Leaks Provide More Information about non-combat deaths

Leaked papers detail local war losses

The scene after a deadly attack on a Stryker left little hope that anyone would emerge from the obliterated infantry carrier

Read more: http://www.thenewstribune.com/2010/10/26/1396352/leaked-papers-detail-local-war.html#ixzz13Sh7Fe53

More specific non-combat cases:  click here.

Counting US Non-combat Deaths

Our website, Home of the Brave, at http://non-combat-death.org includes over 1,150 listings of military personnel killed from causes other than by enemy induced deaths in battle.  We have attempted to place each of these deaths into one of the following categories: 

·        Accident, including vehicle, helicopter, electrocution, etc.

·        Friendly Fire

·        Homicide

·        Natural causes, including illness, heat stroke, etc.

·        Self-inflicted, including suicide and presumed suicide

·        Under investigation

·        Generic “non-combat cause”

·        Non-hostile gunshot wound; non-combat weapons discharge

·        Overdose

There are many problems involved in creating and keeping such a list accurately.  The majority of the listings come from the official Department of Defense death announcements which come out shortly after the deaths occur.  We rely, initially, on the cause of death listed in these announcements as “non-combat related” or some similar designation.

Unfortunately, the vast majority of these official announcements leave the cause as the generic “non-combat cause” and most are also stated to be “Under investigation.”  The DoD does not officially update their announcements once these investigations are completed, so it is a large task to go back to each listing looking for updates in the press in order to place them into a proper category.  I’ve spent a lot of time doing this, slowly updating causes of death and trying to make sure the sources are accurate.  In the past year or so, every single Marine death is announced as “died during combat operations”, which obviously skirts the cause of death.

I am quite aware that these listings are not all inclusive.  I often come across media reports of the deaths of active duty military personnel on domestic military bases or off-base which are carried only in the local media outlets.  These are added to the listings as I come across them.  Occasionally, there are wonderful people who email me listings to add or corrections of the existing lists.

Sometimes, like right now, I read books which enlighten me with historical accounts of battles in which long lists of friendly fire deaths are revealed.  I am reading Where Men Win Glory, by Jon Krakauer, a book ostensibly about Pat Tillman’s death by “friendly fire”, but packed with well-researched and documented accounts of the first days of the Iraq invasion.   I do not know why I have not been made aware of the large number of total screw ups from the day on which Jessica Lynch’s convoy mistakenly took a wrong turn to Nasiriyah prior to the first day of battle on March 23, 2003, when 29 Marines and other military personnel were killed – the majority by the horribly named, “friendly fire.” ( It would seem that we Americans are so self-reliant that we don’t need no stinkin’ enemy – we are perfectly capable of killing our own.)

The relationship of this knowledge with the problem of counting has directly to do with the misinformation fed to the media by our own government.  Initial reports of these battles, even a year later when the complete investigation was done, assigned none of the deaths to friendly fire, and yet troops on the ground were actually bombed by US planes and helicopters.  The fact that those killed were engaged in what they thought was battle with the enemy adds to the confusion in categorization.  Typically, both cockpit videotapes were mysteriously “lost” shortly after they were reviewed by officials.

An alternate story, which can still be found on some entries at the Washington Post site listing casualties is “Ambushed in Nasiriyah by Iraqi soldiers who pretended to surrender, then opened fire when the Marines approached.”  This, also, has been proven to be a fabrication.  These soldiers were also most likely killed by friendly fire.  A relatively small number of US Marines were actually killed by Iraqis on March 23, 2003.

I would remind the reader of the preposterous stories fed to the press about the Jessica Lynch “rescue” from an Iraqi hospital where she was reported to have been not only shot while shooting back, but also raped and tortured.  By now, all should be aware that this was a total fabrication.  Her own testimony in one of the Tillman hearings confirms that her weapon was jammed and that she did not fire a single round.  She was well treated in an Iraqi hospital and there was little resistance when US troops came for her.  Nevertheless, video was produced which would lead one to believe that this was a dangerous mission.

Then, there is the cover up of Pat Tillman’s death, with the various politically advantageous tall tales told before the Army was finally forced to admit that he was killed by members of his own platoon.  To this date, his family is still trying to get the whole truth.

