http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/natsec/RL32492.pdf
That link just has some interesting data for comparison.
The table that reports active duty deaths by year (1980-2006) is interesting to me as are the tables that present numbers of how many served, were wounded, or died per conflict.
While I'm sad when almost anyone dies under any circumstances (and even the rare exceptions don't make me happy or anything), from a numerical standpoint it's hard to argue that it's a particularly deadly war or even a particularly dangerous (in terms of the percentage wounded) war as wars go.
Even if you aren't crazy about why we went to war, unless you were just exceptionally pissed about Arch Duke Ferdinand, we're still doing much better in Iraq than we did in WWI. It's hard to think of much more senseless slaughter than WWI. We lost more than 100,000 guys in less than a year and a half.
I hate that I'm probably coming off as all, "well whatever, it's no Pacific theater in WWII, who cares?" But when people want to discuss numbers in Iraq, I feel like they should have to mention that we lose 700-1000 people in the military in a year when aren't actually engaged in wars.
It's a dangerous job in the best of circumstances.
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