As I write on this 5th Anniversary, there have been about 4015 soldiers killed in Iraq fighting for and defending this country. I know this because we are constantly barraged with the death toll on the news every day. Can you image fighting WWII with the coverage as it is today? There would have been no American Spirit left.

There also, has been some junk email circulating on the net about death rates in Bush and Clinton’s years in office. Here are the actual numbers for you.

The e-mail grossly distorts the numbers in several years. For instance, the e-mail claims that 2,465 military personnel died (of all causes) in 1995, but according to the CRS report (which obtained its numbers directly from the Department of Defense), you have to go all the way back to 1980 – when the military was nearly 50 percent larger than it is currently – to get close to that figure. The true figure is less than half what the e-mail purports. In point of fact, 7,500 troops died during Clinton’s eight years in office. During Bush’s first six years, the number was 8,792. And that excludes the 899 combat deaths in 2007, which was the deadliest year of the Iraq war for U.S. troops. (We don’t yet have figures for total deaths for that year.)

It may surprise many to learn that there are so many military deaths during peacetime. But this is just the law of averages at work. In 1993 the military had 1.7 million men and women in uniform. During that same year, 1,175 of them died from accidents, homicide, suicide and illness. That makes the 1993 non-hostile death rate for military personnel 69.1 per 100,000. That’s actually fairly low; the rate for all Americans age 20 to 29 is about 97.5. Today’s military is considerably smaller, with just under 1.4 million personnel.

To make an apples-to-apples comparison, we would need to separate combat and non-combat deaths. According to the CRS, during the Clinton administration, one person in uniform died as a result of hostilities and another 75 died as a result of terrorist attacks. By contrast, during the first six years of the Bush administration, 2,596 troops died from hostilities and 55 from terrorist attacks. Looking at the non-hostile deaths (i.e., accidents, homicides, suicides and illnesses), we find that an average of 947 military personnel died each year during the Bush administration compared with 913 during the Clinton administration .

Soldiering has never been a particularly safe occupation. But it is absurd to suggest that soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines are somehow safer during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan than they were during the relatively peaceful Clinton administration.