Last week, a group of seven House Democrats wrote a letter to President Bush that accused the Pentagon of “under-reporting casualties in Iraq by only reporting non-fatal casualties incurred in combat.â€
Current Pentagon casualty reports state 2,390 service members have died from the operations In Iraq and Afghanistan with over 16,000 wounded. Salon, however, has published details of the October Veteran Affairs report which show that 119,246 now off-duty services members who fought in Iraq or Afghanistan are receiving health care from Veteran Affairs. From Salon:
Presumably, some of those health problems are unrelated to the war. But the statistics seem to show that a lot of those health problems are war-related. For example, nearly 37,000 have mental disorders, including nearly 16,000 who have been diagnosed with posttraumatic stress disorder. Over 46,000 veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan receiving benefits from the V.A. have musculoskeletal problems. These are all veterans who within the last four years were considered by the military to be mentally and physically fit enough to fight.