As our family walks home from church following a warm Mother’s Day celebration, I reflect on the mothers of the men, women and children who have died in war. Some of these mothers from our current war are U.S. citizens and may be known to our national community; many are Iraqi mothers, how many we don’t know.

The Importance of Body Counts

 Californian Marla Ruzicka ¾ who was born December 31, 1976, and died in Baghdad on April 16, 2005 ¾ created an aid organization, CIVIC (Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict), one of whose aims was to keep track of the number of civilian lives lost in Iraq. In an essay written a week before she died, the victim of a bomb intended for another target — a fate identical to that of the individuals whose family members she was so focused on helping — she wrote: “A number is important not only to quantify the cost of the war, but as a reminder of those whose dreams will never be realized in a free and democratic Iraq.”

 Although General Tommy Franks, in a news conference in Afghanistan in March 2002, said “we don’t do body counts,” in fact, Ruzicka wrote, “troops on the ground keep these records because they recognize they have a responsibility to review each action taken and that it is in their interest to minimize mistakes.” Another reason the military might wish to publicize their estimates of civilian lives lost in war would be in response to estimates of others, such as a study published in the British medical journal The Lancet last year suggesting that 100,000 people have died in Iraq since the onset of the U.S.-led invasion.

 Last month Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, in discussing criteria to measure U.S. successes in Iraq, neatly summed up a widely recognized systems management dictum in the concise statement, “If you study it, it improves.” Yet despite high-level recognition of this principle in the abstract, the United States government, through the Department of Defense, has consistently refused to estimate the number of civilian lives lost in actions taken by the U.S. military.

Require the Military to Keep Track

 Vermont’s Senator Leahy honored Marla Ruzicka in a statement two days after her death as one who “saw her work as part of the best of what this country is about,” and through it became in the eyes of many “as close to a living saint as they come.” He himself responded to lobbying by Marla while she was alive by creating a program that contributed more than $8 million in assistance to innocent victims of military operations in Afghanistan. This kind of support later led to the creation of the Civilian Assistance Program, which has provided $10 million in aid to families and communities of Iraqi civilians killed by U.S. and other coalition forces.

 If you feel, as Marla Ruzicka did, that we owe it to the mothers of the world to track the number of innocent civilians killed in our armed conflicts, or if you’d like to apply the wisdom in Rumsfeld’s statement that “if you study it, it improves,” to civilian casualties of war, then please ask your Senators, your Representative, and Senator Leahy to consider sponsoring legislation which would require the United States Department of Defense, or another agency, to count estimated civilian lives taken in any military conflict in which the United States is engaged.

 Perhaps if other countries in the world adopted similar laws ¾ or worked through the United Nations to accurately tally all lives lost in armed conflict, civilian and combatant ¾ the horror of war would become more evident to us all. If that happened, the chances of a country initiating war might go down, and if so, more mothers on Mothers Day might be able to hug their loved ones close as my wife did her family today.

Chris Hogness is a Portland M.D.

A war memorial is proposed for the Oregon State University campus. Shall we continue to memorialize violence, or can we begin to glorify peace and nonviolence?