By Attorney Thom Cooper
Our law office is involved extensively in obtaining veterans benefits for veterans and their widows. Therefore I thought it might be appropriate to reflect on the costs of wars in terms of the number of deaths of our veterans. Many people think that the most costly war for Americans was World War II or the Vietnam War. They are wrong. The most costly war, in terms of deaths, was the American Civil War with over 625,000 American deaths. By comparison the Civil War was 10 times more costly in terms of American lives than the Vietnam War. What is even more impressive is if you look at these deaths as a function of the population of the U.S at the time of the specific war. Looking at it this way would make the Civil War more than 50 times more costly than the Vietnam War. I will certainly remember this as our Family visits the Gettysburg battlefield next week on our vacation.
I have put together the table below for you review.
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_casualties_of_war
