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America's wounded

The cost to the US of military returning from the war in Iraq will never ever be truly known. One thing is for sure. America will be faced with a huge bill to treat all these "wounded" personnel - physically and mentally - for years to come. All too sadly these people are being forgotten or over-looked by American society.
Reports about the end of the war in Iraq routinely describe the toll on the U.S. military the way the Pentagon does: 4,487 dead, and 32,226 wounded. The death count is accurate. But the wounded figure wildly understates the number of American service members who have come back from Iraq less than whole. The true number of military personnel injured over the course of our nine-year-long fiasco in Iraq is in the hundreds of thousands -- maybe even more than half a million -- if you take into account all the men and women who returned from their deployments with traumatic brain injuries, post-traumatic stress, depression, hearing loss, breathing disorders, diseases, and other long-term health problems. We don't have anything close to an exact number, however, because nobody's been keeping track.

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