around all the army ranks. That's not true, of course. The casualties are concentrated in the infantry units (not a lot of call for armored divisions in fighting an insurgency) and a lot of good soldiers spend most of their careers in support and technical deployments that keep them far from the carnage.

This war is hell on our troops; Bush gave them an impossible and dangerous mission (without adequate protective gear) and can only pout and throw temper tantrums whenever someone says, "Hey, let's quit wasting all these lives on a lost cause." Unfortunately, by giving a damn about what happens to these soldiers' lives, I'm showing that I don't "support the troops." Not the way the Bush-apologists mean it, anyway.

Stats for this math lesson come from Iraq Coalition Casualty Count at icasualties.org.

NB: There's about 188,000 personnel in the Marine Corps, so a parallel analysis of their casuality rates would be as follows. Out of every 500 Marines in the service, 2 have been killed in Iraq, 19 wounded by hostile action, five of whom have been evacked from Iraq, and five have been evacuated for nonhostile disabilty--two for accidents, three for disease.