Apparently all the news coming out of Iraq is old news—even when it’s as fresh as spilled blood. Improvised explosive devices, rocket-propelled grenades, 100-plus Iraqi lives ending violently every day. The atrocity du jour rolls past our collective consciousness like a lullaby.

We seem content to let factors like distance and culture explain our disassociation with Iraqi and Afghani lives plunged into blinding chaos. But what of our failure to understand the plight of American troops? As they carry out Operations Iraqi Freedom and Enduring Freedom (purportedly on our behalf), record numbers are being blown apart. And many are living to tell the tale.

Image by Ashley Dorr

The Department of Defense tracks fatalities and injuries for both operations and releases fresh numbers weekly. According to the tally through Sept. 15, 2006, only 3,009 soldiers have died fighting our enemy, Terror. That’s an uplifting number in a culture obsessed with the statistics of death. Nowhere near the 291,557 lives lost during World War II or the 47,424 lost in Vietnam.

Soldiers died in those wars at rates of 30 percent and 24 percent, respectively. On today’s battlegrounds—rife with improvised roadside bombs—14 percent of wounded soldiers have died. This apparent improvement is a credit to advancements in body armor (which can spare a life but rarely arms or legs) and the speed of medical responses during combat (which address dazed, unconscious and tattered soldiers in the critical minutes after an attack). But we’re missing something: The messy middle ground between death and life—where the wars’ survivors awake to minds and bodies that are vastly different from the ones they knew.

Brain damage, blindness and amputation are the three most common severe injuries affecting troops today. The modern guerilla’s close-range, high-velocity explosives, packed with kitchen-sink shrapnel like nails and shit, cause gruesome wounds that require an average of five to six surgeries to mend. The Department of Defense tracks only the totals of personnel “wounded in action” and does not account for soldiers injured or diseased in nonhostile ways. (Notably, the department began tracking personnel “wounded in action” in April 2004, a very costly month for the U.S. military.)

The Department of Defense further distills wounded-in-action numbers by separately counting wounded soldiers who return to duty within 72 hours. Of the 21,804 soldiers wounded before Sept. 15, 2006, 9,734 of them did not return to duty. They are the severely wounded troops who face arduous recoveries and complex adaptations to new circumstances—prosthetic limbs, glass eyes, bubbly scars, exposed and swollen brain tissue. This means that 12,070 troops have returned to duty after non-life-threatening injuries, such as head traumas that show no immediate signs of severity.

On the home front, meanwhile, we emblazon our cars with decals of American flags and yellow ribbons that read, “Support Our Troops.” Some military families must use the slogan as a salve, soothing overwhelming anxiety and grief with optimism. But politicians brandish it as a reprimand—an ingenious, insidious barrier to silence difficult questions about the toll and purpose of our nebulous War on Terror.

And so the heavy-handed statement sits, frozen in time, oblivious to consequence, squarely opposed to the fact that one day our troops won’t be troops anymore. They will leave active duty and sag into age, and the luckiest will have avoided grave injuries. The others will largely fall into two camps: Camp A will live prosperous, happy lives with kitchen appliances and families and health insurance. Camp B will struggle with isolation and poverty with greater frequencies of addiction and depression.

Of course, bold and distracting success stories will come out of Camp A—like Tammy Duckworth, a 37-year-old National Guard major, runningfor Congress in Illinois. Duckworth lost both legs somewhere in the sky over Baghdad when the Black Hawk she piloted was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade in November 2004. By March 2005, she was learning how to walk with prosthetic legs, grappling with her future and calling her senators on behalf of military families. Following encouragement from Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin, she is now running for office, and her momentum has lured the likes of Laura and George W. Bush to Chicago to rally against her.

As time wears on, the inspiring glow of positive stories like Tammy Duckworth’s will dominate our collective attention span and overshadow the iniquities facing more unlucky veterans. Satisfied by the miraculous resolve of a few maimed vets, we catch a feel-good charge and go about our oblivious lives obliviously. By acknowledging the less-happy endings, we would admit our complicity in the reckless situation that caused them.

Why would we bother to do that when we can pretend that every brave and valorous soldier returning with battle scars will be outfitted with space-age prosthetics—the best that money can buy!—and overachieving in no time? The fall from grace that is inevitable for many Iraqi Freedom and Enduring Freedom veterans does not figure into “Support Our Troops” fanfare.

As usual, a legless panhandler does not rouse our compassion. The American attitude says people get what they deserve, and it has a dark side like a black hole.

To learn more about the human impact of war in Iraq and Afghanistan, visit www.globalsecurity.org and www.icasualties.org. To view the Department of Defense weekly summary, visit www.defenselink.mil/news/casualty.pdf.