Outside The Beltway [1] notes 31 people dying in a U.S. Marine Corps helicopter crash [2] this morning, and muses:
As I’ve noted numerous times, helicopters are dangerous even in a non-hostile environment. They do things fixed wing aircraft can’t but the price is sometimes very high.
Just so, James. I knew a couple people who died in Buffalo a few years ago driving a chopper, and they said the same thing.
One aditional point, however… This is the biggest single-action casualty count for the entire Iraqi conflict thusfar. Can anyone name any campaign in our history, where that single action death count was less?
I can’t.
Certainly, this doesn’t diminish the weight of the deaths that have occurred, but it does suggest that there is a rather different quality to this conflict.