I’ve written before about the non-combat deaths in Iraq. At the time I was wondering what happened to Major Gloria D. Davis, who was found dead. We have since learned that she was involved in ( or so they say) the contractor fraud scandal. While checking to see the latest on that case today, I ran across this article by Frank Rich, which ran in the New York Times yesterday. It seems Charles D. Riechers, 47, the second-highest-ranking procurement officer in the United States Air Force - killed himself by running his car’s engine in his suburban Virginia garage, two weeks after his appearance in a front-page exposé about the contractor fraud in The Washington Post. So I guess this explains SOME of the non-combat deaths.

Now the U.S. army has sent safety experts to Iraq to study the non-combat deaths, and why they are on the rise. There have been 9 already this month. There were 29 in August and 23 in September. That’s alot of unexplained deaths. It will be interesting to see what this study comes up with. I wonder how many of the accidental deaths are due to fatigue, mental stress, and our soldiers being there too damn long. We don’t know yet the full effect that extended tours are having on our troops. I’m guessing we won’t hear about it if that’s the case. 4 out of the 10 deaths reported by the Pentagon last week were non-combat related. One of the four was a vehicle rollover. There seems to be alot of those, too. Do our soldiers not know how to drive or what? If they rolled over to avoid an attack or during an attack, that would be reported, no? So many of them are just reported as accidents. What’s up with that?

Anyway, this is something I think about. Losing so many young men and women…..and so many of them not even combat related. The point is, if we weren’t there….they wouldn’t be dying there. Maybe if they want to cut down the non-combat deaths in Iraq we should just get the hell out of Iraq!