This Memorial Day, let us note how war is a common cause of death for Americans. Wiki lists 1.35M deaths from 1775 to 2023 in 81 conflicts. About half were in combat and half not. About half the deaths were in the American Civil War, 30% in WW II, and 10% in WW I.

From 1780 to 2020, there have been about 550M people born in the US (Birth rate, Population), and perhaps another 60M who became naturalized citizens (32M since 1910). So there have been about 610M Americans total. Of that total 330m are still alive, and so 280M have died. The 1.35M deaths in war thus represent about 0.5% of all deaths, or about 1 in 200.

To give a sense of scale, a lot more people have been killed in car accidents, about 4M since 1900. That’s 1 in 70. The number of war deaths, though, is not far off from the number of murders. Hard statistics for the murder rate go back to 1950, and soft ones say that the rate was about 5/100K people before that. That gives 1.7M murders in our history. The number of Americans killed in war is 80% of those killed by other Americans, not counting the Civil War.

It’s kind of startling. Yet when I think of my own ancestry, there was a grandfather lost in the gulag in WW II, a great-grandfather in Belgium in WW I, and another great-grandfather in the Russian Revolution. I don’t think any of my great-great-grandparents died in war, and that’s about as far back as I know. That makes 3 deaths among 28 people, almost 10%.

If you can track your family back for several generations, you too probably have some war deaths in the family. The twentieth century was just one of the most violent in history.