War critic's hobby evolves into grim tally of Iraq toll

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 attend.

But for almost 3 ˝ 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 Iraq Coalition Casualty Count Web site.

It started as a hobby, the work of a war critic who wanted to help keep the facts straight. Today, The Seattle Times, the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post and The New York Times use all or part of White's numbers to show the extent of the nation's collective sacrifice.

Bloggers use his numbers to quell conspiracy theories, and soldiers' parents call up the site to make sure their children are not listed. Job seekers have sent him résumés, unaware the operation is little more than a guy and his laptop.

White is a former post-punk-guitar player who, at 50, favors khakis and sensible shoes. He is proud of his work and pleased people are paying 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 lately. His statistics show October was the deadliest month for U.S. soldiers in Iraq since January 2005, with 105 deaths. This month, as of Tuesday, 35 more soldiers have died. The total number of U.S. military fatalities stands at 2,853. It likely will surpass 3,000 early next year if current 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 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, White could have kept its grisly rhythms at a distance. Instead, those rhythms now define him.

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.' "

Low-key protest

White is a Southern liberal who never considered himself an activist, but he long has had an interest in politics and current events. He traces it to his upbringing in South Carolina, where he lived through the tension of desegregation.

His most reliable passion, however, always has been music. When George W. Bush was elected president in 2000, White retreated into Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music, immersing himself in its crackly old spirituals and Scots-Irish murder ballads.

His reaction to Iraq was different. About two months after the U.S.-led invasion, White discovered a California anti-war protester named Pat Kneisler had posted a self-researched tally of troop casualties on Daily Kos, a pro-Democratic Web site. Like White, Kneisler had been frustrated by differing death counts in the media.

White contacted her and offered to keep the count going on his site, lunaville.org, the name for the make-believe city where he set his daughter's bedtime stories.

Kneisler accepted the offer, and the two set about their common task from different sides of the country. For White, it was a protest, albeit a low-key sort that suited his personality.

"I'm not the kind of person who will stand on a street corner holding a sign," he said. "Maybe I'd be a better person if I was."

Then, as now, the U.S. Department of Defense kept its own tally of U.S. casualties on its Web site. But White and Kneisler were concerned the numbers were updated slowly and didn't seem consistent in media accounts.

"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."

The two used official military news releases for their list, cross-checking them with reports from journalists who were "embedded," or traveling with coalition troops. Over time, they earned a reputation among media and military families for being accurate and quick to update their figures.

Kneisler dropped out of the project in April without explaining her reasons to White. She would not comment for this story.

In the past, White said, they had argued over whether to post the name of a soldier who had been run over by a car while on leave back in the United States. He refused to post the number because he thought it wasn't war-related.

White added features that packaged the casualty and fatality numbers in ways 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 occurred in each Iraqi province. It reveals that Anbar province — the largest in the nation and home to Fallujah — has seen more than 1,040 coalition deaths, making it a deadlier place than Baghdad, with 746 deaths. Many of the charts show U.S. deaths as well as international-coalition deaths: of the 246 foreign, non-Iraqi troops killed, 125 were from the United Kingdom, 33 were from Italy and 13 were from Bulgaria.

Some information on White's site, like the number of U.S. deaths per state, also is available from the Defense Department, but White often updates his numbers faster and his information is easier to find.

White also goes 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. (That number has since become 28). On Oct. 19, USA Today used icasualties.-

org's numbers to show the five deadliest days in Iraq thus far in 2006. (The deadliest was Jan. 7, when 18 U.S. troops were killed, nine in a helicopter crash).

Marine Corps Maj. Stewart Upton, a Defense Department spokesman, said he hadn't heard of the site. "People should look to the Department of Defense for the official numbers," he said.

Digging for facts

The essence of White's work starts with his search for casualty news releases from the coalition, the Multi-National Force-Iraq. The releases contain minimal details of the death; typically, its date and location, and what branch of the military the troop was in, and the cause.

White posts these deaths in his main database as "NAME NOT RELEASED YET" and counts them as "Reported U.S. Deaths Pending DoD Confirmation."

Then he goes to the Department of Defense Web site, where a more detailed news release is made public 24 hours after the family is notified. These generally contain the deceased's name, age, rank, hometown and a more thorough description of the cause of death.

When a specific news release matches a generic one, White fills in the details. It is these details that allow him to generate many of his original charts and graphs. But sometimes the generic and the specific news releases do not match. Checking against details in news reports has become more difficult, he said, because fewer reporters appear to be embedded.

Instead, some of his best fact-checkers are the military personnel and families who use the site.

White has kept his site free of politics, largely because he has learned how much the families of troops rely on his numbers.

"It's awful hard to read those e-mails," he said. "You have to acknowledge their loss in a nonpartisan way. That's one reason the site's agenda is separate from my politics. ... It answers a question I want answered."

But some questions are easier to answer than others. White also has been trying to keep track of Iraqi deaths, tallying the numbers from news reports. But he knows it's not an accurate way to count and his numbers only go back to January 2005.

His chart lists 19,480 Iraqi civilians killed since that date. Below that total, a sentence in red type says "Total Prior to 2005," followed by a question mark. "This is not a complete list, nor can we verify these totals," the site states.

His list of private contractors who died in Iraq carries a similar disclaimer. It is one of the few collections of its kind that is publicly available. But so far he has found only 370 names by scouring news reports. The Department of Labor has tallied 650 deaths through late October but refuses to release the names for reasons of confidentiality.