"Pile The Bodies High..." -- Body Counts, Body Bags

So now it's 2,000. Two thousand American military men and women, dead in Iraq. More than three times that many wounded so badly they had to be sent home.

The name the Pentagon attached to number 2,000 was Staff Sergeant George Alexander Jr., a Texan, 34, wounded in Samarra by an IED not quite a week before, died at an Army hospital in San Antonio over the weekend.

The thousandth American service member killed in Iraq died on September 7 of last year. Number 1,000 had no name attached. In the kind of bombings and assaults that leave three, four, five soldiers dead in one horrific moment, no one can really say who died in what order.

So it was with the very first U.S. military dead in Iraq, in the early days of the war -- a couple of Marines lost in firefights, four more in the crash of a helicopter, and again, who could say with authority who was the first of them to go?

A spokesman for the U.S. command called the 2,000 figure an "artificial mark on the wall," and urged reporters to accentuate the positive. "Mark on the wall" -- a good choice of words, whether he meant them to be or not. We put marks on the wall to remember how tall our children were, and how tall they have become. The marks always get higher, never lower. The death toll will only grow; it does not diminish. They will be all coming home, but they will not be coming back.

We humans fix on the thousandth and two-thousandth because we are creatures with ten fingers and ten toes, and base-ten multipliers matter to us -- tenth and fiftieth and hundredth anniversaries, tin and gold and diamond milestones.

I think the most important casualty number in Iraq could be a strange-sounding figure: 2,750. Whoever draws body bag number 2,750 will be the death that surpasses the number of people killed in the World Trade Center attacks of September 11, 2001 -- the casus belli for this Iraqi war. The number of American military people who will have died avenging the World Trade Center deaths will be more than the number of those who in fact died at Ground Zero.

There's some flex in this number; we could choose to add to the 2,749 at the World Trade Center the 184 dead at the Pentagon, the 40 on flight 93 who died in a field outside Pittsburgh. [We do not add the 19 hijackers, whose names and numbers should not be commingled with their victims'.] All told, that makes 2,973. I have no doubt that, at the present course of this hideous excuse for a war, we'll reach that milestone, too. The first death, the thousandth, the two thousandth, the 2,974th.

As we suspected then, and know for a certainty now, Aeschylus was right -- war's first casualty is always truth. Who will be its last? Whose death will be the end of all these deaths? Whose name, whose face, will haunt us again with the question that a young John Kerry posed in 1971 to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee: "How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?"