The 1994 “friendly fire” attack of a Black Hawk Helicopter flying over Iraq killed Lt. Laura Piper and 25 other people.  Her mother has written a book, A Chain of Events, which exposes the cover up of the incident by the US Air Force.

Since my own son’s death included one of these totally fabricated stories by unnamed Military sources, this pattern of deception by our own government is particularly disturbing to me.

Still, the American public believes what it wants to believe, despite massive evidence proving that we are being lied to on a regular basis about how our military members are killed.

So, I am now confirming the names and causes of death of the military personnel named in Krakauer’s book.  There were also names and descriptions of soldiers killed in non-combat death situations in the book Black Hearts, by Jim Frederick which await confirmation and addition to our lists.  I am likely to come across other sources.

Homicides within the military have only recently begun to be reported publicly.  Suicides, which may in fact be murders staged to look like suicides, are usually not properly investigated, so although families dispute the official cause of death frequently, there is no way of accurately counting suicides vs. homicides in a military setting.

One of the additional problems with keeping this list, is that families are sometimes convinced that a non-combat death is somehow less honorable than a combat death.  I’ve heard people say that they wish their loved one had been killed in combat…  So, some causes of death are purposely not revealed for that reason.

We will probably never know the accurate, comprehensive number of non-combat deaths in the current conflicts, let alone domestically.  Our lists are only an attempt to get an idea of just how many of our Soldiers, Sailors, Marines, and Airmen are killed in non-combat incidents while on active duty.  There are others who have begun to investigate similar deaths occurring shortly after discharge from the military services which are coming up with alarming numbers.

Donna Janeczko 

Loose Lips Sink Ships: Parallels and Connections

Stanley McChrystal was engaged in a pissing contest with Administration Officials. It’s worked for him in the past.

Surely, he knows that we can’t win in Afghanistan. “It's not going to look like a win, smell like a win or taste like a win," says Maj. Gen. Bill Mayville, who serves as chief of operations for McChrystal.”

“Today, as McChrystal gears up for an offensive in southern Afghanistan, the prospects for any kind of success look bleak. In June, the death toll for U.S. troops passed 1,000, and the number of IEDs has doubled. Spending hundreds of billions of dollars on the fifth-poorest country on earth has failed to win over the civilian population, whose attitude toward U.S. troops ranges from intensely wary to openly hostile.” It is unlikely that after all the years the US has spent in Afghanistan we will even undo the damage done to the country by the Taliban after they received US aid during the Soviet occupation.

“The general's staff is a handpicked collection of killers, spies, geniuses, patriots, political operators and outright maniacs.” “…they pride themselves on their can-do attitude and their disdain for authority.”

Still, unless the magic of positive thinking results in the refutation of history, McChrystal would have been the general in charge of losing. Getting himself fired was a way out. Maybe that was his intent in giving access to Rolling Stone reporter, Michael Hastings.

Publicly criticizing Biden, Eikenberry, Holbrooke, Jones, etc. fit his macho image and would be consistent with any plan to get out of his position of “sure-to-fail Commander.” He may have strategized a “best case” scenario for himself.

Military personnel on active duty, at any level, do not have the luxury of engaging in this type of public criticism. This is not accepted military demeanor.

What is the connection of this story with the handling of non-combat military deaths and the experiences of surviving families?

First, there appears to be a total disregard for the lower ranking military personnel who are in Afghanistan, in danger of death by I.E.D., suicide, accident, or fratricide. While the “pissing contest” proceeds at the highest levels of authority, people are dying. In the light of the hopelessness admitted by McChrystal’s aides, they are dying for nothing.

Let’s not forget McChrystal’s very active role in the cover up of Pat Tillman’s “friendly fire” death. He was also involved in a prisoner abuse scandal at Camp Nama in Iraq. Although one would think that McChrystal surely deserved demotion for all this -- he received regular promotions in rank and no punishment worth mentioning. All of these risky projects just helped him climb the ladder of success in his career.

I’d nearly forgotten that I wrote to my US Senators from Virginia when McChrystal was up for the Afghanistan Command, protesting that he was not worthy of such a distinction. No one paid attention.

