A nose for casualties. A BBC journalist has been counting:

'the latest Haditha attack ranks among the biggest US losses.
Last December, 14 US troops and four civilian contractors died in a suicide bombing targeting a military base in Mosul.
Only air crashes, with or without hostile fire, have resulted in higher US death tolls, including 16 in the November 2003 loss of a Chinook helicopter near Falluja and 31 in a helicopter crash in January 2005 near the Jordanian border'