U.S. Deaths in Iraq Mark Increased Presence
More Killed in Action Than in Other Wars

By Donna St. George
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, December 31, 2006

FORT LEE, Va. -- In a little-known museum tucked away on the grounds of an Army post near Richmond, a memorial wall just inside the door quietly announces a profound change in the nation's fighting force.

Name upon name, the wall honors soldiers who have died in the combat zones of Iraq and Afghanistan: PFC Lori Piestewa, CPT Kimberly Hampton, SPC Lizbeth Robles, SGT Jessica Housby. . . . All 59 are women.

They are casualties in a conflict that has seen women serving in larger numbers than before, in a wider array of jobs, amid violence that heeds no front line.

As the U.S. death toll in the Iraq war approaches 3,000, the memorial at the U.S. Army Women's Museum is a solemn acknowledgment that women have quietly taken a place in the nation's procession of flag-draped coffins and military funerals.

In all, 62 service women from all branches have died in Iraq, about two-thirds of them in hostile fire. By comparison, in World War II, historians say, 16 women were killed in action. In Vietnam, one woman's life was claimed by enemy fire; in the Persian Gulf War, five.

Most previous female casualties were nurses. Now the female dead include military police, truck drivers, intelligence analysts, helicopter pilots, medics, mechanics, media escorts and kitchen managers. At least 13 left behind children. More than half were younger than 25.

It is a scenario that experts once predicted would lead to a public outcry against "women in body bags." Instead, the casualties appear to have melded into the nation's experience of war.

"I think people have come to the sensible conclusion that you can't say a woman's life is more valuable than a man's life," said retired Air Force Brig. Gen. Wilma Vaught, president of the Women in Military Service for America Memorial Foundation. "We don't want to lose any of them."

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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.

Just days before she was killed, "Tee" had been home for a two-week break. She had enjoyed a big family cookout, skated at her favorite roller rink, prayed at her Baltimore church, joined her mom for shopping and her aunt for a movie.

Her older brother was a Marine, and her father was a Baltimore police detective, and it seemed natural, her mother said, that Green would wear a uniform, too. Although she had done a semester at Norfolk State, and then Morgan State, she gave up college for the Army. The military, she had decided, would be her career.

"Anyone who knew her would tell you that was her calling," her mother said. "It was just something that was in her. It was part of her like her right arm."

Sgt. Amanda Pinson

Two photos of Amanda Pinson appear on the screen; she wears camouflage in one and a T-shirt that says "Angel" in the other. Pinson was killed by a mortar round outside a building on her post in Tikrit.

On that day in March, she was walking toward her fiance, a fellow soldier, to join him for lunch. She was wearing an engagement ring he had given her in Iraq.

Pinson was 21, a cryptologist from the St. Louis area who had been inspired by the Sept. 11 attacks to join the military. She worked in the intelligence unit for the Army's elite 101st Airborne.

"She was so strong," said her father, Tony Pinson. "She had so much heart, and she earned so much respect for her abilities. She was very hard-driven, working around the clock. You couldn't tell her she couldn't do something. She would prove you wrong."

On the day she was killed, her fiance was injured, but "she absorbed most of the impact," her father said. He said he thought that would have been her wish. Her fiance had two children from a previous marriage.

She was just starting out.

1st Lt. Ashley Henderson Huff

It is her wedding day in this museum photograph, and Ashley Huff wears a jeweled tiara, her blue eyes looking out happily, all future and promise.

Near the photo, the display mentions Huff's love for the University of Georgia, where she graduated. The die-hard Bulldogs fan was a sorority girl and an ROTC standout.

Huff was killed in September by a suicide bomber in Mosul. She was 23.

Her mother, Janet Henderson, had not heard of the museum but finds solace in the idea of keeping her daughter's memory alive.

"I don't think the American public knows that there are young women, 23 years of age, working in Iraq and putting their lives on the line every day," Janet Henderson said. "They need to know that women like Ashley are doing so much there. She truly believed in her work and in protecting this country."

Huff led a unit of the military police in Irbil, and much of her work involved training Iraqi police. Her biggest project was a proposal for a police academy. "Ashley pushed and pushed and pushed until she got it approved," her mother said. "That was her biggest accomplishment."

Before her deployment, she had married her college sweetheart, Brian Huff. "We had a beautiful, beautiful wedding," her mother recalled. "We planned it for six months, we planned every detail, and it was a dream wedding, and she looked like a princess."

She was looking forward to buying a house with her husband and starting a family, her mother said. One day, she hoped to work in politics or diplomatic affairs.

The last time they spoke, her daughter told her: " 'Mom, I'll be home soon, and we'll have the best Christmas,' " her mother recalled, crying softly as the holiday approached.

Pfc. Hannah McKinney

She is standing with her new husband and young son in the photograph, and her family members say she wanted nothing more than to be back with them in the United States. But she never got the chance after Sept. 6, when she was run over in the pitch-black night in an accident that has been under Army investigation.

This is the story her mother tells by phone one recent day as McKinney's 2-year-old son scampers around, trying to hang candy canes on his grandmother's Christmas tree in Redlands, Calif. "Her son will never know his mom," Barbie Heavrin said.

McKinney was a single mother when she enlisted over her parents' objections, telling them: " 'The Army would never send a young mother, a single mother, to Iraq,' " her mother said.

Before she shipped out in 2005, McKinney married her fiance in a civil ceremony. The couple was planning a wedding around the Christmas holiday at Immanuel Baptist Church in Highland, Calif.

"We would have been preparing for that right now," her mother said. "We had a funeral at the church instead of a wedding."

Sgt. Jennifer Hartman

The story about 21-year-old Jennifer Hartman mentions her roots in Pennsylvania and her enthusiasm for riding snowmobiles and ATVs. She is pictured in uniform and with her younger brother and sister.

Hartman was killed by a suicide car bomber Sept. 14, near her work site in a power plant in Baghdad. "She would have been back in Texas on Nov. 10," her mother said. "She would have been home for Christmas."

The oldest of three children, Hartman enlisted while she was in high school, drawn to the promise of college tuition benefits and aware that her family, with two daughters and a son, could not afford so much higher education.

Her mother, Bernice Hartman, said the Army recruiter promised them that she would not be sent to Iraq, saying the Army " 'would take someone off the street before they take your daughter.' " Bernice Hartman said the words had haunted them.

"We would have never signed," she said, her voice breaking.

Since Jennifer Hartman's death, her father has been unable to sleep. Bernice Hartman has so many questions, about how it happened, about the two soldiers who died with her. "It just seems like everything you want to know, they can't tell you," she said.

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At the museum, Ron Bingham, who works with the collections, describes the memorial as an evolving tribute. It started with only the wall of names in 2004. When the interactive display of photographs and stories was added in 2005, it became much more, and now it expands all the time as more photographs and life details are gathered and as the toll of war grows.

Visitors often linger at the display. Sometimes they talk about the soldiers' lives. Sometimes they leave in tears.

"Every woman from a private to a general has an important story to tell," Bingham said. "The idea is to get as much information as possible to preserve their stories for future generations."

Staff researcher Madonna Lebling contributed to this report.