Accidents Outside Combat Take Toll on U.S. Military

Writing to his mother from Iraq in early May, Lance Cpl. Matthew R. Smith said he planned to be home in Anderson, Ind., to celebrate his 21st birthday later that month.

He never made it.

It wasn’t an enemy sniper or rocket-propelled grenade that ended the young Marine reservist’s life. After crisscrossing the desert for months at the wheel of a Humvee, Smith was speeding south along a northbound shoulder one night when he slammed his vehicle into an Army tractor-trailer abandoned on the side of the highway. He died of a massive head injury.

Smith had been driving for 15 hours with little break, and the Humvee’s radio, speedometer and seat belts were not functioning, said his lone passenger, Lance Cpl. Antonio J. Delk. One of its low-beam lights also was out, and Smith was using his high beams sparingly so as not to blind oncoming traffic. When the trailer suddenly materialized, there was no time to react.

Months later, Smith’s mother said her son’s loss would somehow be easier to accept if he had been killed by hostile fire.

“It was a stupid accident; it shouldn’t have happened,” Patricia T. Smith said. “He’d be ticked off because he would think he didn’t die the way a Marine should die.”

It is not only Iraqi resistance that is cutting down U.S. forces at an alarming rate. Since the war started on March 20, more than 80 have died in noncombat accidents. That’s nearly one-fifth of the total fatalities among soldiers. Many, like Smith, were killed in military vehicles. Others perished when helicopters crashed or weapons misfired.

This toll of preventable loss, which is by no means limited to the Middle East battlefront, has alarmed the Pentagon. A total of 575 servicemen and women died in accidents worldwide during the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, the second straight year noncombat fatalities have risen and a 64% increase since 1998. The death rate for active-duty personnel in accidents rose last year to the highest level in eight years -- 35.63 per 100,000 individuals.

The recent increases occurred as the U.S. fought wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and troops found themselves in treacherous conditions and unfamiliar terrain. Nonetheless, most fatal accidents in the last three years occurred in the United States. In fact, half the fatalities happened in private motor vehicles -- exacting a high price in lost soldiers and increased health-care costs.

For a generation, accidents have proved far more deadly than combat or terrorism. Since 1980, more than 20,000 military personnel have died in accidents while fewer than 1,000 have perished in battle, Defense Department figures show.

By its nature, military service is dangerous. Those who enlist do so with the expectation that they may be put in harm’s way.

Nevertheless, the military had been steadily reducing its losses due to accidents, cutting its annual fatality figure by 56% between 1991 and 1998. But the reductions stopped the following year, even as private sector companies with high-risk activities, such as commercial airlines, continued to make impressive strides in reducing accidents. With the military rates climbing again, the magnitude of the losses has drawn concern at the highest levels. In May, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld challenged the heads of the services to cut the number and rate of accidents by half within two years.

“World-class organizations do not tolerate preventable accidents,” he said. “These goals are achievable.... We owe no less to the men and women who defend our nation.”

Rumsfeld spoke on a day when four Marines died in Iraq in the accidental crash of their CH-46 helicopter into a canal and a fifth drowned trying to rescue them. But officials say the impetus for the secretary’s initiative predated the war.

In response, the Pentagon created the Defense Safety Oversight Council -- a group including senior Army, Navy and Air Force officials -- to track accidents, determine why they are increasing and make recommendations. It can propose any steps it deems necessary, right up to grounding an aircraft as too dangerous, Defense officials said.

“Every accident that happens is another flag for us to address root causes,” said Joseph J. Angello Jr., a Pentagon official who helps direct military readiness and serves as the council’s executive secretary.

Rumsfeld’s target would be ambitious in peacetime, but it is particularly challenging amid continuing warfare. Former Defense Department safety experts welcome Rumsfeld’s attention to an issue that has long taken a back seat, but they express skepticism about the Pentagon’s willingness to change a mind-set that accepts accidents as a cost of business.

“They’ve reached out a couple of times in the last two years to have industry work with them, to learn industry’s best practices,” said Richard F. Healing, a National Transportation Safety Board member and former Navy director of safety and survivability. “To date, that effort has suffered from a chronic lack of sufficient funding -- not walking the talk.”

Even now, major safety measures will have to compete with such expensive priorities as buying weapons, waging war and rebuilding Iraq.

Angello said the council hopes “implementation costs will be very small compared to the savings.”

In recent years, cost savings have come at the expense of safety. To trim the budget, the number of safety positions in the Defense secretary’s office dwindled from five to one in the 1990s. A single official now oversees aviation, weapons and transportation safety issues. Though the shift occurred during the Clinton administration, these safety jobs have not been restored under Rumsfeld.

