4000 dead

Posted: Monday, March 24, 2008 4:04 PM by Barbara Raab

By Mike Taibbi, NBC News correspondent

Anyone who's reported from Iraq -- and I've done four substantial reporting assignments from the war, from 14 weeks at the start to a month-long embedded assignment with producer John Zito last spring with a company of the Third Infantry Division -- follows the news from the war zone with a special interest.  So I knew in recent weeks we were creeping up on the next somber milestone: 4,000 American troops killed in battle. 

John and I spoke several times in the past few months about how we might report that story, when the milestone was reached, and one idea came together.  We'd both covered the war from the beginning, and had revisited story subjects we'd come to know along the way.  

One subject, a 35-year old raw-boned Oklahoma tough guy named Daniel "Bill" Scates had been killed late last summer along with four fellow soldiers when they walked into a booby-trapped house in southern Baghdad.  I knew Scates; had met him in the first weeks of the war on a day when he was struggling to come to grips with a tragic mistake:  his company had survived the costly but triumphant march from the south to Baghdad, but, once there, they'd set up a roadblock where they were billeted and when an innocent Iraqi family drove through it, panicking, Scates watched as the security detail mistakenly opened fire.  A father and his daughter were killed, his wife the only survivor. 

Scates had come face to face with the woman and, in a story we reported from Baghdad about combat traumatic stresses, he'd said in a debriefing session "I had to look her in the eyes, and I felt so horrible for her...I'm becoming more and more pissed with time over (the incident)...it gets me so frustrated, more and more I want to choke somebody... constantly!" 

Scates was a professional soldier, though, and dealt with his anger in as straightforward a way as he'd spoken to us.  He re-upped not once but twice after his first tour.  He didn't make it back from his third tour, telling his wife Raquel before he left that he'd had dreams about not surviving this time.  But he repeated to Raquel what he'd told us several times, "I'm a soldier, this is my job.  It's what I do."

And now, John Zito and I and Producer Sue Kroll knew, his wife and two young daughters would have to start a life without him and that's the story we would tell.  We'd gone to El Paso and covered Scates's funeral, and though we interviewed his wife and older daughter, we never put a separate story together on their struggle after Bill's death.  Now, with the new milestone approaching, would be the time to do it; to explore the struggles unique in this "friends and family" war... a war so under-the-radar for many Americans now, that in a Pew Research survey earlier this month a paltry 28% of those polled knew to the nearest thousand how many American military dead the war had claimed. 

We would touch on a few other recent deaths of troops in Iraq but returned, in the end, to the Scates family story.  Raquel, after a rough patch in their marriage, had smoothed things out with her husband in the months before his final deployment;  "We were even thinking of having a third (child)," she says. Then, last August 11th, Raquel heard a car door slam from the street in front of her house, and peeked through the small window in her front door to see a two-man uniformed detail approaching.  

"I was already crying before I opened the door," she told us. Three combat tours in Iraq certainly upped the odds of a bad result.  She was devastated, but not shocked.

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