by James Glaser
May 12, 2005

I was looking up breaking news on the Associated Press web page and came upon this column, "A Daily Look at U.S. Military Deaths In Iraq."

I can't imagine who gets stuck with the job of writing this column every day, but no one put their name to it. It has to be a depressing job and I bet they pass it around so no one gets it all the time.

Today it said, "As of Wednesday, May 11, 2005, at least 1,606 members of the U.S. military have died since the beginning of the Iraq war in March 2003 according to an Associated Press count." It goes on to say that the figure includes four military civilians. Then there is a disclaimer saying that the AP count is one lower than the Department of Defense's tally.

I have no idea of what a military civilian is, but I think they are the four American civilians who were killed in Fallujah and I guess by now we have revenged each of those four Americans, with at least a thousand Iraqi civilian deaths in that city.

To add to the number of Americans killed in the war, the Associated Press also keeps a running total of troops killed from members of the "coalition" of countries helping George Bush out with his war.

"The British military has reported 87 deaths, Italy, 21; Ukraine, 18; Poland, 17; Spain, 11; Bulgaria, eight; Slovakia, three; Estonia, Thailand, and the Netherlands, two each; and Denmark, El Salvador, Hungry, Kazakhstan, and Latvia, one death each." I have no idea why they switched from numbers to written numbers in the middle of the sentence.

I thought it was a nice touch that the AP gave the day of May 1, 2003 as the date President Bush "declared that major combat operations in Iraq had ended." They then report that 1,468 U.S. Military members have died in Iraq since then.

AP then go on to give a short bio and explanation about the latest American troop deaths. On this day there were five. Four of them died from explosions and one from small arms fire.

We know from the past experience that with five deaths, there were also about 80 troops wounded, but the Pentagon gives no report on those numbers nor do the tell us how many troops lost legs, arms, eyes, or just chunks out of their bodies.

We are over two years into this war and we have news organizations keeping a daily running count of American deaths in the combat zone. Washington, most newspapers, and the nightly television news programs have slowed down coverage on the war and many Americans have lost interest, at least until some local home-town Soldier or Marine is killed. Them the whole town and region feels bad and for a few weeks the war is back on the front burner, but then that soon fades and the latest murder or drug bust takes over.