Name Unknown: The Anonymous Casualties of War

Last month in the Burnside Writers Collective, editor Jordan Green wrote a moving tribute to three friends who were killed in Iraq. In conjunction with his essay, Jordan posted the names of the 3,299 American soldiers who have lost their lives since the war began four years ago. “The names of these soldiers are routinely used as political tokens,” he wrote. But the soldiers are more than just names. “They had family and friends and experiences, and, when we use them as tokens, we disregard their humanity.” Jordan concluded his piece with an invitation to BWC readers to honor the fallen by leaving memories on the comment board.

From the beginning, Jordan’s essay on the slain American soldiers was to be paired with another essay, which I would write, about the Iraqi civilian casualties. The essay I had in mind was angry and urgent, a little sarcastic, with a touch of righteous indignation. It would be short, nothing more than an introduction to the thousands of Arab names which would follow. Very likely, no one would post memories in the comments section, but that was just as well. I wasn’t interested in individual tributes. The essay I planned to write was less about grieving for dead Iraqis and more about giving full vent to my antiwar sentiments. The collection of names would tell a larger narrative - actually, page one of Chapter One of a story that would unfold for decades to come: a house on fire and how maybe we lit the match.

But an internet search for the names of Iraqi civilian casualties is an exercise in frustration. With the exception of one door-to-door survey conducted in 2003 by The Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict (CIVIC), no serious attempt has been made in the West to document the identities of dead civilians. The media cannot or will not do it. Advocacy groups like CIVIC are easily overwhelmed as the violence escalates. And the military isn’t interested. Referring to the war in Afghanistan, General Tommy Franks once famously said, “We don’t do body counts.”

This policy of “no body counts,” which was extended to Operation Iraqi Freedom, has led to casualty estimates that range from the absurdly low to the shockingly high. When President Bush was asked in December 2005 how many civilians had been killed in Iraq - by coalition forces as well as by terrorists and anti-occupation insurgents - he answered, “Thirty thousand, give or take.” Setting aside for a moment the casual “guesstimation” of his response, Bush was probably getting his numbers from the Iraq Body Count (IBC), a website which catalogs and tallies civilian casualties based on eyewitness accounts and the prevalence of media reports. IBC is frequently cited by news outlets and policymakers. In December 2005, the Iraq Body Count stood at 34,000. But the IBC urges the public to remember that many deaths go unreported. It is reasonable to assume, the website says, that for every reported casualty there are nine unconfirmable casualties. As of May 6, 2007, the IBC has confirmed 62,842 civilian deaths.

Two other estimates are worth noting. Late last year, Ali al-Shemari, the Iraqi health minister, reckoned that 150,000 civilians had been killed since the start of the war. This is based on the number of bodies brought to Iraqi morgues and hospitals, including the central morgue in Baghdad which was averaging 60 violent death victims per day in November 2006.

A study conducted by Johns Hopkins University and published in The Lancet last year relied not on body counts but on interviews with households. It put the civilian death toll at a staggering 655,000, about one-third of which were directly attributed to coalition forces. Most of the victims were men between the ages of 15 and 44. The Bush administration quickly dismissed the study, and The Wall Street Journal and right-wing bloggers attacked its methodology. But pollsters like John Zogby and statisticians from other universities defended the research. Ronald Waldman, an epidemiologist at Columbia University told The Washington Post that the survey method was “tried and true.” The Johns Hopkins study was, he said, “the best estimate of mortality we have.”

Thirty thousand. Sixty-two thousand. Six hundred and fifty-five thousand. These aren’t people, just large numbers. They are abstractions, rounded up or down to the nearest zero, vulnerable to “give or take.” I had always been uncomfortable with the idea of copying and pasting tens of thousands of names - a good chunk of an entire generation of young Iraqi men. But now I was faced with another issue: how to demonstrate the civilian cost of war without them.

I test-drove a few possibilities. Having settled on the authoritative and more conservative (and somehow more “palatable”) Iraq Body Count, I opened Microsoft Word and wrote “Anonymous” 62,842 times. The document ran to more than 1,100 pages. But, scrolling down, I discovered I didn’t like “Anonymous” after all. I associated the word with sixteenth-century morality plays and authors who were theoretical even to classics professors. I used the Find and Replace feature to change “Anonymous” to “Name Unknown.” I still wasn’t satisfied. Now the list had an air of bureaucratic sterility. To save space, I tried to organize the list into three columns, but my computer crashed.

Posted on May 7, 2007 12:00 AM