So few???
There have been 706 US fatal casualties. , since the begining of the conflict.
Of those 706, some 637 have occurred since May 1st, 2003. And of those 637, only 401 were hostile fire related. The other 236 were either friendly fire related or non-combat related incidents.
If you do the math on this, it shows that about 1/3 of the US casualties were caused by negligence, faulty machinery, and good old plain stupidity!!
It´s a really high number, by all accounts.
Now, either the Department of Defense lied about these numbers, maybe to hide the true mortality rate of the war and portraite it less deadly than what it really is;
or,
these numbers are actually correct, and thus show a very undertrained,unprepared, obtuse, and totally subpar military force! Take your pick!
I believe the answer is somewhere in between. There are a lot of people in Iraq that should have been retrained, especcially the National Guard people, and the reserves that Bush had to resort to. I call them the "weekend warriors". Then there´s those guys who get to drive a Hummvee without a license, and crash at the first corner! Not to mention the trigger happy fools, that shoot at anything that moves, and ask questions later...
Put that all together, and you get a grim picture.
If we could cross check the units from where the troops come from with the non-hostile casualties, i would bet most of them came from poorly trained and n00bie-green outfits. Rummsfeld needed every warm body he could find, and he took everything he could get, idiots and all.
I wonder what they tell the families...
"Sorry ma´am, your boy drowned when he tried using an M-1 tank as a river raft in the Euphrates. Here´s his Silver Star for his original thinking..."
Or
"Sorry ma´am, your husband died in "Airaq", while playing baseball with a live grenade".
No medal for him, he didn´t finish the home run."
:confused:

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"Quincitilius Varus, give me back my legions!"
Emperor Augustus of Rome.