July 30, 2003 (Wednesday)
Key West, Florida

SO, how many are dying in Iraq (not to mention the Iraqis, who apparently did not die but just vanished from the population statistics, in the obliging manner characteristic of the enemy in all wars fought by the Americans and their hapless allies in recent years).

How many American soldiers are actually dying? They no longer have names, just numbers, (which helps when a game of Find the Lady is being played); and those numbers are in my view quite suspect.

A friend who was an infantry lieutenant in Vietnam tells me this morning:

"Regarding casualties in Iraq, one 'trick' US commanders learned in Vietnam was quickly to load onto helicopters men who were clearly dying and not going to make it, so that they would not 'count' as 'killed in action'. Perhaps (probably?) there is some new formula like that ... if one doesn't die of wounds within so much time, one is not counted as having died of enemy action."

Not much consolation to the gentleman concerned, but it probably made sense in the Pentagon.

I spent two hours last night, when I should have been writing the third volume of CHURCHILL'S WAR, watching an enthralling C-Span television "window" on a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on what should have been the topic of Iraqi Reconstruction. It devolved instead into a cross examination of the appalling Under Secretary of Defence Paul Wolfowitz -- the Senators finally asking the questions that the US journalists somehow can't: the US press is still entranced, as if in a bad dream, where you sleep into the midst of some appalling nightmare and find you can't open your mouth, or if you can, your tongue has gone.

Particularly good in their grilling of the stammering, smirking, perspiring Wolfowitz -- where is the biting sarcasm of Donald Rumsfeld when the Pentagon needs it -- were Barbara Boxer of California, and Chafee and our own Senator Nelson of Florida. The Senator from New Jersey was no slouch either. The Assistant Chief of Staff, General Keane, sat there with a face like a china bulldog, the very image of a modern major general, putting on as honest a show as you would expect, having none of the wiles of the politicians.

At one moment the mask slipped, and nobody noticed. Keane, or was it Nelson, talked of how he had a few days ago visited a US army unit in Baghdad which had only just lost one of its men, -- "killed when they went into the University."

Now, I read the press accounts of that operation -- where the US army closed down a dormitory because it invading their own base's privacy. None of the newspapers mentioned any "coalition" deaths in that dorm raid.

Nor do we yet know the unfortunate soldier's name, and going on past practice in this war it seems we never will.

I find something surreal about a great country which gulps and takes a deep breath at the death of one, two, or three soldiers each day -- since I am deeply immersed in the history of military operations in 1944, when the numbers were, ahem, rather different. On reflection, the grunts had no names then either.

 The unbearable murkiness of Paul Wolfowitz