In any war there will be thousands of service personnel who participate, but the amount of people who are actually involved in REAL fighting is a very small percentage. For every one front line soldier there must be non combatants such as clerks, cooks, drivers, medical, supply and many more. These people are necessary, but do not usually get involved in any fighting. So if you have a war such as the Vietnam war and 500,000 personnel are sent, there may only be about 50,000 fighting personnel from that 500,000. Then out of that 50,000, there may only be about 5,000 involved in actual fighting. That boils down to about 1% who are involved in any firefights.
