AP: True Cost of War -- Staggering Number of Wounded Vets

Editor & Publisher, March 07, 2008 7:40 AM ET

Associated Press

NEW YORK The number of wounded soldiers has become a hallmark of the nearly 5-year-old Iraq war, pointing to both the use of roadside bombs as the extremists' weapon of choice and advances in battlefield medicine to save lives.

About 15 soldiers are wounded for every fatality, compared with 2.6 per death in Vietnam and 2.8 in Korea.

But with those saved soldiers comes a financial price — one veterans groups and others claim the government is unwilling to pay.

Those critics also say that the tens of thousands of soldiers wounded in Iraq are part of a political numbers game, one they say undermines the system meant to care for them.

The most frequently cited figure is the 29,320 soldiers wounded in action in Iraq as of Thursday. But there have been 31,325 others treated for non-combat injuries and illness as of March 1.

"The Pentagon keeps two sets of books," said Linda Bilmes, a professor at Harvard and an expert on budgeting and public finance whose newly published book, The Three Trillion Dollar War, was co-authored with Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz.

"It is important to understand the full number of casualties because the U.S. government is responsible for paying disability compensation and medical care for all our troops, regardless of how they were injured," Bilmes said.

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