Some of us have had experience with commanders who deny families access to information and have covered up for malfeasance. On a personal level, I can comment on the unseemly behavior of McChrystal and his team and draw parallels from the time of my son’s death and the media coverage shortly afterwards. There seemed to be no consequences for such actions -- until today.

Planting false stories in the press is something Stanley McChrystal would appear to approve of if the end result was politically expedient. Disseminating disinformation is not a skill that I admire. Sacrificing lives for personal gain is not a skill that I admire. Manipulating grieving families and causing pain in order to achieve some political goal is not a skill that I admire.

I hope that there will be a carryover to the entire US Military organization at all levels.

Braveheart

Quotations are from the article, “The Runaway General”, by Michael Hastings which appeared in Rolling Stone: http://www.rollingstone.com/

More:
Revisiting the Pat Tillman Story, and McChrystal's Role
Did Pat Tillman Reach Out From the Grave?
Tillman Mother Sought to Warn Obama of McChrystal
General McChrystal's Ties to Pat Tillman Cover-up
General McChrystal's Credibility Problem

Attrition: The Enemy Has Your Back, And Your Feet

May 14, 2009: In the last eight months, U.S. troops in Iraq have had more to fear from accidents, disease and stress, than enemy action. In those eight months, 139 troops died, but only 48 percent as a result of combat. This is a trend that has been growing for over a year.

Through the end of last year, 4,300 U.S. troops have died in Iraq, and 19 percent of those fatalities were from non-combat causes. Most of the non-combat deaths were from accidents and disease. One of the major categories of non-combat death is vehicle accidents. In 2007, 20 percent of the non-combat deaths were from vehicle accidents. But in 2008, overall deaths declined by two thirds (from 904 in 2007, to 312 in 2008), but vehicle accident deaths went from 37 to 19.

Read the entire story by clicking here.

Mother Fights Army Over Son's Death

By ROBERT IMRIE – Mar 23, 2008

WAUSAU, Wis. (AP) — Joan McDonald believes her son was a casualty of the war in Iraq, but the Army says that while he did suffer a severe head wound in a bomb blast, the cause of his death is undetermined, keeping him off the casualty list.

She and her family are demanding more answers in the death of Sgt. James W. McDonald.

"I don't want it to be an undetermined cause of death," said Joan McDonald. "That is ridiculous."

McDonald, 26, was injured in a roadside bomb blast in Iraq last May. He was assigned to the 1st Battalion, 5th Cavalry Regiment based at Fort Hood, Texas. After treatment in Germany, McDonald returned to Fort Hood and underwent extensive facial surgery in August.

His body was found in his barracks apartment Nov. 12, a Monday. He was last seen alive the previous Friday.

The Army ruled out suicide and accidental factors, but an autopsy could not determine the exact cause of death, in part because of the decomposition of the body, said Col. Diane Battaglia, a base spokeswoman.

As a result, McDonald's death is considered noncombat-related, with the caveat that medical experts couldn't rule out that "traumatic brain injury" may have been a factor, Battaglia said.
Joan McDonald, of Neenah, has no doubts about her son's death.

"If my son was not at the war, he would not be dead, plain and simple," she said. "He was a strong healthy boy. ... Don't tell me it was unrelated to the war. I will never accept that."

Tom Wilborn, a spokesman for Disabled American Veterans in Washington, said the question of whether McDonald was a war casualty is the first that he was aware of from the Iraq war.

"But it happened a lot during Vietnam," he said. "There's a long history where guys would be wounded in the jungle and they might live long enough to come home. And then they would pass away and were not counted as a combat casualty."

According to an Army study in 2007, 1.4 million people in the U.S. suffer traumatic brain injuries each year. Of those, 50,000 die, 235,000 are hospitalized and 1.1 million are evaluated, treated at a hospital emergency department and released.

A Government Accountability Office study found that of soldiers who required a medical evacuation for battle-related injuries in Iraq or Afghanistan, 30 percent suffered a traumatic brain injury. But it was unknown how many soldiers suffered more mild forms of brain injury.

The family has asked Sen. Russ Feingold, D-Wis., for help. McDonald has a copy of a March 11 letter Feingold sent to Maj. Gen. Galen Jakman at the Pentagon outlining her concerns.

McDonald said her son was a strapping 6-foot-3, 200-pound soldier who served two tours of duty in Iraq and loved the military.

