The Lucky Ones

[jhain]

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1037641,00.html?cnn=yes


angle these look like the lucky ones. In any other war, they would be dead, having bled to death on the battlefield or died in a hospital from wounds so grievous that their armor could not protect them and the doctors could not save them. In World War II, 1 in 3 wounded soldiers died; in Vietnam, 1 in 4. In the Iraq war, the rate is 1 in 8. As of last week, just over 1,500 U.S. military personnel had died in Iraq and 11,285 had been wounded. The Pentagon does not keep counts of dead or wounded Iraqis. Human-rights groups and academics have tried to estimate the number of Iraqi deaths, speculating it could range from 15,000 to 100,000. No one has even tried to guess the number of Iraqis who have been wounded.

It is so much easier, of course, to call the U.S. wounded unlucky, the double and triple amputees maimed in a war that has not always gone as planned. If Kevlar and ceramic plates are the great lifesavers of modern warfare along with quick-clotting powders and ultrasound units that fit in backpacks, how many more lives and limbs might have been saved if the humvees that were meant for transport in noncombat zones had been equipped with the armor necessary for a guerrilla war that has no front lines, no safe havens?

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we will eventually see more and more of this leaking out...
These poor kids can't blend in very well back at home.