WASHINGTON, 14 April 2003 — Nearly 40 percent of the US soldiers who have died in the war in Iraq were killed in incidents unrelated to direct enemy fire, according to casualty patterns from the three weeks of fighting leading to the fall of Baghdad and its immediate aftermath.
The Defense Department has said that 19 of the 106 deaths among US troops as of Friday were the result of accidents. A closer analysis, based on Pentagon sources and information the military is sharing with soldiers’ families, indicates that, of the total who have died, Iraqis killed 66 at most.
Although several of the deaths remain under military investigation, the information that can be gleaned to date offers the fullest portrait of deaths that have occurred so far. It suggests that five soldiers were killed in friendly-fire incidents, three died from random causes, and at least a dozen men who have been identified by the Pentagon as killed in action actually perished at times and in places devoid of combat.
This pattern of casualties — relatively low overall, but high in deaths outside battle — echoes tendencies that first became evident during the Gulf War of 1991, when fully half the 300 deaths among US troops were from accidents and other noncombat causes. But it also reflects changes that have taken place since then, primarily in the US military.
The current conflict, like the 1991 war, has produced remarkably few deaths, compared with most wars through US history. The casualties in the invasion that began last month include 106 dead, 14 captured and missing and 399 wounded, in the Pentagon’s most recent public count, out of about 250,000 troops. That rate so far is about 1 for every 480 soldiers deployed in the war. From World War I through Vietnam, the casualty rate hovered consistently at about 1 for every 15 soldiers. The casualties in the current conflict would be lower except for a single day — March 23 — when 22 members of the US forces were killed near the southern Iraqi town of Nassiriyah and another seven were left missing in action.
The lower overall casualty rate, experts said, reflects improvements in US military technology in the past decade, particularly more sophisticated surveillance and more precise long-range weapons. “It’s a combination of being able to detect where the enemy is and being able to reach out and kill them,’’ said Theodore Stroup, a retired lieutenant general and a former chief of army personnel.
“The optimists who were predicting light casualties thought they would be light because there wouldn’t be any urban warfare,’’ said Stephen Biddle, a professor of national security studies at the Army War College. “We got urban warfare without the heavy casualties.’’
Instead, there have been deaths that reflect the peripheral hazards of war.
Cases in point are evident among the dozen or so that were listed as killed in action but that took place where no fighting was under way.
They include a pair of Marine reservists who drowned March 24 while crossing the Saddam Canal to help secure land for a water purification team. And three Marines killed March 30 when their Huey helicopter crashed on takeoff in southern Iraq after refueling. And an additional four Marines, missing for days, who were discovered by divers 20 feet deep in the Euphrates River along with their tank, which apparently had plunged off an unfinished bridge the night of March 25.
“All I’ve heard is they were not under fire,’’ said Barbi Schneckloth, a travel agent in Davenport, Iowa, whose fiance, Sgt. Bradley Korthaus, 28, drowned in the canal. “I just feel like he was stolen from us,’’ she said, adding that military representatives had told his family that four members of his unit — two of whom survived — waded into the water without flotation devices or safety lines.
A detailed analysis of all 106 deaths, based mainly on information in official Pentagon announcements, shows that the army and Marines have lost the most. The army accounts for slightly less than one-third of the troops that have been deployed but nearly half of the deaths so far. Similarly, the Marines account for a third of the deployments but 40 percent of the deaths.
A half-dozen members of the military reserves, called up for wartime duty, have been killed, including Korthaus and Evan James, 20, of LeHarpe, Ill., who drowned with him while attempting the canal crossing. Two days after the war began, an army reservist, Spc. Brandon Tobler, 19 and less than two years out of high school in Portland, Ore., died in a supply convoy when the Humvee in which he was riding slammed, in a sandstorm, into the vehicle just ahead.
At the same time, officers accounted for one death in five — a large share, compared with past wars, caused in part by the fact that several helicopters, invariably containing men of officer rank, have crashed.
Women have largely been spared. The only female soldier to die was Pfc. Lori Piestewa, 23, a member of the Hopi Indian tribe who was missing, and then found killed, after an ambush of an army maintenance company on March 23, the war’s deadliest day for US troops.
In many ways, the mosaic of casualties is a microcosm of the country: The soldiers who have died came from 36 states. About 40 percent of the troops who have been killed came from the South, reflecting the region’s relatively large presence in the military overall.
Of the 80 whose race could be determined, roughly one-fourth were black — compared with about one-fifth of the military and about 12 percent of the US population. At least 13, or about 16 percent, were Hispanic, compared with about 9 percent of the military and 12 percent of the country as a whole.
Ten of the dead were still teenagers, but a half-dozen were over 40.
“It’s who’s paying the price and who is in the military,’’ said Christopher Lawrence, executive director of the Dupuy Institute, a small think tank that researches armed conflict.
Among the most intriguing patterns to emerge from the current war, however, involve the way in which troops have been killed — ways that are not always immediately evident from the Pentagon’s initial public statements.
Each branch of the service determines whether a casualty is labeled as occurring by accident or in combat, and so far, defense officials say, the services are using a broad definition of “killed in action.’’ One Pentagon official said that any incident that is under investigation is being categorized as a combat death until proven otherwise.
This decision, in part, reflects the military’s belief that relatives would rather learn that a soldier was killed in combat, rather than by someone’s mistake, said Jeffery Charlston, an army historian who tracks casualty issues.
And certainly, information the Pentagon has released to news organizations and families suggests that more than half of the deaths so far in Iraq have been caused by hostile action, ranging from a car bombing to firefights.
Sgt. 1st Class Paul R. Smith, of Tampa, Fla., was killed on April 4. According to an account by ‘’60 Minutes II,’’ the 33-year-old army platoon leader grabbed the machine gun on an armored personnel carrier and began firing at Iraqi soldiers to enable the men he supervised to escape. They did, but he was killed.
In five instances, the military has said it believes deaths came by friendly fire. Army Capt. Edward J. Korn, 31, of Savannah, Ga., was inadvertently shot by US forces on April 3 when he had walked over to inspect an Iraqi tank that his unit had destroyed.
Army Pfc. Jason Meyer, who turned 23 last month and marked his first wedding anniversary less than two weeks ago, was killed by shrapnel on Tuesday at the main airport on the outskirts of Baghdad.
His mother, Kathy Worthington, said the officers who arrived at her home in Howell, Mich., late that night to deliver the news “said he was in a tank or on a tank, but they never said it was friendly fire.’’ Later in the week, a Pentagon source said that it was, indeed, such an incident, because a US tank round that had been fired through an airport building, ricocheted off the tank he was next to and hit him.
In a few cases, military officials have reclassified casualties that they first said were accidental.