"He was having a problem sleeping since he came back from the war. I don't think it had anything to do with sleep apnea. I think it had to do with bombs," she said.

He also had seen a doctor because of severe nose bleeds but was told the symptoms were not that unusual, given his August surgery, she said.

Before he died, McDonald had worked on the base at a weapons room and the post office, she said. He had planned to leave the Army in January to pursue a career in firefighting.

She said she recently ran across a T-shirt that said he helped build a memorial wall at Fort Hood to honor its soldiers killed in Iraq.

"I want his name on that wall," she said. "We don't know what else to do. I have one brother who is saying 'Does it matter. To you, he is a casualty of war. To everyone that knew him, he is a casualty of war.' I am like, well, it kinda does matter."

Suspected Army suicides set record

By Gregg Zoroya, USA TODAY

WASHINGTON — A record number of soldiers — 109 — have killed themselves this year, according to Army statistics showing confirmed or suspected suicides.
The deaths occur as soldiers serve longer combat deployments and the Army spends $100 million on support programs.

ON DEADLINE: Vets' suicides also being scrutinized

"Soldiers, families and equipment are stretched and stressed," Gen. George Casey, Army chief of staff, told Congress last month.

The Army provided suicide statistics to Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash. Her staff shared them with USA TODAY.

Those numbers show 77 confirmed suicides Army-wide this year through Nov. 27 and 32 other deaths pending final determination as suicides.

The Army updated those statistics Wednesday, confirming 85 suicides, including 27 in Iraq and four in Afghanistan.

The highest number of Army suicides recorded since 1990 was 102 in 1992 — a period when the service was 20% larger than today.

A total of 109 suicides this year would equal a rate of 18.4 per 100,000, the highest since the Army started counting in 1980. The civilian suicide rate was 11 per 100,000 in 2004, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The military hasn't erased the stigma surrounding mental health issues, so troubled soldiers often do not seek help, Murray says.

"I want to say I'm surprised" by the suicide increase, she says. "But when we're not doing everything we can to deal with mental health, when we know the Army is under such stress, it's not a surprise. It has to be a wakeup call."

The Army has moved more aggressively in recent years to stem suicides, instituting mandatory training for every soldier about mental health and establishing a program to study its suicides.

Research released by the Army in August shows that almost 70% of suicides in 2006 were spurred by failed relationships.

The Army continues to improve its suicide-prevention programs, spokesman Paul Boyce said Wednesday. A hotline number — 800-342-9647 — is also available.

Since Sept. 11, 2001, records show that 128 soldiers have killed themselves while serving in Iraq or Afghanistan.

One was Spc. Travis Virgadamo, 19, of Las Vegas. His family said he was on suicide watch but was eventually taken off, and his gun was returned. "That night he killed himself," says his grandmother, Kate O'Brien, of Pahrump, Nev.

O'Brien says her grandson desperately wanted to come home.

"He would say, 'Grandma, pray for me.' " she says. "What good is somebody (to the war effort) that is under such stress?"

120 War Vets Commit Suicide Each Week

By Penny Coleman, AlterNet
Posted on November 26, 2007,
Printed on November 26, 2007

Earlier this year, using the clout that only major broadcast networks seem capable of mustering, CBS News contacted the governments of all 50 states requesting their official records of death by suicide going back 12 years. They heard back from 45 of the 50. From the mountains of gathered information, they sifted out the suicides of those Americans who had served in the armed forces. What they discovered is that in 2005 alone -- and remember, this is just in 45 states -- there were at least 6,256 veteran suicides, 120 every week for a year and an average of 17 every day.

As the widow of a Vietnam vet who killed himself after coming home, and as the author of a book for which I interviewed dozens of other women who had also lost husbands (or sons or fathers) to PTSD and suicide in the aftermath of the war in Vietnam, I am deeply grateful to CBS for undertaking this long overdue investigation. I am also heartbroken that the numbers are so astonishingly high and tentatively optimistic that perhaps now that there are hard numbers to attest to the magnitude of the problem, it will finally be taken seriously. I say tentatively because this is an administration that melts hard numbers on their tongues like communion wafers.