“The song remains the same,” said George W. Siebert, who directed safety and occupational health policy in the Defense secretary’s office from 1984 to 1998 and recalls a 1986 challenge by then-Defense Secretary Caspar W. Weinberger to reduce accidents.

“The services really want to run their own show. That’s where the money is. That’s where the clout is. Unless they get that partnership, you’re not going to see any reductions.”

As a first step, the council compiled statistics on accident costs and causes. Angello described the number of military injuries as “stunning.”

Between Jan. 1, 2001, and the end of September 2003, , the Army recorded 534 accidental deaths, the Navy, 291, the Air Force, 280, and the Marines, 250, Defense Department figures show. Half died in private car and motorcycle accidents, 15% in aviation accidents and 5% each in military vehicle accidents and by drowning.

During the 1991 Persian Gulf War, as in the recent conflict in Afghanistan, far more soldiers died from nonhostile causes, including sickness, suicide and accidents, than from enemy fire.

“You’re talking about a very highly skilled, scarce commodity: the modern American service person,” said Daniel Goure, a defense analyst and former Pentagon official. “You don’t want to lose them at all, but you clearly don’t want to lose them to accidents.”

Many of the accidents occur at the intersection of bad judgment and faulty equipment. Take the crash that killed Matthew Smith.

Delk said the Humvee in which he and Smith were traveling was the communications vehicle for a long convoy ferrying troops and supplies between Kuwait and Iraq. The accident occurred at 10:30 p.m., and Smith had been at the wheel since 7 that morning, Delk said. He said that Smith declined when he offered to take over, but that it was not uncommon for Smith and others to drive 16 or more hours a day.

Because their radio didn’t work, Delk said, he and Smith drove up and down the convoy to communicate with their commander on short-range walkie-talkies. He said they were racing along at about 60 mph in the emergency lane on the wrong side of an unlit road. “Over there,” he said, “we drove on whatever side of the road we wanted.”

The trailer “just came out of nowhere,” Delk said. “The next thing I knew I heard us hit it and felt the back of the vehicle lift up and my head hit the back of the seat.”

Smith, his face bleeding badly, was alive, but not for long, his companion said. Delk, who broke his leg and injured an arm, remains on active duty while recuperating in the U.S.

The Army accident investigation report, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, largely held Smith responsible. It noted he was traveling against the flow of traffic, with limited visibility, at speeds far exceeding the 45 mph he had been ordered to drive.

The report did not mention the radio, speedometer or seat belts being broken, as Delk told The Times. It said Smith had “been given the opportunity to sleep for eight hours” before driving, consistent with Marine regulations. And it noted that Smith was not wearing his seat belt and that neither he nor Delk had their helmets on as ordered, though it acknowledged that wearing one would not have prevented Smith’s death.

Col. David G. Reist, commander of the Marines’ Transportation Support Group in Iraq, said no problems were noted with the Humvee’s equipment in a routine check before the trip.

“Our unit drove 1.3 million miles in the war,” Reist said. “We had one death. This happened two miles from the end of them coming home. This just tore my heart out.”

Aircraft Crashes Rise

The trend for aviation accidents has also been troubling, with fatalities increasing by nearly a third over the last two years. In the 2002 fiscal year, 57 aircraft were destroyed in accidents, more than doubling the total from the previous year.

Also in 2002, accidental military aviation crashes cost more than $1 billion in lost aircraft, some upward of $50 million each. Sixty-one pilots and passengers died.

In contrast, no U.S. commercial passenger or cargo plane suffered a fatal crash in 2002.

Beyond the purely human toll, each fatality means an enormous lost investment for the military. Still, it often takes a series of deadly crashes before the military will make crucial safety improvements. Even when there is a pattern in multiple accidents, it can take years to secure the funds and install the equipment needed to fix the problem.

“Human error is a leading cause of mishaps,” a 2002 Congressional Research Service report on military aviation safety found. But it also cited “aircraft age, pilot training, weather and other environmental conditions [and] mechanical failure and new aircraft designs” as factors.

Most military aircraft lack the safety features on commercial airplanes, which can sometimes prevent crashes caused by human error. The General Accounting Office, the investigative arm of Congress, reported last year that “the military services have lagged as much as two decades behind [the civilian Federal Aviation Administration] in requiring the installation of cockpit technology in passenger-carrying aircraft to alert pilots to impending collisions.”

There have been deadly consequences.

After a plane in his air wing narrowly avoided a head-on collision with two other military aircraft in Saudi Arabia in 1995, Lt. Col. Jay Lacklen, a safety chief at Dover Air Force Base, decided to search military files for other near misses. He discovered nearly a dozen.

Lacklen wrote letters up the chain of command urging the installation of a collision-avoidance system that was standard on commercial airliners. The system uses a computer to alert pilots when other planes are too close and guide them away from impending collisions.

