"I don't want to be a daddy because daddies die," said Jack Shanaberger, age four, following the death in Iraq of his father, Staff Sergeant Wentz "Baron" Shanaberger, a military policeman from Louisiana. With his four brothers and sisters, Jack is among the nearly 900 American children who have lost a parent in Iraq. According to experts cited by Lisa Hoffman and Annette Rainville in a moving story for the Scripps Howard News Service, "The proportionally higher number of American children left bereaved by the Iraq war is unprecedented." Past U.S. wars were mainly fought by single men, but 40 percent of the 1,256 GIs killed in Iraq as of November were married, and 459, including six women, had children. Shana Corey tells her children that while "[you] might forget what your daddy looks like ... [you should] always remember his hugs, always remember his kisses, always remember his love." They have felt their father's touch. Not so the children of the forty men who died while their wives were pregnant.
The defense analyst Anthony Cordesman forecasts that many more children will share Jack Shanaberger's grief if, as Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has indicated, U.S. forces stay in Iraq until 2008 or 2009. By then, Cordesman estimates, 5,038 U.S. troops will have died.
The children of the war dead are not the only "hidden casualties" of George W. Bush's war. "People see the figure 1,200 dead," Dr. Evan Kanter, a psychiatrist at a Seattle veterans hospital, told Scott Shane of The New York Times. "Much more rarely do they see the number of wounded. And almost never do they hear anything at all about the psychiatric casualties." Given the bloodshed they have seen and inflicted in intense urban combat, and the fear they experienced from the moment they arrive to the moment they leave Iraq—including, as the rocket attack on the Army mess hall in Mosul horrifically dramatized, when they are "off-duty"—the number of Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans who will suffer symptoms of serious mental illness may exceed 100,000. They "are going to need help for the next thirty-five years," according to Stephen L. Robinson, the executive director of the National Gulf War Resource Center. To use Cordesman's scale, if the war lasts four more years it may inflict several hundred thousand psychiatric casualties. Already 31,000 U.S. veterans have applied for "disability benefits" for physical and psychological injuries. Nine thousand have been "wounded." A combat wound is a rifle grenade hitting you on the jaw and driving your bottom teeth into the roof of your mouth. It is a rain of hot metal pulping your eyes. It is all the booted feet in the world concentrated in one piece of shrapnel crushing your groin. It is never walking again, never making love again, losing your sense of taste forever because Donald Rumsfeld did not care enough about you to armor your vehicle. Readers who can tolerate the sight of amputated limbs should see the photographs that accompany a recent New England Journal of Medicine article on battlefield wounds. If the occupation—and insurgency—drags on until the end of Bush's term, the wounded will number more than 25,000. A member of the provisional Iraqi government recently said that, given the growing strength of the insurgency, U.S. troops may need to stay ten years, long enough to double Cordesman's numbers.