An unfair comparison

"US troops shoot dead pregnant Iraqi". I don't know why this caught my attention. I'd been scanning the headlines on Google News, like I do everyday, and as far as I could tell, the part of my brain that responded to the word "Iraq" had gone numb a long time ago.

I imagine that in the three-plus years that the U.S. has been in Iraq, just about every manner of shooting has taken place. Neck, chest, groin, back. On the street, in a store, in someone's house. Women, children, the eldery, people with big ears, people with small ears. With nearly 3 000 coalition deaths (icasualties.org) and around 40 000 Iraqi civilian deaths (iraqbodycount.org), there certainly have been plenty of chances. Why should a pregnant woman be special?

It made me sad to read the details. She was being driven to the hospital. Her husband was waiting for her there. She was taking a taxi. The driver was not hurt. (Bad aim?)

But the most egregious part of the whole thing, and of all accidental killings in war, was the part about money. An accidental killing in Iraq yields the surviving family $2 500. By comparison, a U.S. military widow receives something called "indemnity compensation" currently set at $1 033 per month for a period of two years. That works out to just shy of $25 000.

To make things really unfair, I Googled "trophy fee." This is the amount a hunter pays out for the privilege of killing an animal, typically big game in a controlled environment, sometimes called a "kill fee." A caribou will run you $3 750 in Alaska. A cheetah in Namibia sets you back around $3 500. In Cameroon a female anything costs twice as much as the male, so a male lion costs you $2 500, a female $5 000.

I don't know how all this is connected, but I'm sure that on the Twister board of life, these two circles are close to each other. Somewhere in Iraq a family is receiving $2 500 in cash from the U.S. government. Maybe it should be receiving $5 000 instead, or maybe $7 500 if the fetus was a male, $10 000 if the fetus was female. But, no, it's probably just receiving $2 500, the same amount a game hunter in Cameroon is forking over for a lion. Egads, I think I just made myself sick.