UNTANGLING THE COSTS of the war has not been easy, and it would not have been possible without the help of many.
The fact that so much of the data and information that should have been publicly available was not meant that some critical pieces of information have had to be obtained through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). We thank Paul Sullivan of Veterans for Common Sense, who helped us to understand the situation facing returning Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans, and who provided us with crucial data from the Defense Department and Department of Veterans Affairs obtained under the FOIA.
Robert Wescott was particularly helpful in reviewing the estimates of the macroeconomic costs. An earlier version of our analysis was presented at a joint session of the American Economic Association/Economists for Peace and Security in Boston in January 2005, and the discussion with other members of the panel—William Nordhaus, Bassam Yousif, and Steve Kosiak, and especially Alan Sinai—was particularly helpful. Robert Hormats shared his ideas about the cost of war and the problems posed by deficit financing. William Pfaff and Jamie Galbraith looked at parts of the manuscript. Research help was provided by Columbia University research assistants: Giselle Guzmán, Fang He, Izzet Yildiz, and Dan Choate. Thanks are owed to others at Columbia University: Jesse Berlin and Deborah Lizak. Thanks are especially owed to Jill Blackford, who helped in every aspect of the research and editing, and who worked heroically to bring the book together at the end. Some line editing was done by the very able Graham Watts, as well as Samantha Marshall and Amy Prince.
At Harvard, we especially wish to thank Brian Iammartino, who provided invaluable assistance in developing the cost model, and Harvard students Tony Park and doctoral candidate John Horton (himself a service-connected disabled Iraqi war veteran), for their contributions to the research. Thanks also to Michael Johnson and Jamie Georgia, two outstanding faculty assistants. We also thank Michael McGeary of the National Institute of Medicine for patiently explaining the disability compensation system to us, and for reviewing the detailed issue of compensation for amputations. We also wish to thank David Gorman and Joe Violante of Disabled American Veterans, David Sevier of the Commission on the Future of America’s Veterans, and Paul Rieckhoff of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America for helping us to understand the veterans’ disability compensation system, the difficulty of transitioning from military to veteran status, and the plight of veterans returning from the current war. We also thank 2nd Lt. Matthew Fecteau, who has been serving in the U.S. Army in Iraq since 2006, for his generosity and courage, and for helping us to understand the day-to-day realities of life in the war zone. We appreciate the assistance of Nick Kitchen, a doctoral student at the London School of Economics who helped us to analyze the costs to Great Britain, Susan Anderson of the Massachusetts Bar Association, who explained to us how juries award compensation in cases of death and injury, and economist Matt Goldberg of the Congressional Budget Office, who took the time to review the CBO’s methodology in detail with us.
We are indebted to a number of medical doctors who have helped us to understand traumatic brain injury and PTSD, including Dr. Charles Marmar and Dr. Karen Seal of the Veterans Hospital in San Francisco; Dr. Dan Lowenstein, professor of neurology at UCSF Medical School; Dr. Maureen Strafford of Cambridge, MA; and Dr. Gene Bolles, the former chief surgeon at Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany.
At Norton, we want to thank our publisher Drake McFeely, as well as his colleague Kyle Frisina, and especially Brendan Curry, who was very helpful and patient throughout the editing process. At Penguin, we are again deeply indebted to Stuart Proffitt. Once again, the bulk of the editing was done by Anya Schiffrin, who patiently went through every draft of the book and helped at every stage of the writing. The idea of this book comes from her father, the publisher André Schiffrin, who also provided invaluable suggestions on how to shape it. A great deal of the credit for this book goes to Jonathan Hakim, who devoted countless hours to perfecting the cost model, helped to edit several chapters, and provided insight and guidance throughout. Finally, we pay tribute to the late Dr. Murray Bilmes, who served in the U.S. Army in the Pacific during World War II.