4,000

It was inevitable that we'd arrive at this point as a road side bomb kills another four soldiers in Baghdad. A quagmire and a ruling caste who still believe they were right to be wrong about Iraq. But the cost is far higher than the 4,000 officially killed.

The wounded figure since March 19, 2003, is now well above 29,000. It is far, far higher than the number killed, and often has a more lasting impact on those who sacrifice as a human tragedy and in terms of costs. If one counts the number of men and women whose lives have been virtually destroyed by critical combat wounds and adds that total to the number killed, we reached 4,000 long ago. Far too much media coverage focuses only on "killed." There needs to be balance in counting all of the wounded, and far more attention paid to the number of critical physical and psychological wounds and disability cases. In many ways, news reporting on the "stats" of the fighting now covers only half the sacrifice of those who serve in uniform.

Here's the story of one young man, now "a gimp."

You can't look away

The wounded.

One of the more shocking photographs to emerge from the current Iraq war was taken last year in a rural farm town in the American Midwest. It’s a studio portrait by the New York photographer Nina Berman of a young Illinois couple on their wedding day.

The bride, Renee Kline, 21, is dressed in a traditional white gown and holds a bouquet of scarlet flowers. The groom, Ty Ziegel, 24, a former Marine sergeant, wears his dress uniform, decorated with combat medals, including a Purple Heart. Her expression is unsmiling, maybe grave. His, as he looks toward her, is hard to read: his dead-white face is all but featureless, with no nose and no chin, as blank as a pullover mask.

Two years earlier, while in Iraq as a Marine Corps reservist, Mr. Ziegel had been trapped in a burning truck after a suicide bomber’s attack. The heat melted the flesh from his face. At Brooke Army Medical Center in Texas he underwent 19 rounds of surgery. His shattered skull was replaced by a plastic dome, and a face was constructed more or less from scratch with salvaged tissue, holes left where his ears and nose had been.

Ms. Berman took this picture, which is in the solo show at Jen Bekman Gallery, on assignment for People magazine. It was meant to accompany an article that documented Mr. Ziegel’s recovery, culminating in his marriage to his childhood sweetheart. But the published portrait was a convivial shot of the whole wedding party. Maybe the image of the couple alone was judged to be too stark, the emotional interchange too ambiguous. Maybe they looked, separately and together, too alone.

“Marine Wedding,” the portrait’s title, was not Ms. Berman’s first encounter with wounded Iraq war veterans. She photographed several others beginning in 2003, and 20 of her portraits were published as a book, “Purple Hearts: Back From Iraq” (Trolley Books, 2004), with an introduction by Verlyn Klinkenborg, a member of the editorial board of The New York Times. These pictures, accompanied by printed interviews with the sitters, have been traveling the country, and 10 are now at Bekman.

Here's the slide show. It is their aloneness that rips at you. We will never know what they felt and what they feel, never know who they were before and who they are now. They will keep paying for Iraq long after it's over. Long after we've not only stopped paying, but (as most of us already have it seems) stopped caring as well.

They know that.