Editor & Publisher has an odd little article up compiling some statistics on the Iraq War on the occasion of the (announcement of the official) 3000th combat death in the conflict. There are some oddities in this list, like this note:

Deaths by hostile fire: 2422 80.9%
Non-hostile: 578

Age 18-20: 517 17.2%
Age 21-30: 1813 60.9%

Look at those last two entries: 17.2 and 60.9 don't add up to 100%, they only come to 78.1%. Assuming that this is not the Civil War, where underage boys run away from the farm to the recruiting office with a piece of paper in their shoe with the number "18" written on it so that when they are asked their age they can truthfully say they are "over 18" we will assume that the people omitted from this list are over the age of 30.

22% of the dead in the Bush War of Choice are over the age of 30. Some of them are over 50. Havent' seen any over 60 myself but we know people of that age are over there in combat so there's probably some I've missed.

Some of the other stats aren't really stats at all but just countings. Raw data. Take for instance the list of states losing the most troops:

California 305 10.2%
Texas 266
Pennsylvania 144
New York 139
Ohio 130
Florida 125
Michigan 118

The biggest states, of course. The list would look considerably different if measured by percentages, or divided by per-capita of state population. But just looking at the raw numbers, we don't quite see that oft-proclaimed preponderance of "red states" or Southern ones. There are those who don't consider Texas, much less Florida, "southern states" in the usual sense of the term.

Anyway, it's an interesting column. Go look. And if you have the custom of spending a period of time in prayer or meditation on a regular basis, maybe devote a session to just counting to 3000 in your head.