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Originally Posted by bolo121
Hmm not a proper comparison
To make a more accurate comparison we must take,
1. The total number of combat troops in the US army
2. The total number of young men in the same age group in the general pop
If deaths caused by 1 exceeds deaths caused by 2, we can then conclude that the war has had an effect
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Your comparison isn't an accurate one, either. The articles specifically discuss combat veterans, so we do need to look at the number of returning combat veterans, not total combat troops. This is especially true as some will have left the service, so a more accurate ratio would be the killings compared to the all of those returning from the War on Terror.
Second, we cannot say young men only in the age group of the general population, because, after all, there are women in the military.
Interestingly, LTC Grossman's
On Combat discusses the issue the NYT raises:
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The data simply shows that in each of these wars [WWI, WWII, Korea, Vietnam, Gulf War] we gave hundreds upon hundreds of thousands of men weeks, months and years of training on how to kill. Then we sent them to distant lands to fight for us, sometimes for years on end, and when they came home they were less likely to use their deadly skill than non-veterans of the same age and the same sex. The finest killers who ever walked the face of this earth were the boys who came home from World War I, World War II, Korea and Vietnam, and yet they were less likely to use those skills than a non-veteran. The reason is clear: Combined with learning to kill, they acquired a steely warrior discipline-and that is the safeguard.
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