10,591 US dead in Iraq?

A recent Huffington Post article by Ron Glasser drawing parallels between Iraq and Vietnam contained a figure that caught my eye:

But the death toll in this war was never the true indication of the severity of the fighting, nor of the risks involved. Unlike Vietnam, where the number of casualties to deaths was 2.4-to-1, in this war the ratio is 16-to-1. Because of better body armor and improvements in battlefield medicine, soldiers survive today who would have been dead in Vietnam. It is not the graveyard that is legacy of this war, but the neurosurgical unit and the orthopedic ward.

This passage suggested a simple question to me: How many US service members in Iraq would be dead today if our medical capabilities were unchanged from previous wars?

I put together a very simple spreadsheet to do the calculations.  The data came from Wikipedia, and are slightly out of date for the Iraq war.

My calculations were simple, and I'm sure the statistically trained among you could easily think of a more elegant way of doing this.  I began with the total number of US casualties in Iraq since the war began.  This number is 29401, again, according to slightly-dated data on Wikipedia.  I then calculated the ratio of wounded to killed for all major US wars since the Revolution, and asked how many service members in Iraq would be dead if previously obtained ratios were being seen today.  The answers were stark:

War               Equivalent Iraq deaths
Revolutionary              14,701
Civil (Union)                16,580
WWI                           10,688
WWII                          11,075
Korea                           7,680
Vietnam                      10,591
Gulf                            11,476
Afghanistan/Phillipines   6,803

This is sort of like calculating historical prices into today's dollars.  If this were the Vietnam war, there would be nearly 11,000 dead.  I think this is an important perspective.  I'm wrong to do it, but I have found myself saying something like, "Sure Iraq is bad, but it's not as bad as Vietnam was."  Well, if it isn't, these figures emphasize that it is certainly on its way.

Note that this is a quick an dirty analysis.  Others may have already done it elsewhere.  It does not include information on the number of combat troops, and I am trusting the Wikipedia data entirely.  It says nothing about the horrible nature of the injuries experienced by soldiers who would have died in previous wars.  Also, please note that the ratios on the Wikipedia page are quite different from those in Glasser's article.  I can't explain the discrepancy.  If someone has more time than me to refine any of these numbers, I won't be offended.  

But for me, the story is clear.  The Iraq War is a first order F-up and needs to be over.  And I haven't even touched the horrible tragedy of civilian deaths, which to me is an even more compelling and disturbing story.