3,013: The Number: Special To Newshole

Every Tuesday morning for years, I thought up some semiprivate joke to stick in a tiny line of type running across the top of the front cover of City Paper just before we sent the whole thing off to press. It was sometimes an oblique comment on something going on in the world ("Slots, schmlots--how `bout Coinstar?"), others a semi-private joke or message ("We'll miss you, Uli") or just some weird something that popped in there ("Magma"). Then on the morning of Tuesday, Nov. 9, 2004, we decided to put the number of U.S. soldiers killed in Afghanistan and Iraq on the top line. (It may have been art director Joe MacLeod's idea, but neither of us really remembers at this point.) I went to CNN.com and found the current casualty count: On that day 1,134 soldiers had died in the "War on Terror." I bookmarked the web page, typed "1,134" on the line, and we sent the cover.

That was the week after the 2004 election, so perhaps we were feeling the need to be mindful of the cost of the Bush administration's thin mandate to stay the course. Whatever the case, I kept checking the CNN site late Monday night week after week, and we kept running the number on the cover week after week. My boss asked what the number meant at some point, and I told him. It came up in a discussion in the Mobtown Shank e-zine once, and I explained what it was. It was no big secret, but it was no big deal, either. We just kept running the number as it got bigger and bigger, growing past 2,000, then 2,500, and then, over this past New Year's weekend, 3,000.

Media outlets hither and yon marked the 3,000-dead milestone, as do we now, in our own way. Two years ago, I wanted to keep running the number to keep mindful of the number of U.S. troops who've died thanks to policy we endorsed by majority vote, but that number doesn't take into account the number of U.S troops wounded and maimed (more than 22,000). Or the number of dead troops from other countries who came along on this misadventure (128 dead Britons, 13 Bulgarians, one Fijian, five Salvadorans, etc.). But another number recently made an even bigger impression on me: According to a United Nations report released in November, 3,709 Iraqis were killed in October 2006 alone, the highest monthly total for the war to date, and the death toll among Iraqis continues to outpace the U.S. toll at a similar rate.

There's no question that 3,000 makes a nice round figure to remark upon, but it's a week later and the number of U.S. troops killed is up to 3,013. Next week it'll be higher, and the week after, and for many weeks to come, and the numbers will grow on all sides. I have no brilliant proposals for ending U.S. involvement in Iraq without sending the numbers even higher. I'm just hoping and praying there will come a time when we can stop running that number, period.