6498

I wasn’t referring to 9/11, I was referring to the post-9/11 conflicts (aka Iraq and Afghanistan).

6499

I remember as a child hearing jets in the sky and I’d look up wondering if the Soviets were attacking. I remember a grade school teacher telling us a Nuclear War was inevitable. I didn’t expect it yet I did expect it. I grew up and had a mostly normal childhood, playing sports every day after school, happy-go-lucky with the neighborhood kids most of the time, imagining my adult life and not nuclear devastation. Yet it was there, that idea.

6500

Vietnam ended. The War on Terror never will.

6501

I never had that, but I knew in my heart that at any moment we could all die and never see it coming. I was a smart kid though, I knew a first strike would come via missile and hit before I ever heard anything about it. They might fire off the tornado sirens if they had time.

6502

I’m of course not from America, but this matches my experiences exactly in Denmark as well. The older people get, the more inclined they are to casual racism, fear-mongering, and be swayed by nationalist parties. I’ve seen this is in my own family quite a bit as well. People who used to be calm, intelligent, inclusive, becomes rather the opposite.

In Denmark, part of it is a large political party catering to the fears of all elderly (Our country gets taken over by foreigners, they take our jobs, our women) but I also think its all the news all the time - they are scared of the world, and want to, well, build a wall around our country and keep everyone else out.

6503

The early '80s still felt pretty Cold warry to me and we had the pop culture to prove it. Wargames, Red Dawn, that creepy-ass New Twilight Zone episode where the person freezes time and there are ICBMs in the air…

But what really, really scared the everliving crap out of me was The Man Who Saw Tomorrow. Damn you, Orson, for lending your inimitable gravitas to that fear-stoking hogwash!

6504

Not to nitpick, but I am pretty sure that is not right. Over 200 thousand US casualties in Vietnam…

6505

It’s like 50k something. Not remotely 200k.

Afghanistan had around 38k casualties iirc. Not sure on Iraq, but together it wouldn’t surprise me if it was more.
We just don’t get to watch it on television and advances in battlefield medicine means more of them didn’t die on the field.

6506

Almost 60k dead. 150k wounded.

6507

Over 900 thousand US servicemen were wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In all likelihood, we actually had over a million wounded, but the VA stopped tracking it.

This is based on the number of disability claims filled with the VA by veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan theaters. Another source had that number at 970k.
http://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/costs/human/military

It’s crazy, right? Now, I suppose that some people of these may be psychological issues, like PTSD, but still, the numbers are staggering.

But we have been at war for nearly 2 decades. Shit adds up.

6508

That figure may be correct, but may classify as injured even vets who have sought help for mental trauma.

Measuring Vietnam vets by the same standard would produce a much much higher figure, because it was a much bigger and more intense war that produced more casualties of all types.

6509

Well, a big part of it was also that you were much more likely to die in combat in the 60s than the 00s as a US servicemen. Not only was the military technology advantage less, but the odds of surviving an injury were much less.

Total number of servicemen in Vietnam was close to the total number in Iraq and Afghanistan, 2.7 million be 2.5 million.

6510

What?

There were nearly 60,000 US troops killed in Vietnam, and about 300,000 wounded.
In Iraq, about 4,500 US troops have been killed, and about 32,000 wounded.
In Afghanistan, 2,400 US troops have been killed, and about 20,000 wounded.

But all that’s completely meaningless, because more Americans died in Civil War. /s

EDIT:

Those are figures for in-theater casualties.

As Soapyfrog points out, lots of returning vets are being treated by the VA for post-concussive symptoms, depression, PTSD, etc. Since there was much less effort to find and treat these conditions in the Vietnam era, the 900,000 figure is not really an apples-to-apples comparison.

I mean, only 2.5 million people were even deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan. Do the math…

6511

Yeah, those numbers aren’t correct, based on what vets have been filing with the VA. It suggests that those numbers you cited were massively underreported.

Again, some portion were likely psychological… But not nearly enough to make up the huge difference between VA disability claims and the reported wounded.

Some additional information from Forbes about that report of a million wounded:

6512

A huge portion is “psychological” or post-concussive, and it’s definitely enough to make up the difference. Most cases of traumatic brain injury (“concussion”) and PTSD would have been written off as “shell-shock” in previous generations. It was massively underdiagnosed.

From your own article:

That’s 570,000. And we’re not counting depression, substance abuse disorder, chronic back pain, etc. All of which may be treated by the VA as a service-related injury.

6513

It’s totally possible that the numbers from Vietnam were underreported. The total number of soldiers deployed were close to the same.

I’m still not sure how this became a point of discussion anyway.

The point was that the Boomers were there worst generation.

What made then the worst want that they didn’t fight enough wars… it was that they started even more of them, let the nation’s infrastructure crumble, and ignored science and climate change and did nothing… And now left us with a massive bill to pay.

If the following generations somehow fail to deal with any of those problems too, then maybe they’ll be as bad. But they haven’t been running the world yet.

6514

Lets compare apples to apples first:

Vietnam: 58k dead, 150k wounded requiring hospitalization

Iraq + Afghanistan: 7k dead, 50k wounded requiring hospitalization

In this case wounded means physical wounds from the battlefield or accidents in the course of combat operations or supporting combat operations.

Now apples to oranges comparison:

Given that Vietnam accrued almost 4x the casualties of Iraq and Afghanistan, and did so with a largely conscript army with a lower level of training and much worse post war care for veterans dealing with non-physical problems, it seems reasonable to conclude that the total toll including psychological injuries from Vietnam would be at LEAST 4 times what we are seeing for Iraq and Afghanistan…

Also, BTW, almost 10 million Americans served in vietnam. (on closer inspection this is the total who served during the vietnam era, you are right total of 2.7 million served in vietnam)

6515

Eh, no, almost ten million men were in the military during Vietnam.

About 2.7 actually served in Vietnam.
http://www.uswardogs.org/new_page_18.htm

Again though, this is all beside the point. I’ll concede that Vietnam was a terrible conflict.

6516

Here’s a Congressional Research Service report to support your apples-to-apples comparison. It confirms your numbers: many more were killed and wounded in Vietnam.

And the point of this exercise is to refute the linked article’s argument that the boomers never suffered. If they didn’t, then pretty much nobody did and the argument is meaningless.

As for which generation is “worst”: the Greatest generation caused the Great Depression. They waited too long to prevent the Holocaust. The buildings they put up had to be torn down and replaced with shinier buildings. They detonated nuclear weapons, twice. They set the all-time record for debt-to-GDP. And they did not solve the problem of racism. So they are the worst. That’s about as good an argument as yours, Timex.

6517

But you also need to account for the fact that those numbers are roughly half the real figures, because there is an equal or greater number of ‘contractors’ who had the same fate. They just are not included in the ‘official’ numbers, and not properly tracked so we lack real data.

But over 7000 dead contractors from firms like Blackwater and their ilk. Maybe more, perhaps much more. But we know at least that many. And at least another 50k wounded.