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OPINION: Preventable Deaths from 'Friendly' Fire
Friday, April 26, 2002
By Jane Lichtenberg

When young men and women enlist in the U.S. armed forces, they expect to defend this great country, even with their lives. They do not deserve to be sent home in body bags, dead from accidents that never should have occurred.

An F-16 pilot from the Air National Guard on patrol south of Kandahar, Afghanistan, thought he was acting in self-defense when he dropped a 500-pound laser-guided bomb on ground forces last week. He apparently didn't know the area was restricted for training. Four Canadians were killed and eight wounded.

On March 2: The first U.S. soldier killed during the Afghan assault may have been hit by an AC-130 gunship, which reported striking an enemy convoy in the area at about the same time.

On Dec. 5: A B-52 bombed U.S. and Afghan forces near Kandahar, killing three soldiers from the Army's 3rd Battalion and wounding 19 others, including Afghan leader Hamid Karzai. A 500-pound bomb fell within 100 yards of the soldiers' position.

On Nov. 26: An F-18 dropped a bomb during a prison riot in Mazar-e-Sharif. Five U.S. soldiers were injured.

Several other reports of "friendly fire" injuries to civilians and property have been reported since Operation Anaconda began. This is nothing new in modern warfare, when much of the fighting is done from high altitude.

On April 14, 1994, over the northern Iraq "no-fly zone," two Army Black Hawk helicopters were shot down by F-15 fighters, killing 26 people in the worst such incident in U.S. military history. The pilots thought the helicopters were Russian-built and flown by Iraqis.
(More: IndyStar.com News Source)
2002 © The Indianapolis Star.

All true. All good points. Combat, however, will continue to kill the innocent, there is just no way around that -- just as training deaths will continue to occur on military posts. Until the human factor is completely removed from the training and war zones of the world, humans will continue to die.

Dan