Since these new wars began, and in spite of a continuous flood of alarming reports, the Department of Defense has managed to keep what has clearly become an epidemic of death beneath the radar of public awareness by systematically concealing statistics about soldier suicides. They have done everything from burying them on official casualty lists in a category they call "accidental noncombat deaths" to outright lying to the parents of dead soldiers. And the Department of Veterans Affairs has rubber-stamped their disinformation, continuing to insist that their studies indicate that soldiers are killing themselves, not because of their combat experiences, but because they have "personal problems."

Active-duty soldiers, however, are only part of the story. One of the well-known characteristics of post-traumatic stress injuries is that the onset of symptoms is often delayed, sometimes for decades. Veterans of World War II, Korea and Vietnam are still taking their own lives because new PTSD symptoms have been triggered, or old ones retriggered, by stories and images from these new wars. Their deaths, like the deaths of more recent veterans, are written up in hometown newspapers; they are locally mourned, but officially ignored. The VA doesn't track or count them. It never has. Both the VA and the Pentagon deny that the problem exists and sanctimoniously point to a lack of evidence they have refused to gather.

They have managed this smoke and mirrors trick for decades in large part because suicide makes people so uncomfortable. It has often been called "that most secret death" because no one wants to talk about it. Over time, in different parts of the world, attitudes have fluctuated between the belief that the act is a sin, a right, a crime, a romantic gesture, an act of consummate bravery or a symptom of mental illness. It has never, however, been an emotionally neutral issue.

In the United States, the rationalism of our legal system has acknowledged for 300 years that the act is almost always symptomatic of a mental illness. For those same 300 years, organized religions have stubbornly maintained that it's a sin. In fact, the very worst sin. The one that is never forgiven because it's too late to say you're sorry.

The contradiction between religious doctrine and secular law has left suicide in some kind of nether space in which the fundamentals of our systems of justice and belief are disrupted. A terrible crime has been committed, a murder, and yet there can be no restitution, no punishment. As sin or as mental illness, the origins of suicide live in the mind, illusive, invisible, associated with the mysterious, the secretive and the undisciplined, a kind of omnipresent Orange Alert. Beware the abnormal. Beware the Other.

For years now, this administration has been blasting us with high-decibel, righteous posturing about suicide bombers, those subhuman dastards who do the unthinkable, using their own bodies as lethal weapons. "Those people, they aren't like us; they don't value life the way we do," runs the familiar xenophobic subtext: And sometimes the text isn't even sub-: "Many terrorists who kill innocent men, women, and children on the streets of Baghdad are followers of the same murderous ideology that took the lives of our citizens in New York, in Washington and Pennsylvania," proclaimed W, glibly conflating Sept. 11, the invasion of Iraq, Islam, fanatic fundamentalism and human bombs.

Bush has also expressed the opinion that suicide bombers are motivated by despair, neglect and poverty. The demographic statistics on suicide bombers suggest that this isn't the necessarily the case. Most of the Sept. 11 terrorists came from comfortable middle- to upper-middle-class families and were well-educated. Ironically, despair, neglect and poverty may be far more significant factors in the deaths of American soldiers and veterans who are taking their own lives.

Consider the 25 percent of enlistees and the 50 percent of reservists who have come back from the war with serious mental health issues. Despair seems an entirely appropriate response to the realization that the nightmares and flashbacks may never go away, that your ability to function in society and to manage relationships, work schedules or crowds will never be reliable. How not to despair if your prognosis is: Suck it up, soldier. This may never stop!

Neglect? The VA's current backlog is 800,000 cases. Aside from the appalling conditions in many VA hospitals, in 2004, the last year for which statistics are available, almost 6 million veterans and their families were without any healthcare at all. Most of them are working people -- too poor to afford private coverage, but not poor enough to qualify for Medicaid or means-tested VA care. Soldiers and veterans need help now, the help isn't there, and the conversations about what needs to be done are only just now beginning.

Poverty? The symptoms of post-traumatic stress injuries or traumatic brain injuries often make getting and keeping a job an insurmountable challenge. The New York Times reported last week that though veterans make up only 11 percent of the adult population, they make up 26 percent of the homeless. If that doesn't translate into despair, neglect and poverty, well, I'm not sure the distinction is one worth quibbling about.

