Stone Mountain, Ga. – No one asked Michael White to count the dead soldiers in Iraq.
He is not a military man, and he has no friends or relatives who serve. He is a guy with a Honda Civic, a mortgage and a job in a suburban office park. A guy with a wife and a 7-year-old daughter who has soccer games to go to.
But for almost 3 1/2 years – for no pay and no glory – White has kept a meticulous tally of every U.S. and coalition military fatality, posting the names and the numbers on his website, www.icasualties.org.
It started as a hobby – the work of a war critic who wanted to help keep the facts straight.
Today, the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post and The New York Times use White’s numbers to show the extent of the nation’s sacrifice.
Bloggers use his numbers to quell conspiracy theories, and soldiers’ parents call up the site to make sure their children are not listed on it. Job seekers have sent him résumés, unaware that the operation is little more than a guy and his laptop.
White is a former post-punk guitar player who, at age 50, favors khakis and sensible shoes. He is proud of his work and pleased that people pay attention.
But like many Americans, he doesn’t know when the war will end – and he wonders how long the site will dominate his life.
He has been particularly busy of late. His statistics show that October was the deadliest month for U.S. soldiers in Iraq since January 2005, with 105 fatalities.
This month, as of Wednesday, 40 more soldiers have died. The total number of American military fatalities stands at 2,858. It will likely surpass the 3,000 mark in a few months if trends hold.
“I work on the site every morning, every lunch, every evening,” White said. “I’m sure my wife resents it, as well she should. … There’s housework that doesn’t get done. There’s yard work that doesn’t get done.”
His wife, Ashley, admits that his obsession can be frustrating.
“When I want to do something fun on the weekends, it competes with his work on the site,” she said. “On the other hand, I’m very proud of him for his commitment.”
Like most Americans with scant ties to the war effort, White could have kept its grisly rhythms at a distance. Instead, those rhythms now define him. And yet Iraq can still seem worlds from his tidy suburban cul-de-sac and the breakfast nook where he does most of his work on a round wooden table.
A window behind him offers a view of the train tracks where, about year ago, he remembers seeing a train loaded with Humvees – a rare reminder of life during wartime.
And even now, White can seem unsure about his motivation for assuming his peculiar burden.
“Why do I do it? If you ask my mother or my sister, they’d say, ‘That’s Michael: obsessive,”‘ he said. “It’s like when I was 14 years old and locked myself in my bedroom to memorize every word to ‘Like a Rolling Stone.”‘
The U.S. Department of Defense keeps its own tally of U.S. casualties on its website, www.defenselink.mil.
“The concept from the get-go was to get an accurate count,” White said. “I’d pick up the morning paper and it would say the number was X, and then I’d hear a news report that said five more troops had been killed. But the next day in the paper, the number was still X. It was always behind, and I wanted to know what the immediate tally was.”
White added features that packaged the casualty and fatality numbers in ways that the Pentagon had not. The idea, he said, was to generate the kind of detailed data that corporate executives demand for their board meetings.
One map shows the number of coalition and U.S. deaths that have occurred in each Iraqi province. It reveals that Anbar province – the largest in the nation and home to the battle-scarred city of Fallujah – has seen more than 1,040 coalition deaths, making it a deadlier place than Baghdad, with 746 deaths.
Some of the information on White’s site, such as the number of U.S. deaths per state, is also available from the Defense Department, but White often updates his numbers faster. And White goes one step further. He breaks down the number of deaths by city.
Those kinds of details are among the chief attractions for journalists. In September, The New York Times used White’s figures to show that Houston, at the time, had sacrificed more soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan than any other city, with 27 deaths.
