Rise In Deaths Indicates Afghan War Is Evolving

His war was almost over. Or so Marina Buckley thought when her son Lance Cpl. Gregory T. Buckley Jr. told her he would be returning from southern Afghanistan to his Marine Corps base in Hawaii in late August, three months early.

Instead, Buckley became the 1,990th U.S. service member to die in the war when, on Aug. 10, he and two other Marines were shot inside their base in Helmand province by a man who appears to have been a member of the Afghan forces they were training.

A week later, with the death of Spc. James A. Justice of the Army in a military hospital in Germany, the U.S. military reached 2,000 dead in the nearly 11-year-old conflict, based on a New York Times analysis of Department of Defense records. The calculation by The Times includes deaths not only in Afghanistan, but also in Pakistan and other nations where U.S. forces are directly involved in aiding the war.

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