“We called it ‘moon dust’,” Jeffery Camp, a 61-year-old retired military veteran who lives in Sarasota, Florida, says when describing the terrain in Maidan Shar, Afghanistan, where he served with the United States Army from 2008 to 2009.

The fine particles of dust there would find their way into “your vehicles, your equipment, your lungs”, he says ruefully while describing the searingly dry summers and freezing windy winters in the eastern provincial capital.

Camp is one of the 832,000 US service members deployed to Afghanistan from 2001 to 2021 during what became the longest war in US history.

He joined the Army in 1983, well before the September 11, 2001, attacks on the US, which led to the war in Afghanistan. “Service was a calling, not a reaction to a national crisis,” he tells Al Jazeera.

During 20 years of war, 2,461 US soldiers were killed and at least 20,000 wounded.

“I left both Iraq and Afghanistan with a profound respect for the human cost of war, not just for American service members but for the populations of those countries. War is not clean, and the people who bear the longest burden are rarely the ones who made the decisions,” Camp says.

Human cost of US wars

Tuesday marks 60 days of the US-Israel war on Iran.

Since February 28, US-Israeli attacks on Iran have killed at least 3,375 people, according to Iran’s Ministry of Health.

The US military has confirmed 13 combat-related deaths among its service members across the region, with more than 200 injuries.

Since the 1950s, US-led wars have killed millions of civilians and tens of thousands of military personnel.

According to an analysis by the Cost of War Project at Brown University’s Watson Institute of International and Public Affairs, US-led wars since 2001 have directly caused the deaths of about 940,000 people across Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen and other post-9/11 conflict zones.

The graphic below breaks down the estimated number of civilians killed for every US soldier in the Korean, Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq wars.

Iran war: $11.3bn spent on munitions in first six days

According to the Pentagon, the Trump administration spent $11.3bn during the first six days of the war, with an estimated $1bn subsequently spent on the war every day until the April 8 ceasefire.

According to Mark Cancian, a senior adviser with the Defense and Security Department at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the $1bn per day figure is “a little high”.

Speaking to Al Jazeera, he says the war “was very expensive in the first few days” because the US used costly long-range munitions, including Tomahawk missiles. They cost $2.5m each, and the US military used hundreds of them.

Cancian calculates that in addition to the $11.3bn spent on munitions, an additional $1.4bn should be added for combat losses and infrastructure damage and a further $26.5m for support costs, bringing the total for the first six days to $12.7bn.

Cancian estimates that after the first week of its air strikes, the US spent “about half a billion dollars a day”, and now, during the ceasefire, that figure is likely “under $100m per day” because the US is not using any munitions.

On a per-day cost basis, the Iran war may be one of the most expensive in recent history.

According to figures from the Costs of War Project, the 20-year Afghanistan war cost an estimated $2.3 trillion, averaging more than $300m per day, while the eight-year Iraq War, which began in 2003, cost an estimated $2 trillion, averaging about $684m per day.

‘Another prolonged war’

Naveed Shah is the political director of Common Defense, a grassroots veteran-led organisation based in Washington, DC, that aims to engage, organise and mobilise veterans.

Shah, who served in Iraq from 2006 to 2010, believes the US must defend its national interests and has a vital role to play in deterring threats, but too often overreaches with open-ended wars of choice that create more problems than they solve.

“The current conflict with Iran is repeating the mistakes that led us to spending 20 years in Iraq and Afghanistan: shaky evidence at best, moving goalposts and dangerous rhetoric that risks drawing us into another prolonged war,” Shah tells Al Jazeera.

“At the same time, while we’re deploying troops overseas, the government is trying to claw back the care we promised for our veterans,” Shah says.

“The true cost of war extends far beyond the battlefield. It echoes for decades in veterans’ bodies and minds and for their families. For the families of the troops who won’t come home, it will be an empty seat at the dinner table and a hole in their heart for eternity,” he says.

According to the Cost of War Project, the US is expected to spend at least $2.2 trillion on obligations for veterans’ healthcare over the next 30 years.

Iran war most unpopular in US history

According to a Reuters/Ipsos poll from April 12, 60 percent of Americans disapprove of US military strikes on Iran. This is up from a 43 percent disapproval rating at the start of the war.

Historically, US wars have mostly enjoyed a “rally around the flag” effect, which causes low disapproval at the outset.

The chart below compares the disapproval rating at the start and end of the five main wars the US has led since the 1950s.

US consumers are paying the price

Marwa Jadoon, 40, from Oklahoma, whose name has been changed to keep her identity concealed, says her out-of-pocket expenses have increased by more than 35 percent over the past couple of months.

“As someone with multiple considerably expensive health conditions, I’m paying more than I’ve ever paid before just to cover only my essential medications and recurring testing. It’s limited my ability to afford additional treatments since healthcare costs are astronomical in the US. I’ve cut costs in groceries and anything outside of essentials,” Jadoon says.

Jadoon feels she’s been shortchanged with the policy shifts that came at the same time she was made redundant, further complicating her life.

“I find it appalling that my tax dollars are funding a war when we have repeatedly been told that we cannot afford universal healthcare. At the end of last year, I lost my job and had to apply for unemployment and Soonercare,” she says, referring to state-covered healthcare.

She explains that unemployment benefits would not even cover her rent.

“How can my tax dollars afford to pay for wars and foreign governments while I can’t even receive Medicaid because they deemed $400 is too much a month? My phone bill alone is $116 a month. My student loan payments are almost $200 a month. I would love to see anyone in the current administration survive on $400 a week with no medical coverage,” Jadoon says.

Another woman in Oklahoma, who also wished to remain anonymous due to her job with the state government, says, “The war in Iran and its funding has made me feel cornered. I feel it at the gas pump, I feel it at the doctor, dentist. I feel it at the bank. I feel it when I’m at the grocery store, thinking how exactly everyone is acting so calm. And it moves me, literally. Emotions carry little power. I’m ready to do something about it. I’ve been stolen from and lied to, and I’ve had enough.

According to the Climate Solutions Lab at the Watson Institute for Public and International Affairs at Brown University, the total consumer burden from the increase in petrol and diesel prices across the US as a result of the war on Iran is estimated at $27.8bn, roughly $200 per household.

The national average price of petrol has increased nearly 40 percent from $2.90 per gallon ($0.76 per litre) before the war to $4.10 per gallon ($1.08 per litre) now.