[Media-watch] US lost it's 100th soldier in combat, why did no one notice?- Independent - 12/12/2004

[Julie-ann Davies]

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/story.jsp?story=592328

Last week the US lost its 1,000th soldier killed in combat. Why did no one 
notice?
Because the coalition wants to play down the carnage. Especially when it 
comes to civilians
By Andrew Buncombe, Severin Carrell and Raymond Whitaker
12 December 2004


A deadly milestone was reached in Iraq last week, and hardly anyone noticed. 
Captain Mark Stubenhofer of the US army's 41st Infantry Regiment, killed in 
a firefight on a street in Baghdad on Tuesday, was the 1,000th American to 
die in combat since the country was invaded nearly 21 months ago - yet none 
of the reports of his death mentioned the fact.

The reason? Only one news agency spotted that the Pentagon's official tally 
of deaths in action had reached 999, and that its latest casualty 
announcement meant that the toll was now in four figures. And when Capt 
Stubenhofer's name was released later, after his family had been informed, 
no news organisation made the connection, not even The Washington Post, 
which carried a story because his home town - Springfield, Virginia - is in 
its circulation area.

The Post reported that Capt Stubenhofer, 30, had last spoken to his parents 
when he called from Iraq to tell them his wife had had their third child, a 
daughter. "He never got to see her, though. She'll only know him through 
us," his mother, Sallie Stubenhofer, told the newspaper. It was his second 
tour of duty in Iraq; during his first he was awarded the Bronze Star.

Thanks to a website that meticulously records coalition casualties, 
icasualties.org, we can see that Capt Stubenhofer was older and more senior 
than most US soldiers killed in Iraq, and that Baghdad, where he died, has 
claimed more American lives than anywhere else in the country. But because 
the most significant statistic was missed, there was no analysis of the cost 
of the conflict so far.

Two years ago, when the rush to war was becoming unstoppable, would we have 
thought twice if we had known how many Iraqis and non-Iraqis would die or be 
damaged? This question was not asked on the occasion of Mark Stubenhofer's 
death: and that is exactly how the Pentagon and the Ministry of Defence want 
it.

In the debate over casualties, the only clear-cut figures are those on 
coalition deaths, because the British and US governments know it would be 
impossible to suppress them. But as icasualties.org makes clear, the 
Pentagon "certainly doesn't go out of its way to divulge" the number of 
losses. "We are told that during the Korean and Vietnam wars, the names and 
numbers of dead AND injured were available from the government," it adds. 
"No longer."

In 2003 the White House issued a directive banning reporters from attending 
the return of coffins containing the bodies of US troops to Dover Air Force 
base in Delaware. A Freedom of Information Act loophole, which forced the 
release of some photographs of such returns, was closed, and a civilian 
worker who took pictures of coffins aboard an aircraft in Kuwait was sacked.

The British, says the website, "do a much better job with their dead", 
listing in one place all those lost in the war - though this is clearly 
easier when the toll is much lower than in the US. There are photographs of 
the ceremonial return of coffins; the MoD posts the names, pictures and 
brief biographies, with tributes, of every dead serviceman and woman on its 
website within a day or two of their death.

What neither Britain nor the US wants, however, is for anyone to dwell on 
the much greater numbers of military personnel who have returned with 
physical or mental injuries. Thanks to medical advances, particularly in 
battlefield treatment, for every US soldier killed in Iraq nine more have 
been wounded and survived, the highest ratio ever. But media access to 
military hospitals such as Walter Reed in Washington or Landstuhl in Germany 
is tightly controlled. Officials at Landstuhl said last month that doctors 
had treated 17,878 injured or sick US troops from Iraq.

Getting figures from the MoD about the exact number of British injured in 
the Iraq conflict is very difficult, and no breakdown on the cause of those 
injuries is obtainable. Official figures are patchy.

The MoD claims releasing casualty data - even rounded-up figures on the type 
or cause of injuries - breaches patient confidentiality. It says the Defence 
Medical Services Department insists on this. A spokesman added: "As there 
is, therefore, no need to collate this information centrally, this is not 
done."

James Bond, an expert on military compensation claims at the Royal British 
Legion, the UK's largest ex-services welfare agency, retorted: "Of all the 
excuses one could think of, that's probably the worst. I don't see how the 
general release of statistics will affect anybody's recovery. What it will 
affect, of course, which may be more to the point, is morale - both within 
the services and in particular the service families. They would reveal that 
the risks of people getting injured are actually quite high. It's a morale 
issue rather than a medical issue."

Commodore Toby Elliott, the chief executive of Combat Stress, the main 
charity for mentally ill ex-servicemen, was more blunt, calling the MoD's 
stance "a load of bullshit". The MoD as well as those involved in the care 
of service casualties need the figures, he said.

At least the coalition members collect figures for their own casualties. 
What outraged a group of more than 40 diplomats, peers, scientists and 
churchmen who petitioned Tony Blair last week is that they make no effort to 
count the far higher totals of Iraqi civilians killed and injured. The Prime 
Minister brushed off their demand for an independent inquiry into the toll, 
saying figures from the Iraqi Ministry of Health "are in our view the most 
accurate survey there is".

But the ministry, which says 3,853 civilians were killed between April and 
October this year, has no figures for the preceding period, and many of 
those killed in Iraq never go to a hospital. Since it is well known that 
civilians were an increasing proportion of fatalities in conflicts during 
the 20th century - rising from 15 per cent in the First World War to 90 per 
cent in the "low-intensity" wars in Africa, East Timor and the former 
Yugoslavia, according to Barbara Ehrenreich in her 1997 book, Blood Rites - 
it is hard to escape the conclusion that Washington and London simply do not 
want to know the figures, to avoid the political fallout they could create.

