The Gazette December 01, 2004
Costs of Iraq rising at home
By Tom Roeder
The 2nd Brigade Combat Team is seeing its soldiers killed in Iraq at a pace that could eclipse the combined losses of all of its new sister units at Fort Carson.
The Army announced the brigade's 23rd death Tuesday. Pfc. Stephen C. Benish, 20, of Clark, N.J., died Sunday during a firefight with Iraqi guerrillas in Ramadi.
One expert says the numbers show the increased aggression of the Iraqi insurgency.
The deaths also show how bad the insurgency is in Ramadi, the Sunni stronghold west of Falljuah that the 3,700-soldier brigade is patrolling.
"They are up at the front, and they are in a pretty rough neighborhood," said John Pike, executive director of the defense think tank GlobalSecurity.org.
Five soldiers in the brigade were killed in the past week during gunbattles with Iraqis. All but a few of the 23 have died in combat.
The 2nd Brigade, which is scheduled to arrive at Fort Carson next summer after a year in Iraq, has been hailed as one of the best-trained units in the Army, Pike said.
Before going to Iraq, the brigade was stationed in South Korea, where U.S. troops were constantly drilled in preparation for a possible strike by North Korea.
"That's why they call them second to none," Pike said.
The brigade was moved to Fort Carson under a Pentagon plan announced in September to cut the number of U.S. troops in Korea.
A few 2nd Brigade soldiers already are at the Colorado Springs base handling administrative tasks or recovering from injuries suffered in Iraq.
If the rest of the unit continues losing soldiers in Iraq at the current pace, it will have had 69 soldiers killed by the time it arrives here.
James Jay Carafano, a defense researcher with the Heritage Foundation in Washington, said it's difficult to draw any conclusions from the death rates in the 2nd Brigade.
"This sounds awful, but the number of casualties we're suffering for the number of troops that are there remains really small," he said.
"So trying to divine whether one area is worse or another is worse, it's really difficult."
During a year of combat in Iraq that ended last spring, Fort Carson lost 45 of more than 12,000 soldiers sent to war. A quarter of the 45 died in helicopter crashes.
Pike said the Carson troops missed the deadliest times in Iraq.
A flashpoint for the burgeoning insurgency came last April, just days after the last of Fort Carson's soldiers left Iraq.
In that month, 135 soldiers died.
November, marked by heavy fighting in Fallujah, Mosul, Ramadi and Baghdad, equaled the U.S. death toll for last April, according to a tally by the Associated Press.
Carafano said the U.S. death toll in Iraq, which topped 1,250 soldiers this week, has remained comparatively light compared with past wars because U.S. troops have gained expertise in surviving enemy attacks.
In fact, he said, attacks on Americans have proved so costly for insurgents that they are instead focusing more on killing Iraqi security forces.
Pike said with the Iraqi election scheduled for January and continued growth in the guerrilla movements, Americans should expect increasing casualties in Iraq for the foreseeable future.
"It's going to get worse before it gets better," he said.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
© Copyright 2004, The Gazette, a division of Freedom Colorado Information
