Thursday, July 24, 2008

One Hundred



That is the number of female service members who have now died in Iraq:

Of the 100 female service members who died:

# 97 were troops, and three were military civilian employees.

# 61 of them have been classified as hostile -- occurring during combat or enemy attacks -- and 39 have been non-hostile.

# 12 died in 2003, 19 in 2004, 20 in 2005, 15 in 2006, 27 in 2007 and seven this year.

# 80 of those were members of the Army, nine were Navy, seven were Marines, and four were Air Force.

So the hostile death rate is 61 percent. And women are not engaging in direct combat? That pretense must stop, especially given the character of the fighting in Iraq: it has no front and no safe places.

The pretense is also harmful for female veterans, because they don't get the kind of help and treatment many of them need after returning home. They weren't in combat, after all.