The following year, an Air Force transport plane carrying Commerce Secretary Ronald H. Brown slammed into a mountain in Croatia. The Air Force then committed to equipping passenger-carrying aircraft with such a system, but did not make funding it a high priority.

Lacklen sent another warning letter Sept. 12, 1997: “When -- not if -- we smack two airplanes together, there will be no excuses and there will be no explanation why we delayed.”

The following day, an Air Force C-141 transport plane collided with a German military plane at 35,000 feet off the African coast, killing all nine crew members on the U.S. plane and 24 on the German aircraft.

An investigation disclosed that the German plane was on the wrong flight path and that African air traffic controllers failed to notice it was on a collision course with the U.S. jet.

The lead Air Force investigator found that a collision avoidance system “could have prevented the accident.”

In the aftermath, the Pentagon instructed the services to reallocate money to speed up installation of the warning device in passenger and cargo-carrying aircraft, including the C-141s.

Even then, the final C-141 didn’t get the warning device until five years after the 1997 collision.

Relatives of those killed in the 1997 accident say it should not have taken such a tragedy to make the planes safer.

“If they’re going to send these young men into hazardous areas, then they should have made the technology available to keep them safe,” said Jean Bryant, whose son, Staff Sgt. Stacy D. Bryant, was among those killed. “They were there on behalf of their country. They had to give their lives because the system was not available.”

The military has also lagged behind commercial aviation in the use of sophisticated flight data recorders, which can detect potential problems before they cause a crash.

“It has dramatically altered our accident-prevention program,” said John Marshall, Delta Air Lines’ vice president for corporate safety and compliance and a former Air Force fighter pilot.

Last year, Defense Undersecretary David S.C. Chu, who chairs the Pentagon safety council, successfully sought $15 million for the Navy, Marines and Air Force to continue testing the technology in various aircraft.

Deaths in Private Autos

The greatest number of accidental military deaths occurs in private motor vehicles. Indeed, military drivers are far more likely than civilians to die in crashes.

In the Marine Corps, 25.17 individuals out of 100,000 perished in motor vehicle accidents in the last fiscal year. The figure for the Air Force was 17.54, and for the Army, 16.5. The rate for the general population is about 15 per 100,000, according to the Transportation Department.

Half of the accidental deaths among military personnel in the last fiscal year -- 284 -- occurred in off-duty private vehicles.

Those killed are predominantly men 18 to 25, Defense officials said. In the Navy and Marine Corps, 36% of the accidents in 2002 involved excessive speed, 34% involved misuse or nonuse of seat belts, and 29% were alcohol-related, Naval Safety Center records show.

Army Rangers David M. Lye and Aaron Page were speeding in Lye’s dark green Mustang on Feb. 17, 2002, in Olympia, Wash., when the car turned a corner, struck a curb, barreled into a utility pole and flipped over.

Page, 27, died of head injuries. Lye suffered a broken neck. His blood-alcohol level tested at more than twice the legal limit; Page’s was also high.

Lye, 31 at the time and the father of four young daughters, was the chief warrant officer in an elite unit. He said he had no recall of the accident or the events preceding it. His attorney contended Page was driving, but the jury determined Lye was at the wheel. He was convicted of vehicular homicide, was sentenced to three years and is being discharged from the Army.

Speaking by phone from the minimum-security Cedar Creek Corrections Center in Littlerock, Wash., Lye said he had spent many hours pondering the instantaneous destruction of his exemplary 12-year career. “I was doing all these great things and moving up in the Army so fast that I felt indestructible.” He said he thought, “Maybe I can cheat on the rules a bit here.”

The Army is so concerned about deaths in private vehicles that it has developed a computerized program to assess the risks involved in each trip off base. A soldier provides his or her intended route, expected level of fatigue, weather forecasts and other factors. The computer then recommends which roads to take and provides guidance on conditions. The Army may impose a policy to only grant passes or leaves to those who score above a certain risk level.

But service personnel are also killed in military vehicle accidents. From 1988 to 1996, crashes in military vehicles were second only to aviation crashes as a cause of death while on duty, a 1998 GAO study found.

In Iraq, soldiers were killed when a Bradley fighting vehicle drove off a cliff, an armored personnel carrier rolled over and a Humvee crashed into another vehicle during a blinding sandstorm.

These accidents happened even though the Defense Department has an extensive traffic safety program.

It requires motorcycle safety training as well as driving instruction for those younger than 26 and those convicted of a serious moving violation. The courses are provided at no cost. Bases make rides or taxis available to anyone who has been drinking. And each military service has training programs for specialized military vehicles.

Nevertheless, the safety council’s Angello said additional driver education might be needed, especially for young enlistees who have not received training in high school or who come from urban areas where mass transit is the primary means of transportation.

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Times news researcher Janet Lundblad in Los Angeles contributed to this report.