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Sunday, April 06, 2003

By Lillian Thomas, Post-Gazette Staff Writer

Counting the dead is as old as warfare, the most basic way to keep score.

The Hebrews reported how many Philistines they slew, the Greeks how many Persians, and the United States how many Vietnamese enemy troops.

Not any more.

"We don't count enemy dead," said Maj. Ted Wadsworth, a Department of Defense public information officer.

The Pentagon counts U.S. troops killed, injured, taken prisoner or missing in action, but it's silent on Iraqi military deaths and civilian deaths.

"This is very much driven by the Vietnam experience," said Robert Turner at the Center for National Security Law at the University of Virginia. "[Former Defense Secretary Robert] McNamara was into quantifying everything to do with the war. His idea was, 'Let's count the number of enemy dead,' with high body counts meaning you were doing a good job.

"So you would literally go out and see arms and legs and body parts" after a battle, said Turner, who did two tours of duty in Vietnam. "So people would say 'Here's a hand -- that's one. There's a leg -- that's two. It took on an unsavory aspect -- that the goal was to kill as many enemy soldiers as possible."

Sgt. Ray Smith was a tank commander who served in the Central Highlands of Vietnam in 1968-69 with the 1st Battalion 69th Armor, 4th Infantry Division. Smith, now of Costa Mesa, Calif., said there were no overestimates in his experience, but verifies that it was a grisly business.

"Personally, I never heard the term 'body count' until I returned to the United States after my tour. They were called 'enemy casualty reports' in Vietnam just as they were in Germany." They had to be verified by a senior officer, he said.

"More than once we had to haul dead NVA/VC out from remote battle sites on the back decks of our tanks to a place where a battalion or brigade officer could see them in person before they were counted. On several occasions, my crew and I, along with an infantry rifle squad, sat in the sun, baby-sitting bloated corpses until they could be officially counted. Only then did we get the unpleasant job of burying the bodies."

The public recoiled from the idea of counting the dead, and from stories of systematic overcounting by commanders.

"That's in the package of lessons learned from Vietnam," Turner said. "We don't count bodies. We say we've degraded the [enemy] division by 40 to 50 percent." Buildings, equipment, vehicles that are destroyed are counted. People are just a part of that general assessment.

Warfare played out at greater and greater distances because of technological change has made counting the dead more problematic, Turner said. When you bomb a building from miles away or shoot at an opponent in night battles, you might never end up near the place where the bodies are.

But the dearth of information about enemy dead is a result of conscious policy as well as the difficulties in getting data.

In both Gulf wars, the United States has sought to accomplish specific aims not related to taking out large numbers of enemy troops. Killing many Iraqis wouldn't have meant winning in the first war had the invading troops not been driven out of Kuwait. In fact, given how overmatched those troops were, high numbers of casualties would be read more as a sign of overzealousness by the United States than as victory, Turner said.

The Pentagon didn't release any figures after the war.

When Beth Osborne Daponte, then a 29-year-old Census Bureau demographer, did in 1992, it didn't go over well. Daponte looked at indirect as well as direct casualties -- estimating numbers of people who died after the war in postwar violence and due to war-related damage to infrastructure (for example, contaminated water that led to much higher infant mortality rates). Her initial estimates were 158,000 and her final study put the number about 205,000. Her superiors proposed firing her, but withdrew the proposal after the American Civil Liberties Union offered to defend her free-speech rights. She left several months later. She subsequently came to Pittsburgh, where she was at the University of Pittsburgh and then Carnegie Mellon University, where she is a senior research scientist.

Daponte agreed that getting good numbers in the midst of combat is difficult. "There's a tension between impatience to get numbers and the issue of getting good numbers." But minimum estimates can be made, and systems of surveying the population planned so that accurate numbers can be collected after the conflict is over, she said.

The sensitivity over casualty numbers is, if anything, greater in this Gulf War than the last.

Because the stated aim of the war is to take out the ruling regime, "counting bodies in this case doesn't indicate very much," Turner said. "It might be a sign of failure unless those bodies are Saddam, members of his family or close supporters."

Because the long-term plan includes running Iraq after the war, the military wants to keep casualty numbers as low as possible. "The more mothers and fathers lose children, the more wives lose husbands, the more anger there will be toward the people who killed them," Turner said.

So the Pentagon remains mute.

But whether they are counting bodies or not, they are dealing with corpses, the inevitable product of war.

"We bury their dead in accordance with the Geneva Conventions," said Lt. Herb Josey, a spokesman with Central Command in Doha, Qatar. "We follow the tenants of the Geneva Conventions and treat enemy war dead in accordance with that document." If someone comes forward to claim a body, it is turned over. Otherwise, U.S. troops bury it themselves. There are no specialized burial teams, Josey said -- it's a job that any soldier might be called on to do.

It is custom in much of the Islamic world to bury the dead within 24 hours, or even by sundown of the day of death.

Josey said burial would take place as quickly as possible anyway, for health reasons. "We don't know that everyone [to be buried] is Muslim but we do try to conform as much as possible to local cultural and religious mores.

"We are also required to mark the burial site," Josey said. "There is some documentation."

Such documentation is not compiled and added together, however.

"It's a political decision," Da-ponte said. The data might be difficult to get, but at the least minimum counts based on number of interred, number of confirmed killed by commanders on the ground, and number from reliable witnesses could be compiled. "The decision is made: don't add, don't collect."