There is a disgusting email making the rounds that was forwarded to me today.

In summation, the email forward claims (by use of shady analysis of data) that more military lives were lost during the Clinton Administration than during the second Bush Administration. And it had been reproduced many times by the seemingly endless line of idiots with an internet connection (example idiot #1, example idiot #2, example idiot #3) in the blog world.

The original author has apparently taken the data from a June 2007 Congressional Research Service Report on military casualties from 1980 through 2007.

The email forward's table attempts to summarize the deaths incurred by the military each year (with a handy reference to the then current president) and looks like this:

And summarizes it as this:

Something missing? What about the years 1982, 1983, 1985, 1986, and 1987? Regardless, the email forward's concentration is on the Clinton years versus Bush Jr. years (even though the email uses a counting stat [one that grows with each iteration] not an average---and we are comparing eight iterations versus six iterations). For this, I present the following actual table from the CRS report (Table 4, page 10):

There are some serious discrepancies here

This is, at best, grossly negligent reporting (type-os?) of data, at worst (more likely) obvious misrepresentations to suit the author's agenda. For example:

So the email reports an additional 5,449 deaths during the Clinton administration that simply did not occur. I suppose they were hoping readers wouldn't check the original authors source. This is an addition to 534 deaths that occured during the Bush Jr. Administration that were not accounted for.

Now that we have accurately represented the data, the military casualties per year for the Clinton Administration Versus the Bush Jr. Administration look like this:

And these numbers only represent what has happened during the Bush Jr. Administration through 2006.

But wait! The author of the email forward was not even using the correct table from the report!

The numbers (loosely) quoted are from total deaths in the military. They don't take into account deaths from accident, homicide, Illness, suicide, etcetera.

The data that the author should have used is from Table-5, page 11 of the report, which identifies the cause of the death, is presented here:

If we use those figures, the total number of military deaths [minus] homicide [minus] illness [minus] self inflicted [minus] undetermined looks like this (effectively: hostile action [plus] terrorist attack):

I know of anecdotal evidence of two fellow service members dying while I was in the service (1996 - 2000) and one other man killing himself shortly after he got out. I do have real evidence of real men that I personally served with in First Battalion, First of the Twenty Second Infantry (1/22 Infantry, 4ID) and men that served in the other Unit in which I served, the First of the Five Hundredth and Third Air Assault (1/503 AASLT, 2ID) dying in Iraq and Afghanistan. Note that my service was over in 2000.

It's a slap in the face to those that continued to serve after me (and to their widows) to imply that I went through the same thing (or worse as this email implies) that they have.

Here is a great analysis of the same figures (and a copy of the email).