EDITORIAL
Iraq: Let's not lose sight of the real costs

The steady drumbeat of casualties among U.S. forces in Iraq poses some dangerous possibilities:

One is that the level of bloodletting will suddenly become so intolerable on the home front that an abrupt pullout is ordered, leaving earnestly made promises broken. The home front's level of "stomach" for sustained war is difficult to predict, having surpassed 50,000 combat dead in the Vietnam War but only 18 Army Rangers in a 1993 shootout in Mogadishu, Somalia.

An opposite and more subtle worry is that we may grow too easily accepting of a toll that now seems to average about one American combat fatality a day. After all, these servicemen and women are volunteers, and many states have a higher death rate on their highways.

The number of combat fatalities — 473 to date — grossly obscures the rather staggering proportions of the cost to Americans in Iraq. Some numbers provided by columnist David Hackworth, a retired Army colonel, bear this out.

One report says that between March 20, the war's beginning, and Dec. 23, the U.S. military's Transportation Command has evacuated 3,255 battle-injured casualties and 18,717 non-battle injuries. This total of 21,972 evacuees, however, probably includes some service members counted more than once.

"It's safe to say," writes Hackworth, "that so far somewhere between 14,000 and 22,000 soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines have been medically evacuated from Iraq to the United States."

That means, Hackworth adds, that upward of 10 percent of the total number of troops — 135,000 — available to theater commanders in support of the occupation effort have been medically evacuated.

Some of these injuries, of course, are grievous and permanently disabling.

Before we can be sure these sacrifices have not been made in vain, we must keep in mind an accurate picture of their extent.

Correction: David Hackworth was misidentified in a previous version of this editorial.