The number of American troops who have died fighting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan passed 6,000 individuals in the early spring of 2011. Those individuals came from every part of the United States and its territories, and the great majority were young men, of course.  Many were married, with children, and all left families with a lifetime of pain.

They died in a host of horrific ways.  They were killed by the enemy’s deadly targeting or mangled in the dangerous equipment with which they worked.  The causes of death include hostile rocket-propelled grenade fire and the improvised explosive devices that have been responsible for roughly half of all deaths and injuries in Iraq and Afghanistan.  Their deaths were also the result of truck rollovers and other vehicle crashes, electrocutions, heatstroke deaths, friendly fire, and suicides in theater.

Official Pentagon numbers recognize only some of the war dead, however.  Uncounted are the many troops who return home and kill themselves as a result of war wounds such as PTSD.  The military does not report suicides among non-active duty reservists, and the Department of Veterans Affairs still does not report suicides among veterans, resulting in dramatic underreporting of the scale of the problem; fully three quarters of veterans of these two wars are not enrolled in the VA health care system and would be unlikely to be tracked in any case.

While the mortally wounded US soldier is the “gold standard” of war deaths for many Americans, the military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan have produced fatalities among large and unrecognized numbers of private contract workers.  They make up 54 percent of the total US workforce in both countries.  While contractors have been killed in large numbers, a full and accurate accounting has not yet been done by the Pentagon.  The best and most recent estimate is that at least 2,300 contractors have been killed.  The majority of them were the citizens of other countries.

Both wars have been fought in alliance with troops from a number of countries, including domestic security forces in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.  That total exceeds the death toll of 8,351 U.S. uniformed and contract workers:  in all, 31,741 people have died fighting these wars with and for the United States.