Here are
indications of the lingering costs of 11 years of warfare. Nearly 130,000 U.S.
troops have been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, and vastly more
have experienced brain injuries. Over 1,700
have undergone life-changing limb amputations. Over 50,000 have been
wounded in action. As of Wednesday, 6,656 U.S. troops and Defense Department
civilians have died.
That updated
data comes from a new Congressional Research Service report into military
casualty statistics that can sometimes be difficult to find - and even more
difficult for American society to fully appreciate. It almost certainly
understates the extent of the costs of war.
Start with
post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD. Counting since 2001 across the U.S.
military services, 129,731 U.S. troops have been diagnosed with the disorder
since 2001. The vast majority of those, nearly 104,000, have come from deployed
personnel.
But that’s the tip of the PTSD iceberg, since not all - and
perhaps not even most - PTSD cases are diagnosed. The former vice chief of staff
of the Army, retired Gen. Peter Chiarelli, has proposed dropping the “D” from
PTSD so as not to stigmatize those who suffer from it - and,
perhaps, encourage more veterans to seek diagnosis and treatment for it. (Not
all veterans advocates agree with Chiarelli.)
The
congressional study also brings to light the extent of one of the signature
injuries of the post-9/11 wars, Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI), often suffered by
survivors of explosions from homemade insurgent bombs. From 2000 (a pre-9/11
year probably chosen for inclusion for control purposes) to the end of 2012,
some 253,330 troops have experienced TBI in some form.
About 77 percent
of those cases are classified by the Defense Department as “mild,”
meaning a “confused or disoriented state lasting less
than 24 hours; loss of consciousness for up to thirty minutes; memory loss
lasting less than 24 hours; and structural brain imaging
that yields normal results.”
More-severe TBI
is measured along those metrics, lasting longer than a day. Nearly 6,500 of of
those cases are “severe or penetrating TBI,” which include the effects of open head injuries, skull
fractures, or projectiles lodged in the brain.
Like with PTSD,
the TBI diagnoses scratch the surface. The military’s
screening for TBI is notoriously bad: One former Army chief of staff described
it as “basically a coin flip.” Worse, poor military medical technology, particularly
in bandwidth-deprived areas like Iraq and Afghanistan, have made it uncertain
that battlefield diagnoses of TBI actually transmit back to troops’ permanent medical files.
Amputations are
a feature of any prolonged war. Almost 800 Iraq veterans have undergone “major limb”
amputations, such as a leg, and another 194 have experienced partial
foot, finger or other so-called
“minor limb” losses. For Afghanistan veterans,
those numbers are 696 and 28, respectively.
The Iraq war is
over for all but a handful of U.S. troops and thousands of contractors. The
Afghanistan war is in the process of a troop drawdown through 2014 of unknown
speed and will feature a residual troop presence of unknown size. Even if the
U.S. deaths and injuries in those wars may almost be over, the aftereffects of
the wars on a huge number of veterans will not end.
AHT/ARA