Mormon contrasts the deaths of a thousand Lamanites (with certainly a much larger number of wounded) with no Nephite fatalities and only fifty wounded. This great disparity in casualties shows the superiority of the Nephite position, something that would have been quite impressive to Mormon, the military man.
Mormon specifies that most of these injuries were to the unprotected legs—not only an accurate depiction of vulnerable points in hand-to-hand combat, but also a strong suggestion that these wounds were inflicted during the fighting at the entrance. The defensive weaponry was concentrated on the upper body, with no protection on the legs, which were vulnerable to deflected blows. The entrance seems to have been the only point at which hand-to-hand fighting occurred. Those on the walls would have had their legs protected by the earthen wall, and perhaps also by wooden stakes set in the top of the wall, though this appears to have been a later innovation (Alma 50:2–3).