It is a little known fact that the badly wounded were evacuated immediately to get better care. It is even less well known that once they cleared country, even if they died of combat sustained wounds, they were not counted as KIA, thus helping the generals and politicians to better “manage” embarassingly high casualty counts. You are right about the delayed deaths. If you added all those in the names on the Wall might well be as high as 150,000, rather than 56,000.