You'd be half right. The strength and design of helmets did improve.

But that meant that the number of wounded with head injuries in the second World War was far greater than the first.

Mostly because in the latter, an equivalent injury almost always resulted in death.

It wasn't just helmet design, but improvements in battlefield medicine and the logistics trains to supply forward units and evacuate wounded to field hospitals or further back to hospitals on the home front, that increased the ratio of wounded in action to killed in action.

The helicopter improved survival still further. Remember the movie M*A*S*H, set in the Korean War? 'Radar' O'Reilly got his nickname for being able to hear incoming helicopter rotors before anybody else. In Vietnam, the helicopter was used to evacuate wounded soldiers even more efficiently. The ratio of wounded to killed soldiers in Vietnam rose to about six or seven to one.

Which brings us to Iraq, where, thanks to further improvements in body armour, trauma surgery and logistics, the ratio of wounded to killed has risen to around 18 to one. They say if a US soldier is still alive five minutes after an engagement begins in Iraq, he will almost certainly survive. And that brings us to Corporal Poole.

In just about any other conflict in modern history, Corporal Poole would have been dead. Jason Poole, a 24-yearold marine, was on patrol in Iraq near the Syrian border when a roadside bomb or 'IED' - improvised explosive device - detonated and left him shattered. He had to learn to speak and walk again.

According to a January 2006 profile in the New York Times he could manage to read 16 words a minute. His face had to be rebuilt with skin and bone grafts and held together with 100 titanium screws and plates. His girlfriend, who talked of marriage before he left for Iraq, had become "just a friend." He was coping psychologically, barely, with the reality that the life he had planned after the war - university, marriage, kids, a good job - was gone.

Stories such as this, sad but focusing on the 'Six Million Dollar Man' treatment that made Cpl Poole's struggles both possible - because he survived - and necessary, have been around since the first wounded started to return home to the US in 2003.

But it was only after opinion in the US turned decisively against the war in Iraq - a process that began two years ago and became unarguable after the 2006 US midterm elections - that reporters and editors started to look at the story of the wounded in a different light and ask different questions.

Last month, the Washington Post ran two front-page stories, one on a Sunday and one on a Monday, detailing the neglect of hundreds of wounded soldiers and marines at Walter Reed Army Medical Centre in Washington, DC. Just five miles from the White House, soldiers with traumatic brain injuries were being asked whether they'd like to go as out-patients. Bureaucratic indifference meant that soldiers were discharged from hospital beds but, still requiring treatment, were left to linger on post, sleeping wherever they could find, including in local hotels. Picture whomever you consider to be the people in Irish society who have made the biggest sacrifice for their country, left on hospital trolleys.

The Washington Post stories came after a four-month investigation by two reporters. In contrast to bunker-mentality thinking that saw no one fired after the Abu Ghraib scandal, within days the general in charge and the civilian army secretary had been fired by the new defence secretary, Robert Gates.

The scandal, and the belated but correct holding of officials to account, has muted attacks on those seeking to get US troops out of Iraq.

Not that it will do Cpl Poole much good. Perhaps the lesson will be absorbed in less time than it takes to put it on a Trivial Pursuit card.