Toll in Iraq war reaches grim milestone
Their faces, smiling or solemn, are all too familiar in our newspapers and on television. Their names sound a somber roll call — Smith, Falaniko, Ramos, Lee — a roster that seems to grow daily.
U.S. military deaths in the Iraq campaign passed 1,000 on Tuesday.
The troops lost are sons and daughters from city streets and rural hamlets. They are teens who went from senior proms to boot camp and battle, and middle-aged family men who put aside retirement and grandchildren for the dangers of a war zone.
What they share is they will not see home again.
What does the number mean? On D-Day alone, more Americans lost their lives. At the peak of Vietnam, hundreds of U.S. troops were dying each week. And in just one September morning three years ago, 2,792 people perished when two towers crumbled to the streets of New York.
Still, 1,000 is a grim milestone.
The conflict in Iraq has claimed almost three times the number of Americans lost in the entire Persian Gulf War. And this time, the vast majority of U.S. deaths — all but 138 — came after major combat operations were declared over. “Mission Accomplished,” read a banner on the aircraft carrier where President Bush spoke on May 1, 2003.
Sixteen months later, the fighting goes on. So do the funerals.
The lengthening casualty roster reflects a front line that shifted from sandy deserts to shadowy streets, a stubborn insurgency, a conflict far bloodier than many expected.
Back home, there is another growing count: Towns that lost future firefighters and policemen, churches left without Sunday school teachers, families where infants will never meet their dads.
“It’s almost like losing a community,” says Luis Pizzini, an educator in San Diego, Texas. Two of his former students died in Iraq.
Ruben Valdez, 21, and Jose Amancio Perez, 22, grew up on the same block.
Now, the two young men lie buried a few feet apart.
The youngest was just 18. The oldest, 59.
More than half had not seen their 30th birthday, according to an Associated Press analysis of Department of Defense statistics for those who died since the war started on March 19, 2003.
The number of troops who have died reached 998 on Tuesday; three civilians working for the Pentagon also have been killed in the war.
The tally was compiled by AP based on Pentagon records, AP reporting from Iraq, and reports from soldiers’ families.
Of those who have died, 97 percent were men; about two dozen were women. While more than 600 were white, others were black, Hispanic, Asian and American Indian.
There were kids who had never fired a shot at an enemy, and veterans of Desert Storm, Bosnia, Kosovo — even Vietnam.
They hailed from the urban bustle of Chicago, New York and Houston, as well as the cornfields of Silvana, Wash., and the coal mine country of Varney, W.Va. — and from every state but Alaska.