Tick-marks
Oct. 24th, 2005 09:05 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pecuniumSometime this week we pass another milestone.
It happens for all of us, someday, we move from the rolls of the quick to the roster of the dead.
But, at some point this week, or, at the latest, next, 2,000 people in the military will have died in Iraq.
Two-thousand. A drop in the bucket which was Vietnam. Nothing as compared to WW2, and almost trivial when one thinks of the Civil War (Antietam had 3,600 dead. Some 17,000 wounded. From of a total of 93,000 engaged, all in an afternnon; for one battle. Ponder that. We have only half again that many troops on the ground in Iraq right now, imagine almost one-third of them were hors de combat tomorrow), but still, that's a lot of dead.
More than Katrina (so far), almost as many as died on That Tuesday.
Each of them with families, friends, lovers.
Each of them cut short. The kids, the old men (at least one of them was in his early fifties), all of them expected to have years past these, most could count on decades. What did we lose when they died?
Yes, dying is part of the deal. When one joins the Army one promises to let the Gov't send one to places where other people will try to kill you. Seems only fair, as you get to try and kill them. That part of it doesn't bother me. We each made a choice, and some of us have to pay the piper for the right to dance.
But these deaths, they touch me. These are my deaths. These are my comrades, God forbid, they are my friends. One of that list came from my unit. Some of them died in places I was, or with unit I was serving with.
Veterans' day is coming, which for me isn't Veterans', but rather Armistice Day, when the world hoped to do without war again, and remembered the horrible price paid, in blood, and youth (for the death of an age, or perhaps several ages, came in the trenches, a loss of innocence we thought we'd managed to gain; at horrid price, in Viet-nam, but seem to have forgotten, like the mythic regaining of virgnity after a time of abstinence).
I don't ask that I be sent to heroic wars, nor even clean wars. I only ask that the cause be just, as Shakespeare put it in Henry V.
WILLIAMS
But if the cause be not good, the king himself hath
a heavy reckoning to make, when all those legs and
arms and heads, chopped off in battle, shall join
together at the latter day and cry all 'We died at
such a place;' some swearing, some crying for a
surgeon, some upon their wives left poor behind
them, some upon the debts they owe, some upon their
children rawly left. I am afeard there are few die
well that die in a battle; for how can they
charitably dispose of any thing, when blood is their
argument? Now, if these men do not die well, it
will be a black matter for the king that led them to
it; whom to disobey were against all proportion of
subjection.
We are a democratic republic, we have no King to fob the guilt onto, the burden for those who fall in unjust wars rests on all of us.
When the number ticks, think of that, you may, like me, decide to empty a glass. I'll be doing it for absent friends, some of you will do it for memories sake, some of us ought to be doing it for the brief, nepenthic, relief it gives.
It happens for all of us, someday, we move from the rolls of the quick to the roster of the dead.
But, at some point this week, or, at the latest, next, 2,000 people in the military will have died in Iraq.
Two-thousand. A drop in the bucket which was Vietnam. Nothing as compared to WW2, and almost trivial when one thinks of the Civil War (Antietam had 3,600 dead. Some 17,000 wounded. From of a total of 93,000 engaged, all in an afternnon; for one battle. Ponder that. We have only half again that many troops on the ground in Iraq right now, imagine almost one-third of them were hors de combat tomorrow), but still, that's a lot of dead.
More than Katrina (so far), almost as many as died on That Tuesday.
Each of them with families, friends, lovers.
Each of them cut short. The kids, the old men (at least one of them was in his early fifties), all of them expected to have years past these, most could count on decades. What did we lose when they died?
Yes, dying is part of the deal. When one joins the Army one promises to let the Gov't send one to places where other people will try to kill you. Seems only fair, as you get to try and kill them. That part of it doesn't bother me. We each made a choice, and some of us have to pay the piper for the right to dance.
But these deaths, they touch me. These are my deaths. These are my comrades, God forbid, they are my friends. One of that list came from my unit. Some of them died in places I was, or with unit I was serving with.
