The number is approaching 21,000
After I published the initial piece on Oct 16th on the 343rd Quartermaster Company I was surprised by several things. One was that we started getting readers from Landstuhl Regional Medical Centre in Germany. Another was that within 48 hours wampum had acquired a whole new reader demographic, including stripes.osd.mil.
As of Tuesday, 20,802 troops have been treated at Landstuhl from injuries received in Iraq and Afganistan. http://www.estripes.com/article.asp?section=104&article=25671
Had most of the disasterously stupid decisions made after the entry into Baghdad, starting with the demob of the Iraqi Army, not been made by idiological nitwits, about 20,000 men and women would not have detoured through Landstuhl, and we'd still be looking at the interim-to-final-government transition with most of the same balance of forces and a hell of a lot better hearts-and-minds traction with the Iraqis.
Update: 5 more US KIA over the weekend. All in al-Anbar Province (Falluja/ Ramadi). No other details yet.