Trump’s war with Iran has cost American lives, left hundreds wounded with physical and invisible wounds, widened the conflict across the Middle East and into Western cities, drained billions from the treasury, and isolated the United States from weary allies and an appalled world.
To hear administration officials describe it, the war is going great. The primary objective accomplished seems to be reduced pressure for compliance with the law requiring release of the Epstein files.
The official word from the Pentagon, delivered with little regard for truth, much like any other Trump administration statement, is that the number now stands at 140.
One hundred and forty American service members have been wounded in this war with Iran.
The spokesperson was careful to add that the vast majority of these are minor injuries, and that over a hundred of these young men and women have already been returned to duty. That is the official ledger, neat and tidy.
But a number like that, plucked from the fog of war, has a way of looking too clean, too precise. It suggests a neat accounting of bandaged hands and walking headaches, when the truth is likely more of a tangle.
For eight of them, the injuries are severe, and they are now in places where the lights are low and the care is constant.
And one of them, a young man named Benjamin Pennington, an Army sergeant, was wounded in one place and died in another, days later.
So the line between wounded and dead is a thin one, and it moves.
Now, you might recall that just a short while ago, the number we were given was different. It was “fewer than a dozen.”
That was the count they offered when they meant the worst of the worst, the ones who couldn’t be patched up and sent back out.
Which makes you wonder about this new number, and all the stories that fit inside it.
They say the injuries are from drones and missiles, the kind of warfare that rains down from a clear sky. That means shrapnel, the hot, jagged pieces of metal that tear into a person. And it means the invisible wounds, the ones to the brain, the signature affliction of another war not so long ago.
A young man or woman can be standing one moment, and the next, the world goes white and loud, and everything is different. They might not even know it at first. The headache is just a headache, the ringing in the ears just a nuisance, until the days go by and it becomes clear that something fundamental has been shaken loose.
The Secretary of Defense had his own news conference, but he didn’t talk about the wounded. He spoke of the enemy’s capabilities being destroyed, of ballistic missile attacks fallen by ninety percent, of drone attacks down by a similar measure. And maybe that’s all true, as far as it goes.
A general noted that the Iranians are adapting, that they’re still fighting. You have to respect a fighter, he said. Perhaps.
But a man with a diminished capacity to launch a missile can still pull a trigger, as we were reminded this week by the bullet holes in the door of our own consulate up in Toronto. A different kind of war, fought on a different street, but a war nonetheless.
So the official line is one of progress, of degradation, of an enemy on its heels. And then there is this other number, 140.
It is a number that arrived not from a Pentagon press release, but only after it was asked for by others.
It prompted a quiet sort of frustration from a congressional aide, who said the Pentagon ought to just own it, be transparent.
Iran says US and Israeli forces have bombed nearly 10,000 civilian sites in the country, and killed more than 1,300 civilians since the war began 11 days ago.
“The American soldiers are fighting for Israel and the Epstein class,” said Foad Izadi, a political analyst and professor at the Faculty of World Studies at the University of Tehran.
No clear and consistent reason for the war was given yet by Trump or his minions.
Americans owe it to our service members to require the government to tell the truth about what has happened to them.
Because these are not just numbers on a ledger. They are the cost of what we are doing over there, paid in flesh and bone and the quiet aftermath of things that go boom in the night. And the least we can do is look at the bill.
Intelligence from the CIA indicates that Iran has sustained sleeper cells here in the homeland for years for intelligence gathering, targeted killings, and alliances with local elements. These units act as a contingency, conducting pre-attack planning and surveillance, awaiting the authorization to carry out attacks in response to opposition, such as the airstrikes that have unfolded recently.
Izadi said Iran has suffered heavy civilian losses during the war but argued that the country’s resilience could shape the outcome.
“Iran has suffered a lot of losses, including over 1,500 civilian deaths, including 165 little girls that were hit with Tomahawk missiles on the first day of the war,” he told Al Jazeera. “But that doesn’t mean Iran is losing, because Iranian soldiers are fighting for Iran.”