This was just more of an observation. Today while eating, the TV happened to be on and unfortunately, the real news (daily show) wasn't on, so I settled for the news that was on. Apparently, since we've been in Iraq, U.S. causualties (sp, but eh) are now ~1700-1800 due to combat. However, there have also been ~250 *non-hostile* deaths. That number is more than 10% of the combats deaths as anybody with a 5th grade math education can see, so wtf? What exactly classifies as a non-hostile death? I imagine that few of these are actually from natural causes, so that means something else must be killing them. And if it's not hostiles, who's left?

Edit: I realize the link off of seek right now says it's past 1000, but I was just going off of the tv news. But again, even with the numbers mentioned in the first few sentences, that's still more than 1400

The death toll is around 1,000, not 1,700-1,800

http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&ned=u ... death+toll

I think friendly-fire is considered a non-hostile death, and I'd imagine (considering how much of a problem it's been since the Gulf War) that it's one of the bigger sources of such deaths.

helicopter crashes

Well if you take a second to think about it... it would be any death not caused by a hostile force AKA sickness, accident, friendly fire, etc.

Jesus... think people

I hardly think that the health requirement for serving in the military have dropped so low that over 10% (20% if you say only 1000) of deaths are due to sickness. I'm sure that everybody realizes that any non-hostile deaths would be any death not caused by a hostile force. Jesus...think for a second, that is not a revelation.

There have been lots of cases of field exercise accidents such as mid-air collisions with jets, helicopter crashes, and friendly fire incidents such as allied forces firing on other allied forces mistakenly identified as enemy.