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In the 1991 Gulf War, the first major conflict since Vietnam, military leaders braced to lose up to 10,000 allied soldiers. It ended with 614 American combat casualties 147 killed in action, 467 wounded.

That war told Americans it was possible to achieve victory and avoid a heavy loss of life. Conflicts since have reinforced that view.

In the Kosovo air campaign, there were no American combat deaths.

The fight against terrorism in Afghanistan and elsewhere has claimed the lives of 22 U.S. service members in hostile action.

In Iraq, more than 50 Americans have been killed or are reported missing, and about two dozen Britons have died. Casualties mount daily and there is the sense that the bloodiest days lie ahead.

To date, March 23 is the costliest day in U.S. lives: 11 dead, 16 missing and five taken prisoner.

In Vietnam, 47,414 Americans died in hostile action. On Nov. 17, 1965, the bloodiest day of that war, 155 Americans were killed and almost as many wounded in fighting in the city of Ia Drang.

"I was hit by shrapnel in the head and both legs from two grenades and one mortar shell," said Jack Smith, a veteran of that battle, now retired in Mill Valley, Calif., after a career in network broadcasting.

"It just made a little hole in my cheek, broke my jaw and gave me a concussion," he said. "There was a North Vietnamese soldier on top of me who took the bulk of the other grenade that got me in the leg."

In fighting in Somalia during Oct. 3-4, 1993, Americans counted 18 dead from a battle against a warlord's militia and quickly decided to leave that peacekeeping operation.

"We got out of Somalia when there were Marines dragged through the streets," said Stanley Karnow, who has written extensively on the Vietnam War. "We're not all that fearless."

On Oct. 23, 1983, 220 Marines and 21 other service members were killed when their barracks was blown up by a terrorist in Beirut, where Americans also were trying to keep a peace.

"The next thing you know our firm and unswearing policy was to get out of there," Karnow said.

The single bloodiest day on American soil was not Sept. 11, 2001.

That day was Sept. 17, 1862, in the rolling hills of Maryland, where bullets whizzed over the heads of Civil War soldiers, both the blue and the gray, and more than 6,000 died.

"I was lying on my back, supported on my elbow, watching the shells explode overhead and speculating as to how long I could hold up my finger before it would be shot off," according to an eyewitness account of the Battle of Antietam by Lt. Matthew J. Graham, a member of Company H of the 9th New York Volunteers.

When his colonel ordered the company up on its feet, Graham said he thought the commander had gone "suddenly insane."

In World War II, 19,000 Americans died in the monthlong Battle of the Bulge.

For the Gulf War, commanders were anticipating casualties as high as 10 percent of the roughly 100,000 ground soldiers deployed.

The deadliest day for Americans in Operation Desert Storm was Feb. 25, 1991, when 28 soldiers were killed and 89 injured when an Iraqi Scud missile hit a U.S. barracks outside Dhahran, Saudi Arabia. An Army Reserve water purification outfit from Pennsylvania suffered half the deaths.

Terry Taylor, president of the Institute of Strategic Studies in the United States, believes Sept. 11 has made American's more tolerant of battlefield deaths.

Before the terrorist attacks, the American public had an unrealistic "zero-casualty" approach to military operations overseas, said Taylor, a former weapons inspector and retired British army colonel.

photo credit and caption:

Ground crew walks past a row of F-16CJ combat aircraft during a sandstorm at an undisclosed forward deployed location in the Persian Gulf region in this Wednesday, March 26, 2003 U.S. Air Force photo released Saturday, March.29, 2003. (AP Photo/ Master Sgt. Terry L. Blevins, U.S. Air Force )

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