If not for modern medicine Iraq may have had Korea-Vietnam level death toll
Truth is the first casualty of war, and one way to use bend the truth is to hide it in plain sight. During the Iraq war years the emphasis was on numbers of dead American soldiers more than the wounded because the death toll seemed low if we did it that way.
We had Republicans dismiss the casualty rates (like Fox’s Britt Hume) as being less than traffic accidents, etc.
If you payed attention to reporting from that era there was very little mention of wounded casualties.
Modern medicine has allowed soldiers who would have died in the Vietnam era from their wounds to live.
I don’t know how to quantify how many soldiers would have died from their wounds if we negated life saving techniques and science not around from the Vietnam era but if we look at the casualty figures as a whole both dead and wounded we enter a war whose violence was hidden from the American public by downplaying the wounded statistics.
Coalition deaths total more than 4,700, with the United States sustaining more than 4,480 deaths through the Iraq War’s official end Dec. 15, 2011. More than 32,000 other U.S. troops were wounded in Iraq, while more than 134,000 Iraqi civilians were killed during the course of the official war.