Final Salute. Between 2004 and 2005, "Rocky Mountain News reporter Jim Sheeler and photographer Todd Heisler spent a year with the Marines stationed at Aurora's Buckley Air Force Base who have found themselves called upon to notify families of the deaths of their sons in Iraq. In each case in this story, the families agreed to let Sheeler and Heisler chronicle their loss and grief. They wanted people to know their sons, the men and women who brought them home, and the bond of traditions more than 200 years old that unite them. Though readers are led through the story by the white-gloved hand of Maj. Steve Beck, he remains a reluctant hero. He is, he insists, only a small part of the massive mosaic that is the Marine Corps."
The full story ran on Veteran's Day, 2005 and won two Pulitzer Prizes: one for
Feature Photography, another for
feature writing in 2006. A nice single-page version of one section:
Katherine Cathey and 2nd Lt. James J. Cathey (
via.) The Rocky Mountain News closed in 2009.
[more inside]
posted by zarq
on Oct 12, 2011 -
12 comments
CNN.com's 'Home and Away' initiative honors the lives of U.S. and coalition troops who have died in Iraq and Afghanistan. The extensive data visualization project tells the story of where and how the lives of these troops began and ended. The project is a sobering look at the human cost of two wars in the Middle East, and as such is restrained with a sober palette of blacks, whites and greys. [
via]
[more inside]
posted by netbros
on Jun 11, 2010 -
32 comments
Join Devin Friedman at Landstuhl Regional Medical Center, a city of broken men. During the current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan,
Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany has blossomed into the hub of one of the most amazing and miraculous wartime medical systems in modern history. Each week sees 14 flights into and out of the medical center, delivering dozens of war wounded from the battlefield and back out to the more specialized care centers back stateside; the rapidity of care and transit from the war fronts to stable medical care has decreased the mortality of serious wartime military injuries to just ten percent, from the high-20s/low-30s of previous wars. This is an incredibly nice look at the Landstuhl system from the perspective of a single planeload of injured soldiers.
posted by delfuego
on Nov 17, 2008 -
5 comments
The invasion of Iraq may have caused 650,000 Iraqi deaths according to a study being published in the Lancet on Saturday. The work follows up a controversial late 2004
study by the same researchers that estimated "excess deaths" due to the conflict (at that time) to be 100,000. In response to criticism that the 2004 paper's margin of error was uselessly high (the 95% confidence interval was 8,000-194,000), the new results are based on a larger sample, yielding more reasonable range of 426,000-793,000. The paper is virtually guaranteed to reignite
debate over the accuracy of the most widely cited source for Iraqi casualty information, the
Iraq Body Count project (which currently gives a max of 48,893), and the media reports it relies on. The lead author, Les Roberts of John Hopkins, has
said that the original study's publication was timed to influence the 2004 elections, and it would appear that this one is as well. [more inside]
posted by gsteff
on Oct 11, 2006 -
214 comments
Pentagon to close Walter Reed Medical Center More than 3,700 doctors and other medical personnel will be moved to a new and expanded facility to be built at the Navy's National Medical Center in Bethesda, Md., a few miles away. The move will cost nearly $989 million, and is expected to save more than $301 million over 20 years as the Pentagon seeks to streamline care and provide state of the art medical treatment for wounded servicemen and women.
And saving $301 million over 20 years is better than spending a billion dollars within the next 2 years, how?
And never mind those
18,000+ American casualties coming back from the M.E. I'm sure they'll be able to improvise bedrolls during the renovations up in Bethesda...
posted by vhsiv
on Aug 25, 2005 -
42 comments
The
Iraq Coalition Casualty Count has breakdowns of the casualties of the Iraq War and Occupation, by
home city of record,
name, branch of service, rank, and cause of death, and other statistics such as
ethnicity, as well as a printable list of all
fatalities to date.
[previously mentioned here,here,here, and here.]
posted by exlotuseater
on Aug 10, 2005 -
10 comments
Estimated civilian casualties in Iraq:
25,000. A new study by the
Oxford Research Group and
Iraq Body Count estimates that 1 in 1000 Iraqis have been killed since the US invasion began. They further estimate that 37 percent of these deaths were caused by coalition forces, and 9 percent were killed by the insurgents. Estimated civilian wounded: 42,500.
Over 1700 US troops have also died, and over 18,000 have been injured.
posted by digaman
on Jul 19, 2005 -
39 comments
Numbered Among the Dead The life's work of Marla Ruzicka, a 28-year-old American activist, had become door-to-door polling in Iraq to assess the number of civilian casualties of the war. She became one on Sunday, dying in a
suicide bomb attack. "The Marines have nicknamed me Cluster Bomb Girl because I would hear of places where they had gone off," she said in a
2003 interview, "and I would ask them to help me clear the area."
posted by rcade
on Apr 18, 2005 -
55 comments
"We're not going to have any casualties." This is the response that George W Bush gave to Pat Robertson, during a meeting in which Robertson expressed deep misgivings about the impending war in Iraq. There's been a lot of discussion about just how self-assured the President is on his positions (and how he won't admit any mistakes), but where does assurance end and delusion begin?
posted by almostcool
on Oct 20, 2004 -
48 comments
Press underreports casualties I had never heard of "Editor & Publisher" before, but I came across this link, and thought the news was rather shocking.
So while 106 troops were killed since the "end of hostilities," 1927 have been wounded since the war began, 200 have been killed from all causes, and over 4,000 troops have been medically evacuated from Iraq.
The article says the stats are easily obtained from the Pentagon web site - though all I could find was
press releases which just mention casualties one by one.
Can anyone out there find a comprehensive listing on the Pentagon's page?
The article suggests that the media are at least in part to blame here (along with the administration's general reluctance to focus on bad news). Why wouldn't newspapers want to cover injuries to the troops? I, for one, would like to see this covered. What do you all think?
posted by jasper411
on Oct 23, 2003 -
41 comments
What happened in the final days of the Gulf War? "The Battle of Rumaila was closely reviewed at the war's end by an analyst for the C.I.A., who confirmed that the Iraqi losses were great. The toll included at least a hundred tanks from the Hammurabi division. "It's like eating an artichoke," one colonel had said of combat.... 'Once you start, you can't stop.' One of the destroyed vehicles was a bus, which had been hit by a rocket. The precise number of its occupants who were injured or killed is not known, but they included civilians and children. One of the first Americans at the scene was Lieutenant Charles W. Gameros, Jr., a Scout platoon leader, who called in a Medevac team for the victims. At the time, he was "frustrated" by what he saw as needless deaths, Gameros recalled in an interview. 'Now I look at it sadly,' he said. Unresisting Iraqis had been slain all morning, but the deaths of the children troubled many soldiers."
What's happening in "the final days" of the war in Afghanistan? What will be happening in the upcoming war in Iraq?
posted by fold_and_mutilate
on Sep 5, 2002 -
100 comments
