U.S. Deaths in Iraq Mark Increased Presence

Spec. Jessica Cawvey

In the museum where Jessica Cawvey and other women are honored, there is a large interactive screen near the memorial wall. With the touch of any name comes a face, a biography, sometimes a video clip -- life by life, soldier by soldier.

Cawvey's biography mentions how she joined the Illinois National Guard in hopes of making a better life for her young daughter, Sierra. She was a single mother, enlisting in summer 2001, when few people foresaw a long and violent war.

By the time her Guard unit was shipped overseas, Cawvey was an accounting student at Illinois State University, having graduated on the dean's list with a two-year degree from Parkland College, not far from her home town, Mahomet, Ill.

In Iraq, Cawvey, 21, worked in convoys in a transportation company. She was widely viewed, her mother said in an interview, as fun-loving and upbeat.

She was last home in July 2004, for her two-week break, which she had arranged to coincide with Sierra's sixth birthday. Her mother recalled that Cawvey "took her to the zoo, she took her to the aquarium, she took her everywhere she went."

Before Cawvey returned to finish her duty in Iraq, her daughter insisted that she pledge not to get killed, locking pinkies with her as a form of promise. Jessica Cawvey was wary about this, her mother recalled, but gave in .

Three months later, Cawvey was killed near Fallujah, her vehicle hit by a roadside bomb. "Mommy pinkie-sweared she wouldn't die," the girl told her grandmother.

"We had to explain it was not Mommy's fault, that she wanted to come home," said Kevin Cawvey, the soldier's father.

Spec. Toccara Green

Beside the narrative about Toccara Green, there is a photograph of her family members, taken shortly after her death, in front of their home in the Baltimore suburb of Rosedale. The first woman from Maryland to die in the war, Green was killed five days after she last saw them.

The 23-year-old soldier was part of a supply convoy Aug. 14, 2005, when a bomb went off during a refueling stop in Asad, in the turbulent Anbar province.

"Because she was not on the firing line, we never really thought something like that would happen to her," said her mother, Yvonne Green, "but as we and so many others have found out . . . those bombs are everywhere."

Women make up 11 percent of deployed U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. But because they do not serve in traditional "frontline" combat units -- infantry, artillery, armor, Special Forces -- their casualties are proportionately smaller, 2 percent of the lives lost.