The 4000th American GI has been killed in the Iraq war.

Such numerical milestones are damn silly. Every dead soldier counts. As does every dead Iraqi civilian--even though no one keeps accurate stats on the scores of thousands (if not hundreds of thousands) of Iraqi civilians who have died because of this war. And so much of what occurs in Iraq--so many of the deaths--are barely covered by the U.S. media, which is woefully underrepresented there.

That is partly due to the cost and danger of covering the war. But writing for Columbia Journalism Review's website, Paul McLeary, a reporter who recently embedded with an Army unit in Iraq, makes a stellar point that's worth repeating at length:

Five years into the war, news organizations have understandably cut back a bit, given the immense cost of maintaining a Baghdad bureau. From life insurance for reporters to guards, armored cars (which not all bureaus have), and fortified houses outside of the Green Zone, reporting from Iraq is an incredibly expensive proposition.

But embedding with infantry units is free. Flights to Kuwait, where the Army public affairs team picks you up and puts you on a military aircraft to Iraq, and insurance still cost, but once you're embedded, your expenses end. And that's why I can't understand why every major news organization doesn't have one reporter embedded with a combat unit at all times. They won't always be able to file stories, but they can contribute a steady stream of material about the fight-and the ground-level diplomacy-being waged by young American captains, lieutenants, and sergeants. The fact that I spent four weeks in Iraq and only ran into one stringer working for an American newspaper is testament to how few reporters are out in the field. Of course, there are reporters in Iraq, and my time bouncing between combat outposts constitutes an official census; but it is significant that in every unit I was with, I was the first reporter they had seen. It was the same story back in 2006, with I embedded with the 2nd Marine Division in Fallujah.

If this were another kind of war, a conventional war in which two armies faced off along set lines, things might be different. A fight like that is easier to understand, easier to wrap your head around, than complicated counterinsurgency campaigns like the ones in Iraq and Afghanistan which involve ancient cultural and tribal equations. But understanding what the military has taken to calling the “human terrain” is what these new wars are all about, and it's this aspect of the fight that the mainstream media is doing a scattershot job in explaining to the American people.

The media (collectively) has let down the 4000 dead GIs by not doing all they can to explain fully the ever-changing context for their deaths. And the public also has not been true to those who have sacrificed all, for, as Pew studies have shown, most of the public does not follow the Iraq story closely. The media will make news out of the nice round number of American fatalities, and such stories may briefly cut through the clutter of media and everyday life. But that's not much of a way to honor the fallen.