Military mishaps in Iraq

by John Buchel

State Editor

Casualties in the U.S. war against Iraq have not all been due to enemy fire.

18 people were killed Sunday and at least 45 were injured when an American jetfighter dropped a bomb on a convoy that included U.S. Special Forces and Kurdish fighters.

Michael Kelly, the Washington Post columnist who was the first embedded American journalist to die covering the war, was killed when the Humvee he was riding in rolled into a canal outside of Baghdad while under enemy fire.

In the first weeks of the war, Sgt. Hasan Akbar was charged with two counts of attempted murder and 17 counts of attempted murder under military law when he rolled a grenade into a tent where his commanding officers slept.

Lt. Col. Tim Donovan, a spokesman for the Army National Guard, said bizarre accidents could not be attributed to a lack of training for military personal.

“They have absolutely been trained well,” Donovan said. “The real problem is that Southeast Asia is a very hostile environment.”

Donovan said he was surprised there had not been more accidents, helicopter crashes and the like, when there are so many troops operating under such adverse conditions.

“More often than not, pilots are finding missiles and antiaircraft weapons fired at them,” Donovan said. “The hot weather and blind sand from sandstorms also make it difficult to operate. [The accidents] have nothing to do with training and everything to do with the environment.”

Dr. John Drago, assistant professor of anesthesiology at the University of Maryland Medical Center, said he observed a lot of technical mishaps in his time working in Mobile Army Surgical Hospitals for the U.S. Army Medical Corps.

“From a medical standpoint, you see those things. I’ve had to take care of a lot of people who had had accidents,” Drago said. “I was never in a combat situation, but even in our training we had helicopter crashes and other things happen.”

To offer perspective on military mishaps, Drago pointed out the tremendous number of work-related injuries that occur annually in the United States.

“You could look at any large construction company or a company that deals with heavy machinery like Caterpillar or John Deere and there’s a lot of accidents,” Drago said. “Most of those people don’t work with machinery like helicopters or bombs, where the margin of error is very small for a fatal accident to happen.”

Drago said that while U.S. troops undergo a great deal of training, many of the servicemen are around the ages of 19 and 20 and are making life-or-death decisions in the heat of battle, which can never be perfectly simulated in practice.

Drago also said troops probably feel stress and scrutiny from embedded journalists who are covering the war. When a U.S. Marine draped an American flag over the head of a statue of Saddam Hussein as Baghdad fell to coalition forces Wednesday, some saw it as a public-relations nightmare for U.S. officials trying to spin the war as liberation and not invasion.

“They’re under the microscope of the world,” Drago said. “Can you imagine if you had a reporter on your tail all the time, so every time you ran a red light it was on the 6 o’clock news?”