Keeping tabs on Iraq deaths
Patricia Kneisler is a 51-year-old civil engineer who lives by herself in Benicia, Calif., a town of about 27,000 people. She helps design piping layouts for jet-fueling facilities.
Michael White is a married 40-something computer programmer in Stone Mountain, Ga., whose favorite hobby is spinning bedtime stories for his 3-year-old daughter.
They have never met in person. They have talked on the phone once. But they were drawn together last spring by a shared question: How many people are dying in Iraq? Their unlikely collaboration in finding the answer has turned these two ordinary people, on opposite sides of the country, into players in the international debate over the war in Iraq.
The little Web site they created last year — www.lunaville.org — is now considered by many journalists, military personnel and their families to be the most accurate, up-to-date and comprehensive source for death and casualty tolls in Iraq.
“It’s amazing the community of people from around the world that we hear from,’ White said by phone from Georgia.
It began almost a year ago when Kneisler attended an anti-war vigil at a park in Benicia. She had never protested anything in her life. She was a Midwestern numbers geek. But she felt so “completely and totally convinced’ the war was immoral she began showing up at the park every week for the Thursday night vigils, even when the protesters had dwindled to just two or three.
She made two signs to hold. On one she wrote the number of dead U.S. and allied troops. On the other she wrote the number of dead Iraqi civilians. But she ran into a problem: She found conflicting numbers for deaths for U.S. and allied troops.
The Department of Defense and U.S. Central Command Web sites don’t publish running totals to check against such sites as CNN, so Kneisler went into their archives to chronicle and count every death. She crosschecked their numbers with news items about every death since the war began. After three weeks of research, she constructed her own list of the dead, noting the name, hometown, place and date of death and the circumstances.
“I compared my list to others, and my eyes about fell out of my head,’ she said. CNN had missed two British deaths. The Army Times had missed four U. S. deaths. A Russian site that was keeping a tally had double-counted one death and gotten another one wrong.
Three thousand miles away in Georgia, Michael White was searching the Internet for a definitive number on the dead in Iraq. It was late April. The war had supposedly ended, and President Bush had appeared on the aircraft carrier in front of the “Mission Accomplished!’ sign.
“No one seemed to be paying attention to the soldiers that were still dying,’ White said.
He came across Kneisler’s chart on the Web log and e-mailed her. He wanted to take her information, update it daily and post it on the Web domain he had set up for his family. The site already bore the name of Lunaville, the fictional setting of the bedtime stories he spun for his daughter.
The hits to the site soon grew from 4,000 a month to the current 600,000, plus the hundreds of e-mails from military personnel, families of troops in Iraq, anti-war activists, and correspondents in Poland, Spain and Russia who send translated news items from their local papers. Last summer, White had to move the site off his home computer and onto a public Web server to accommodate the volume of visitors.
He and Kneisler, and a growing stable of contributors, continue the meticulous work of researching and posting each casualty as a reminder of the cost of this war.
“Sometimes I feel there is so little I can do as a citizen to affect a war I feel so strongly about,’ said Kneisler, who still shows up at the park with her two signs every Thursday afternoon between 5 and 6.
The totals for U.S. military, as of this writing: 558 dead, 3,200 wounded.
Joan Ryan is a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle. Her e-mail is [email protected].