WASHINGTON, Jan. 31 (UPI) — The American media stood up and took notice when an improvised explosive device grievously injured an ABC News crew Sunday.

In Iraq, and throughout the military, there is sympathy and concern for anchor Bob Woodruff and cameraman Doug Vogt, but there is also this question:

“Why do you think this is such a huge story?” wrote an officer stationed in Baqubah, Iraq, Monday via e-mail. “It’s a bit stunning to us over here how absolutely dominant the story is on every network and front page. I mean, you’d think we lost the entire 1st Marine Division or something.

“There’s a lot of grumbling from guys at all ranks about it. That’s a really impolite and impolitic thing to say … but it’s what you would hear over here.”

At least 2,242 troops have died in Iraq since the war’s start, 1,753 of them killed in action. Another 16,000 have been injured, half of them seriously enough to require evacuation from the battlefield. According to the Pentagon, 60 percent of the deaths are the result of IEDs. IEDs have injured more than 9,200 troops, nine times more than gunshots.

“The point that is currently being made (is that) that press folks are more important than mere military folks,” a senior military officer told UPI Tuesday.

The unavoidable consequence of war is this: People are savagely wounded and killed. Soldiers in Iraq watching the coverage on satellite television and reading the news on the Internet are getting the impression that the press has only just discovered this fact.

It’s not quite as simple as that, of course. Military personnel often express frustration that the media harps on military casualty reports at the expense of what they consider their successes in Iraq.

However, as it promoted its story on Woodruff and Vogt Monday evening, the local ABC News affiliate in Washington showed a montage of exploding vehicles in Iraq — footage culled largely from insurgents, who videotape the attacks and post them on Web sites to advertise or magnify their successes.

The families of the 76 troops killed and 533 wounded in action in Iraq from the District of Columbia, Virginia and Maryland might say the war had already come home.

“It’s just a bit frustrating to see something so dramatized that happens every day to some 20-year-old American — or worse to 10, 30-year-old Iraqi soldiers or cops alongside us. Some of the stories don’t even mention the Iraqi casualties in this attack, as if they’re meaningless,” wrote the officer in Baqubah.
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