They also serve who only sit and count

By Whom the Toll is Counted

No one asked Michael White to count the dead soldiers in Iraq.

He is not a military man, and he has no friends or relatives who serve. He is a guy with a Honda Civic, a mortgage and a job in a suburban office park. A guy with a wife and a 7-year-old daughter who has soccer games to go to.

But for almost 3 1/2 years — for no pay and no glory — White has kept a meticulous tally of every U.S. and coalition military fatality, posting the names and the numbers on his website, http://www.icasualties.org .
[...]
"The concept from the get-go was to get an accurate count," White said. "I'd pick up the morning paper and it would say the number was X, and then I'd hear a news report that said five more troops had been killed. But the next day in the paper the number was still X. It was always behind, and I wanted to know what the immediate tally was."
[...]
On Oct. 19, USA Today used icasualties.org's numbers to show the five deadliest days in Iraq thus far in 2006. (The deadliest was Jan. 7, when 18 U.S. troops were killed — nine of them in a helicopter crash).

Marine Corps Maj. Stewart T. Upton, a Defense Department spokesman, said he hadn't heard of the site before. "People should look to the Department of Defense for the official numbers," he said.
[...]
White has kept his site free of politics — largely because he has learned how much the families of troops rely on his numbers.

"It's awful hard to read those e-mails," he said. "You have to acknowledge their loss in a nonpartisan way. That's one reason the site's agenda is separate from my politics. It's documentary. It doesn't have a political agenda. It answers a question I want answered."