And your point is????
Try explaining to a grieving mother that her son's death was "comparatively rare" and see what happens. Not to mention that there are NUMEROUS times when lives were thrown away to no purpose, as witness Khe Sahn. Not that long after the seige was lifted, the base was abandoned. It had NEVER been strategically necessary to hold the place, except deep in the recesses of Westmoreland's mind. Those Marines and others who died there died to no tactical or strategic purpose (except to protect their fellows in that God-forsaken hole).
People like Hack DO tend to make military planners actually think about the actual, real lives involved in operations. Unlike the "geo-political" thinkers like Kissinger who wrote off over 2000 people just to get his "peace" prize. His elitist rationale that they had signed up and knew the risks was elitist bullshit but there are too many that have that attitude and too few like Hack to make them THINK about what they are doing.
The purpose of holding Khe Sahn was to fix the NVA there and get them enough out into the open that they could be decimated by US firepower, both ground based and airborne, and it worked. Now the overall strategy of the war was ill thought out, if it was thought out at all, but Westmoreland and other military leaders had to operate within the resources and constraints imposed upon them by those Saddam Hussein quality military geniuses, Lyndon Baines Johnson and most especially the beancounter Robert Strange MacNamara.