Who is looking out For America

Editorial review regarding our soldiers who fought in Iraq by Dan Froomkin   Reports about the end of the war in Iraq routinely describe the toll on the U.S. military 4,487 dead, and 32,226 wounded. The death count is accurate. But the wounded figure wildly understates the number of American service members who have come back from Iraq less than whole. The true number of military personnel injured over the course of our nine-year-long fiasco in Iraq is in the hundreds of thousands — maybe even more than half a million — if you take into account all the men and women who returned from their deployments with traumatic brain injuries, post-traumatic stress, depression, hearing loss, breathing disorders, diseases, and other long-term health problems. We don’t have anything close to an exact number, however, because nobody’s been keeping track. The much-cited Defense Department figure comes from its tally of “ wounded in action ” [PDF] — a narrowly-tailored category that on...