US Iraq War Deaths for April
US military deaths in Iraq were up a bit in April, though they weren’t as high as they were back at the start of the year. My guess is that the insurgency’s current focus on killing Iraqis is keeping the US death count relatively low.
Again, I’m getting these figures from the advanced search tool at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund site, and from Lunaville’s page on Iraq coalition casualties. The figures are for the number of US dead per month, without regard to whether the deaths were combat-related.
The first graph shows the first 26 months of each war. (Click on any image for a larger version.)
Next, the same chart, with the Vietnam numbers extended out to cover the first four years of the war:
Finally, the chart that gives the US death toll for the entire Vietnam war:
Disclaimer: I’m aware that we have more troops in-theater in Iraq than we had during the corresponding parts of the Vietnam War graph. Vietnam didn’t get numbers of US troops comparable to the number currently in Iraq until shortly after Johnson won the 1964 election, some three-and-a-half years after the starting point of the Vietnam graphs above.
These graphs are not intended to show the relative lethality of the two conflicts on a per-soldier basis. I was just curious how the “death profile” of the two wars compared, and these graphs let me see that. You are free to draw your own conclusions.
May 9th, 2005 at 2:22 pm
Not that these numbers augur well for anything but I think a further disclaimer is in order: Field hospital advances and bodyarmor make the
casualty numbers of 2004 harder to compare to 1969. So many more wounded survive now but come home missing one or more limbs.
May 12th, 2005 at 9:27 pm
I went to get numbers for the troop deployment from the DoD and calculated a per deployment fatality rate (number of fatalities divided by total troops deployed). I had to do this by quarter because that is how the DoD data were tabulated.
Result for quarter ending in:
Deployment Fatalities Per Capita Rate
3/31/03 269,363 65 0.0002
6/30/03 237,235 141 0.0006
9/30/03 183,002 114 0.0006
12/31/03 167,329 166 0.0010
3/31/04 211,028 119 0.0006
6/30/04 190,949 257 0.0013
9/30/04 170,647 200 0.0012
12/31/04 202,100 272 0.0013
If you had deployment number for Vietnam (I searched around for a while but could not find them) you could use your fatality data too actually compare rates of death corrected for different deployment size.
Grim.
Cheers,
Paul Klawinski