Faced with the difficult prospect of mortality and injury rates for American soldiers dropping to the lowest levels since the onset of the Iraq War, The New York Times has revealed a bold new plan for measuring military casualties in that conflict. The Times has departed from the traditional school of thought and has moved, in their words, towards a “more streamlined and progressive manner of measuring war-related incidents.”

“The decline in the number of dead and wounded soldiers is a bit misleading,” said Times spokesman Alison Beckworth. “Historically, casualties have been counted by looking at the actual number of soldiers killed or wounded while in a particular theater of operations. As we now know, many things that are seemingly unrelated are in fact interconnected. The archaic system we now use, developed during the early days of the Roman Empire, is simply not relevant in our more complex times. That’s why we’ve expanded the definition of ‘casualty’.”

Expanded they have. Under the new plan, soldiers who contract gout, get sand in their eyes or who have a friend back home who catches crabs from that brunette with the squinty eyes that hangs around the Dairy Creme all summer, will now be considered ”wounded”. Meanwhile, military personnel who die within fifty years of their last tour of duty will be counted among the mortalities from the Iraq War (numbers to be extrapolated using a variety of impartial sources including: AP reports, Al Jazeera internal memos, and Sean Penn’s diary).  

“Many on the right have accused us of doctoring the numbers with regard to the way that casualties in Iraq are going to be measured,” said Beckworth. “That’s patently false. We are simply trying to be proactive. If a 93-year-old Iraqi war vet just drops dead near the end of this century, who is to say that his death is not directly related to the Battle for Fallujah? We’re just trying to run the numbers now while the issue is fresh in everyone’s mind.” 

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