Every day the Pentagon dispatches e-mails with the words "DOD Identifies Army Casualty" in the subject field. Sometimes the e-mails say the casualty is a marine, other times it's a sailor or airman. I read each one.
After reading a few hundred of these Department of Defense e-mails it became apparent that troops from small towns in small states like South Carolina were dying in high numbers in Iraq. This, though, was not a spectacular revelation.
Just months into the war and when the death toll was about 350, the Austin American-Statesman reported that 16 percent of the casualties were more likely to come from a county with lower-than-average levels of college education and below-average incomes. Those two demographic categories fit South Carolina to a "T."
In August, after the 20th South Carolinian had died in the war, we decided to see where the state ranked.
I discussed the idea with Chris Roberts, an assistant business editor and computer-assisted reporting specialist, and together we pulled together a story that ran on the front page of The State last summer.
To build the spreadsheet, we downloaded the death counts for each state from the constantly updated database maintained by the Associated Press on its Web site for members. We double-checked the AP numbers with the numbers that we compiled for South Carolina and found no discrepancies.
Using a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet, we copied the state names and number of casualties into two columns. In the next columns we copied state names and state-by-state population counts from Census 2000, which are available at www.census.gov/popest/estimates.php. We made sure the state names from the casualty lists and population numbers lined up, and then deleted the redundant column of state names.
The next step was math: In one column, we calculated each state's number of casualties per 100,000 residents - a simple equation of the number of dead divided by the state's population, multiplied by 100,000. (We used the deaths-per-100,000-residents calculation as the basis for comparison, because each state has at least 100,000 residents and it is a clear way to account for the wide range of state populations.)
The next step, in another column, was to use Excel's Rank function on the deaths-per-100,000-residents calculation.
The results showed that South Carolina, which ranked 26th in population, was eighth in Iraq war deaths.
Two other southern states - Mississippi and Arkansas - followed South Carolina in rounding out the top 10.
Our reporting confirmed the Austin story as well as other studies done on the Iraq death toll. For example, the office of U.S. Rep. Ike Skelton, a D-Mo., found that 44.3 percent of troops killed came from hometowns with populations under 20,000. A St. Louis Post-Dispatch analysis found that 46 percent of the Americans killed in the war through May 26 came from small towns outside metropolitan areas.
What also was interesting was that smaller, so-called "red" states that President George W. Bush carried in 2000 and 2004 elections, had war death rates well above the larger "blue" states.
We finished off the reporting by talking to members of the South Carolina congressional delegation and leaders of communities that have suffered casualties.
The story also questioned whether the disparity in deaths could prompt Congress to reinstate the draft.
This was a simple story to report, not much different than other statistical analyses we've done on dangerous intersections and highways.
The data is readily available. All you need is some Excel know-how.