A BUZZFLASH NEWS ALERT

Last week, Marine Captain Jennifer Harris was buried [1] in her hometown of Swampscott, MA. She was killed when her helicopter was shot down in Iraq.

Though the loss of all human life throughout this war - American, Coalition, and Iraqi civilian - is equally tragic, Harris' death is a reminder that our losses have come from across the demographic spectrum.

Harris was the 75th female coalition servicemember [2] to die in Iraq even though women are still technically barred from combat roles; incidentally, another woman died the same day from hostile fire in an unrelated battle. Of the 3419 total coalition casualties, women make up more than 2 percent. Only 8 of the 58,193 American fatalities in Vietnam [3] were female.

While many tend to think of our soldiers as all male, we also often think they are mostly young. Indeed, 28 18-year-olds and 199 19-year-olds died during their deployments. But 23 men and one woman were at least 50 [4] when they were killed [5], a percentage of total casualties nearly four times higher than in Vietnam [6].

Another statistic that is often overlooked is the number of children whose lives are changed forever when their parents are killed in Iraq. These kids never volunteered mom or dad to fight; many were not even born when their parents enlisted and, in some cases, deployed.

Such figures are not officially tracked, but we were able to identify that nearly 900 children had lost a parent in Iraq by December 2004 [7] and 1,508 by March 2005 [8]. Extrapolated to the current casualty total, the figure today is probably somewhere around 2,200 children. That's already more than a tenth of the 20,000 who lost their fathers in Vietnam, and the number of children left behind per death is more than twice as high.

One expert explains [9] these results by noting that "the proportion of married soldiers is higher today than in any previous war." That means higher rates of wives and husbands are being left widowed by the war.

The White House would rather ignore these inconvenient truths and pretend that death only happens "on their TV screens." [10] But the truth is that for thousands and thousands of people, death in Iraq is very real.

A BUZZFLASH NEWS ALERT

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