There is a particularly terrible irony in the relationship between suicide bombers and the suicides of American soldiers and veterans. With the possible exception of some few sadists and psychopaths, Americans don't enlist in the military because they want to kill civilians. And they don't sign up with the expectation of killing themselves. How incredibly sad that so many end up dying of remorse for having performed acts that so disturb their sense of moral selfhood that they sentence themselves to death.

There is something so smugly superior in the way we talk about suicide bombers and the cultures that produce them. But here is an unsettling thought. In 2005, 6,256 American veterans took their own lives. That same year, there were about 130 documented deaths of suicide bombers in Iraq.* Do the math. That's a ratio of 50-to-1. So who is it that is most effectively creating a culture of suicide and martyrdom? If George Bush is right, that it is despair, neglect and poverty that drive people to such acts, then isn't it worth pointing out that we are doing a far better job?

*I say "about" because in the aftermath of a suicide bombing, it is often very difficult for observers to determine how many individual bodies have been blown to pieces.

Penny Coleman is the widow of a Vietnam veteran who took his own life after coming home. Her latest book, Flashback: Posttraumatic Stress Disorder, Suicide and the Lessons of War, was released on Memorial Day, 2006. Her blog is Flashback.

--contributed by Patti Woodard

Pentagon Cover Up: 15,000 or more US casualties in Iraq War

By Mike Whitney

11/17/07 "ICH" -- -- The Pentagon has been concealing the true number of American casualties in the Iraq War. The real number exceeds 15,000 and CBS News can prove it.

CBS’s Investigative Unit wanted to do a report on the number of suicides in the military and “submitted a Freedom of Information Act request to the Department of Defense”. After 4 months they received a document which showed--that between 1995 and 2007--there were 2,200 suicides among “active duty” soldiers.

Baloney.

The Pentagon was covering up the real magnitude of the “suicide epidemic”. Following an exhaustive investigation of veterans’ suicide data collected from 45 states; CBS discovered that in 2005 alone “THERE WERE AT LEAST 6,256 AMONG THOSE WHO SERVED IN THE ARMED FORCES. THAT’S 120 EACH AND EVERY WEEK IN JUST ONE YEAR.”

That is not a typo. Active and retired military personnel, mostly young veterans between the ages of 20 to 24, are returning from combat and killing themselves in record numbers. We can assume that "multiple-tours of duty" in a war-zone have precipitated a mental health crisis of which the public is entirely unaware and which the Pentagon is in total denial.

If we add the 6,256 suicide victims from 2005 to the “official” 3,865 reported combat casualties; we get a sum of 10,121. Even a low-ball estimate of similar 2004 and 2006 suicide figures, would mean that the total number of US casualties from the Iraq war now exceed 15,000.

That’s right; 15,000 dead US servicemen and women in a war that--as yet--has no legal or moral justification.

CBS interviewed Dr. Ira Katz, the head of mental health at the Department of Veteran Affairs. Katz attempted to minimize the surge in veteran suicides saying, “There is no epidemic of suicide in the VA, but suicide is a major problem.”


Maybe Katz right. Maybe there is no epidemic. Maybe it’s perfectly normal for young men and women to return from combat, sink into inconsolable depression, and kill themselves at greater rates than they were dying on the battlefield. Maybe it’s normal for the Pentagon to abandon them as soon as soon they return from their mission so they can blow their brains out or hang themselves with a garden hose in their basement. Maybe it's normal for politicians to keep funding wholesale slaughter while they brush aside the casualties they have produced by their callousness and lack of courage. Maybe it is normal for the president to persist with the same, bland lies that perpetuate the occupation and continue to kill scores of young soldiers who put themselves in harm’s-way for their country.

It’s not normal; it’s is a pandemic---an outbreak of despair which is the natural corollary of living in constant fear; of seeing one’s friends being dismembered by roadside bombs or children being blasted to bits at military checkpoints or finding battered bodies dumped on the side of a riverbed like a bag of garbage.

&nsp; The rash of suicides is the logical upshot of Bush’s war. Returning soldiers are traumatized by their experience and now they are killing themselves in droves. Maybe we should have thought about that before we invaded.

Check it out the video at: CBS News “Suicide Epidemic among Veterans” http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/11/13/cbsnews_investigates/main3496471.shtml

--contributed by Patti Woodard