something of note that might be considered or consider looking further into...is reserves plainly sucks dick. first couple steps of war historically speaking in the last few decades has been..step 1 send in the marines and get lay of the land, lock-down key points, army backs them up...take out a shit ton of troops and replace them with reserves (which is usually when we lose the most people, especially our middle east invasion).
whenever we lose significant numbers (regardless of how (in)accurate the beginning part of the original statement is) it's reserves. usually they're rusty, older, fatter..and just bad news for them. at least in the last 20-30 years. if you go into the reserves because you are tired of being in the military, you have to consider how much worse it would be a year or two out of practice, or more than that and hopping back in..especially considering if you're called back in for reserves it's pretty clear what that's going to entail.
my brother was in the marines and the same shit happened to him, he did the 2 extra years to avoid the reserves for these reasons. he was in the middle east round 1 early 90s. if you check out the bottom of
this page you can see there's a pretty big gap between living veterans and total servicemembers that aren't accounted for. not saying that's the death toll, just hard to be accurate when the acquirable information is full of holes. think it's the "what the public doesn't know won't hurt them" clause.