Just a Little Perspective Please

3332. That is the number of Americans killed in Iraq since we invaded over 5 years ago. Search the newswires and you'll find plenty of stories portraying the horror of the unprecedented American losses. But that's just not true.

There were about 20 separate engagements in the war between the states (that's the civil war for you carpetbaggers) in which the US Army suffered greater losses than in all 5 years combined in Iraq. Read that carefully. That is just on the Union side. The Confederacy did not keep good battlefield records and there are estimates out there but they are unreliable. The numbers of the union army are stark in their gaudiness.

I know that the style of warfare was different then. We certainly don't line up in line formation and shoot at a man 50 yards or less away who is also in a line formation. But the losses were a greater percentage of the overall population at the time. By any measure, the losses today are miniscule when compared to previous conflicts. For example, the best records show that 51,112 men died in the battle of Gettysburg on both sides. The losses in Iraq are 6% of that.

If you want to compare to a more modern war, there were 125,847 US ground troop casualties in the battle of Normandy alone. There were 33,000 killed in Korea and 47,000 in Vietnam. As medicine and urgent care improve, many soldiers who would have died in earlier conflicts now live. But the fact of the matter is that the press is driving an antiwar agenda and exagerrating the impact of the number of war dead instead of honoring their sacrifice and lives. We need to have some perspective.