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First Sergeant Coffin was the first American soldier to die in Iraq this month, and before the week was out, six more would be killed. On July 2, Marine Corporal Travis Bradach-Nall died clearing mines near Karbala. He was eligible to return to Camp Pendleton, Calif., soon after the war officially ended, but he volunteered to sign on for an extra three months because he wanted to earn more money for college, and because he felt there was still work to do. The next day Private Corey Small died from a gunshot wound "in a noncombat incident," and Private First Class Jim Herrgott was killed by a sniper as he guarded the Iraqi National Museum. Three days later, Sergeant David Parson was shot in Baghdad while raiding a house, and Specialist Jeffrey Wershow was shot in the back of the head while guarding a U.S. delegation at Baghdad University. The next day gunner Chad Keith died when a bomb blew up his convoy on a Baghdad street.
Seven deaths in seven days, each one different, each in its own way a warning. This is a twilight war, the kind America is loath to fight, is reluctant even to train for, as though we can make our enemies agree to our terms of combat, meet us at noon on the field of battle and be crushed by our overwhelming force into absolute surrender. Not since 1945 has a major war wrapped up so clearly or cleanly. Korea ended in a truce, Vietnam in a loss; the Gulf War required a replay. Winning fast but not completely, as in Afghanistan or Iraq, may save lives in the course of the war but transfers an advantage to the enemy when it's over. Once Saddam Hussein's statue fell, Americans hoped to cease fire, store the tanks and bombers and drones, and start rebuilding. For the enemy, the fight had just started--let the sabotage and sniping begin. "The war's not over," declared Lieut. General Ricardo Sanchez, the commander of coalition ground forces in Iraq, at a press briefing last week. "I keep saying that every time I get up here: the war's not over."
More than 70 soldiers have died in the past three months. At this rate it will not be long before more people will have perished since the end of combat than during it. The Iraqi army may have melted away in battle, but its shadow legions of Saddam loyalists and foreign jihadists seem to be growing more organized and more lethal: twice as many U.S. soldiers died in June as in May, and July's rate so far is worse. Soldiers have died in accidents--some caused, no doubt, by the stresses of life under fire and the fear of attack. And they have died after being kidnapped and tortured, died by gun and grenade and mortar. The mortar attacks are especially troubling, since they require a team of insurgents, a leader and a plan.