Four war deaths removed from Iran casualty count, reclassified under new ‘Overseas Operations’ category

A single Iranian drone evaded air defenses on March 1 and struck the relocated operations center of the U.S. Army’s 103rd Sustainment Command at the port of Shuaiba, south of Kuwait City, killing six reservists from Des Moines, Iowa, and wounding dozens more. The attack was the first U.S. combat deaths of Operation Epic Fury, the war launched by President Donald Trump alongside Israel against Iran on Feb. 28.

The letter sent Wednesday by Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Rep. Pat Ryan, first reported by the Washington Post, details the aftermath. According to the letter, which cites reporting by the Washington Post and CBS News, the unit had asked for more medical staff and supplies before the strike and was turned down. After the attack, there was no doctor on site, no fixed aid station, and only one ambulance, with some of the wounded driving themselves to a hospital in Kuwait City. It took nine days before roughly two dozen soldiers, some still unscreened for brain injuries, were flown to the U.S. military hospital at Landstuhl, Germany.

“Doctors told them that because they hadn’t been recorded as medical evacuees on the flight’s manifest or as seriously injured in [the defense department’s] casualty-processing database, they could only get limited treatment and had to wait in nearby barracks because the hospital was unable to admit them,” the letter states.

Soldiers later sent to Fort Hood, Texas, are said to have gone weeks without seeing a doctor able to diagnose traumatic brain injury, despite repeatedly failing post-blast cognitive tests. Families have told CBS News that the U.S. Army downplayed the severity of individual wounds.

The letter also presses Hegseth on the Pentagon’s official count of U.S. service members killed in the war on Iran, which dropped from 18 to 14 on July 23. The Pentagon blamed a data problem, but the lawmakers cite reporting that officials privately said four service members — three killed in Jordan and one in northern Iraq on July 17 and 18 — were dropped because their deaths occurred after Trump’s declared ceasefire in April, even though they died after Trump had told Congress on July 7 that strikes on Iran had resumed. Those four deaths, plus more than 200 wounded, have since been filed under a new “Overseas Operations” category, rather than counted as part of Epic Fury, following an earlier episode in which about 100 troops injured in strikes on Jordan went undisclosed until reporters asked questions.

The letter questions the independence of the U.S. Army’s internal review. One of the unit’s commanders initially assigned a mid-career officer under his own command to the inquiry, before a senior officer and U.S. Army Central took over. Soldiers questioned in the process came away with the impression that, as one put it, “we are investigating ourselves and found no wrongdoing,” according to the Washington Post.

The lawmakers note that at least 18 service members have been killed and more than 620 wounded in the war overall since it began in February.

“As you and President Trump continue to risk the lives of service members in this reckless war, the American people deserve answers on whether you were adequately prepared to protect service members from Iranian attacks and get them the care they needed,” the lawmakers wrote, “and whether you will be prepared to do so if the war continues and escalates even further.”

The letter is the second time in a week a U.S. senator has pressed the Pentagon over the conduct of the war. On July 24, Sen. Tim Kaine, a Democrat from Virginia, demanded answers by Aug. 14 about pre-selected target lists used in the war’s opening strikes, after a Feb. 28 strike on a school in Minab, Iran, killed more than 150 civilians, most of them children. Kaine said he was “deeply concerned about the inclusion of a school in Minab, Iran, on the lists of verified targets.”

The Pentagon declined to comment on the letter led by Warren and Ryan.