You don't care why they're dying, who's killing them, what they're accomplishing with their deaths, and what effect it's having on the war as a whole.

To you, there would be no difference between troops dying in a car rolling over on a road, or troops dying to successfully take the town of Fallujah back from the enemy.

American casualties have been the single factor you have used all along to judge what's going on in the war. To you, a month with no casualties shows things are going well, while a month with fifty casualties show the war is going badly. End of analysis.

Of course, the logical end of this kind of thinking is that the second we get any military opposition, we either surrender or retreat to avoid those all-consuming casualties.

The Marines are attacking a vital choke point for the flow of terrorists, supplies, and money from Syria. But you don't give a rat's ass.