I'm a casualty.

There's a lot of agitation about the number of American dead (4,005 as of this writing), with very little attention to the rest of our casualties. How many wounded are there? We don't know. The military tracks traditionally wounded soldiers, but for years denied the very existance of the Iraq occupation's signature injury: Traumatic Brain Injury. PTSD affects even more soldiers, but they aren't even considered for counting.

Another type of casualty gets overlooked entirely- troops who quit, either by deserting or failing to reenlist. My enlistment expired several months after I returned from Iraq, and I just walked away. This sometimes gets looked at as a retention problem, so the recruiters throw bonuses at it. Money's great, but military service isn't worth money and it doesn't solve the problem.

When I left, the Army lost another mid-career NCO. Just because there was no life insurance payment and there aren't any disability payments doesn't change the fact that I'm lost to them. Just because they ignore the reasons I left doesn't change the fact that it was specifically because of my experiences in Iraq that they lost me.