The total stands today at 493, and the site displays data on them in a variety of ways, showing their hometown, where they are buried, marital status, high school and gender. But the viewer can dig deeper, and search the database by number of children, place of death, branch of military etc.

This to me really brings home a human side to the conflict, the apparently neutral display of numbers becomes personalised when you realise that half of the fallen were either married or engaged, and that about 170 had children, with half having 2 or more. Mix that in with the average age of the troops being 21, and you have to conclude that that’s a lot of very young children who will grow up without their fathers. The figures reveal to the demographics of the war: the majority of the dead come from small towns across the state, with big cities like San Diego and LA contributing 23 and 22 respectively. San Francisco provides only 2 of the dead. One high school, Buchanan High in Clovis, suffered 6 casualties alone. And 59 of the troops were first generation immigrants, looking for the military to further their integration to US society.
And the Marines continue their unfortunate tradition of suffering relatively high casualties respective tot heir size, with a quarter coming from their ranks, although more than half came from the army. The vast majority of the dead were killed in Iraq, where 419 fell, with 46 in the Afghan conflict illustrating the relative scale of each theatre of war.

The data for the survey comes from icasualties.org, which catalogues all of the deaths and injuries suffered by coalition forces in both Afghanistan and Iraq. Their data is staggering, every casualty recorded, with its cause and location and date.

Perusing their material, it becomes clear the California has indeed borne the brunt of the US war effort, with approximately 10% of the total dead, the highest overall total, with 3158 wounded. Texas follows in second place with 386 and 2891, far more than the next states, New York and Pennsylvania with 178/1417 and 18/1247 each.

Almost half of these were caused by IED’s (improvised explosive devices)

What does al this data do? For me, searching through it made interaction with the story an active experience, not a passive one, and the responses from families and loved ones on the LA times blog like the one below carry a powerful emotional charge that the raw data multiples 4000 times.

‘Someday, were going to wake up and find a big whole in an entire generation of our population. Our small towns, without jobs or opportunity to offer these young men and women, have borne the brunt of this war. Joshua Wayne Dickinson, a native to Yucca Valley California will always live in my heart, although he resides in heaven with his mother. At 26 Josh was killed by an IED in Falluja on December 12 2004, he left behind a father, brother, and sister and young daughter. Joshua will always be my hero.’