The thinking became clear from the response of a spokeswoman for the 
Pentagon, Lt-Col Ellen Krenke, when The Independent on Sunday asked about 
numbers of Iraqi dead. "It is something that is not done," she said. "We 
just never have. We keep count of our own, but not the enemy." We were 
asking about civilians, we pointed out. "No," she said, "we don't do that 
either."

Additional reporting by Cub Barrett

COUNTING THE COST

1,428

The total of coalition soldiers killed in Iraq by combat and other causes, 
including accidents. Britain has lost 74 troops, 37 in action; at least 190 
non-Iraqi civilian contractors have also died.

98,000

The minimum estimate of "additional deaths" among Iraqi civilians caused by 
the war, according to a study whose methods have been attacked by the 
Government. Iraqbodycount.net, which uses press reports and other data, has 
a much lower estimate of 14,620 to 16,805, but says it is hampered by 
deteriorating security. Other estimates are 10,000 to 27,000 (Brookings 
Institution) and at least 37,000 (People's Kifah, an Iraqi group).

2,754

The number of troops medically evacuated to Britain up to 18 November. By 31 
August, 79 soldiers had been medically retired, including 19 with mental 
illness and 27 with accidental injuries. The MoD could not give us more 
up-to-date figures.

461

The official figure for British personnel in Iraq diagnosed with mental 
health problems, including 52 with post-traumatic stress disorder. But that 
was only up until February; welfare organisations estimate the total is now 
at least 800.

The British casualty

Private Graham Craddock doesn't know if he is still a soldier or not. The 
reservist believes he has been "cut adrift" by the Army since he was 
evacuated from Iraq. He has since been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress 
disorder.

"The PTSD is from what I saw out there," he says. "At hospital I saw Iraqi 
children with limbs missing. At the same time 1 Para were attacked and were 
rushed in, and I saw all that. I have flashbacks, I sweat at night. I have 
antidepressants during the day, plus painkillers for joint and muscle aches. 
At night I have sedatives."

In civilian life Pte Craddock, who lives in Nottingham with his wife and two 
children, was a transport administrator. But he had been in the Territorial 
Army for 18 months. He continues: "In May last year I was called up. We flew 
from RAF Brize Norton and were put straight to work.

"I drove a water tanker to army camps. I wasn't drinking enough fluids and 
went down with heat injury.They thought I might have renal failure, so I was 
medically evacuated."

When he arrived home Pte Craddock says it was left to his civilian GP to 
diagnose PTSD.

"I got demobilised [from the regular Army, which a TA member is deemed to 
have joined once on active service]," he says. "Two weeks later I got a 
letter saying I was being remobilised. Then I got a letter saying I was 
being discharged on 11 August this year.

"Then two friends from my TA unit came to collect my kit and gave me a form 
which they had been told they had to bring back signed, saying I was being 
voluntarily discharged. I refused to sign. I feel used."

Andrew Johnson

The American casualty

Nadia McCaffrey's son, Patrick, a member of the California National Guard, 
was killed on 22 June this year when his unit was ambushed in the city of 
Balad, 85 miles north of Baghdad. In January Mrs McCaffrey will join other 
American mothers whose sons have died in combat and travel to Iraq to meet 
relatives of Iraqis who have been killed by the US and British invasion.

"We will be mothers [speaking] to mothers," she said. "I don't know [why 
there is less discussion of civilian casualties]. It is very disturbing."

Mrs McCaffrey said her son, who left a widow and two children, often wrote 
to her about the Iraqi people, especially the young children who gave him 
flowers. When her son's body was returned to Sacramento airport she defied 
President Bush's wishes by allowing the media to film it.

She also talked of her son's despair at the US presence in Iraq. "He was 
overwhelmed by the hatred there for Americans and Europeans," she told one 
reporter. "He was so ashamed by the [Abu Ghraib] prisoner abuse scandal. He 
even sent me an email to tell me that not all the soldiers were like that. 
He said we had no business in Iraq and should not be there. Even so, he 
wanted to be a good soldier."

Mrs McCaffrey said she and the other mothers may not be able to enter Iraq 
because of the lack of security. If not, there are plans to establish a 
peace camp at Amman, Jordan's capital.

Andrew Buncombe

The Iraqi casualty

During the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s, Ali Midhat Abed Jassim, now 39, was 
conscripted into the Iraqi army and was wounded in the right leg by a shell. 
It left him with a permanent limp, but he survived living on his disability 
pension and earning a little money through a small business buying and 
selling goods. He married and had one child. He recalls: "When the Americans 
came I expected life would get better. I did not expect such disasters." At 
6am on 3 December his wife heard a loud explosion outside his house in 
Baghdad and woke him up. Mr Jassim heard that somebody had detonated a bomb 
beside a Shia mosque nearby. Unwisely he went outside to see for himself 
what was happening. He could see a car was on fire.

"People were trying to put out the blaze," he recalls from his bed in a 
Baghdad hospital. "There was a second explosion. I was driven to hospital 
with a woman who was also hurt by the blast. They cut off my left leg, which 
was not the one injured in the war with Iran." Mr Jassim can hardly bear to 
think about the future. He has a pension of 115,000 Iraqi dinars ($75) a 
month but rent alone is 200,000 dinars. Many of his relatives lived in the 
same street and four were killed, four injured, in the explosion. "I can't 
bear to think about anything," he said as he prepared for an operation, his 
third since the explosion.

Patrick Cockburn