Veterans' day is coming, which for me isn't Veterans', but rather Armistice Day, when the world hoped to do without war again, and remembered the horrible price paid, in blood, and youth (for the death of an age, or perhaps several ages, came in the trenches, a loss of innocence we thought we'd managed to gain; at horrid price, in Viet-nam, but seem to have forgotten, like the mythic regaining of virgnity after a time of abstinence).
I don't ask that I be sent to heroic wars, nor even clean wars. I only ask that the cause be just, as Shakespeare put it in Henry V.
WILLIAMS
But if the cause be not good, the king himself hath
a heavy reckoning to make, when all those legs and
arms and heads, chopped off in battle, shall join
together at the latter day and cry all 'We died at
such a place;' some swearing, some crying for a
surgeon, some upon their wives left poor behind
them, some upon the debts they owe, some upon their
children rawly left. I am afeard there are few die
well that die in a battle; for how can they
charitably dispose of any thing, when blood is their
argument? Now, if these men do not die well, it
will be a black matter for the king that led them to
it; whom to disobey were against all proportion of
subjection.
We are a democratic republic, we have no King to fob the guilt onto, the burden for those who fall in unjust wars rests on all of us.
When the number ticks, think of that, you may, like me, decide to empty a glass. I'll be doing it for absent friends, some of you will do it for memories sake, some of us ought to be doing it for the brief, nepenthic, relief it gives.
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no subject
Date: 2005-10-25 09:38 pm (UTC)According to Military Casualty info, the first year in which we recorded a death was 1957.
Lets just take the ramp up, and start in '62, where we had 16, and by '64 we had a total of 399.
But that's not the real issue, the real issue, if you want to talk rates is one of per capita. How many soldier, divided by how many dead (see above in re Antietam, where the fatalities were in the area of 3 percent, and the total casualties about 30).
We've cycled about 250,000 troops through (this is a back of the envelope calculation) and had about 2,000 killed [n.b. to those who say the numbers are being hidden with dead troops who don't die until they get out of theater being counted as some other sort of death, Number 2000 died in Killeen Texas, almost two-weeks after his injuries took place, but I digress].
That's a tad under the Antietam numbers.
We've also had some large number of combat related injuries. I think in the neighborhood of 20,000 (based on Purple Heart numbers) and some other number of Disease/Non-Battle Injuries, those are harder to detail, because some sideline one for a week, some get one sent all the way home.
Lets call it a rounded 40,000.
Which puts us in the Antietam range again.
How does that compare to Viet-nam in the first few years?
In 1961 JFK sent 100 men to Viet-nam. That number stayed fairly level for the next year and half, or so. So the 7 soldiers who were killed represented a fairly large percentage. I don't know how many Air Force personell were in support, but the 8 of them who got killed make in '61 can't have been trivial either.
In '62 the numbers went to 5,000 and the casualties fell, as a ratio, to 1 percent (53 dead in '62) but since those numbers were stable until the build up after the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution (and they didn't come into the country until the last half of '62, so we can, effectively double the percentage... which takes us back up to present levels), and '63 saw 118, and '64 saw 206 (which can pretty fairly be said not to be affected by the resolution, because it was passed in Nov.).
At peak, in '67, '68, the US had about 500,000 troops in country, and had 27,600 fatalities, which again seems to fall into the present ratio.
There are other factors, which affect the individual soldier's experience (how exposed to danger are they? In Viet-nam most of the regular risk was taken by front line troops, which is reflected in the density of deaths in the Infantry. Most soldiers in Viet-nam had a sort of low-level fear, every day, but the intensity probably wasn't very high. Is the same true for troops in Iraq? Who can say. It's also not what this is about, so I'll curtail the digression).
On average, we are taking fewer casualties than we did in the first years of Viet-nam, but that same lack of troops on the ground can make that a misleading stat, because losing ten of a hundred would be losing 100 of a 1,000, etc. It's easy to skew the percentage when each piece is a greater portion of the whole.
TK
no subject
Date: 2005-10-25 09:44 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-10-25 09:46 pm (UTC)