Making sense of the news: MRAP death in Iraq

In reading news accounts and commentary on the soldier recently killed after an IED explosion under his MRAP vehicle, a couple of points have come up that could stand clarification.

First, some news accounts appeared to indicate that this fatality was the first soldier killed in an MRAP.

We've learned today that this casualty was the first to happen inside of an MRAP, or mine-resistant, ambush-protected vehicle.
(WSAV.com (NBC affiliate))

USA Today's Tom Vanden Brook continues his excellent reporting on such matters:

WASHINGTON — The U.S. military on Tuesday announced the first death of a soldier in a bomb attack involving one of its newest models of armored vehicles.

The death occurred Saturday when a Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicle rode over a homemade bomb buried in a road in Arab Jabour, south of Baghdad. Three other soldiers in the MRAP vehicle survived the blast, Maj. Anton Alston, a military spokesman, said in an e-mail.

Soldiers have died in the past in older-model MRAP trucks used by explosive ordnance (sic) teams and combat engineers.
(USA Today)

Vanden Brook sums it up nicely. Military officials were talking about one particular MRAP model (apparently it was a MaxxPro, built by Navistar) that had recently been deployed to Iraq.

Those who got it wrong have a fair excuse. Pentagon Press Secretary Geoff Morrell helped:

And as the secretary noted on Friday, those vehicles are a proven life-saver in the battlefield. Of course, they are not, as we have pointed out for months now, fail safe. And over the weekend, just south of Baghdad we lost our first soldier in an IED attack on an MRAP.
(defenselink.mil)

The military helped quite a bit with that piece of misinformation, it turns out:

"An American soldier was killed in an improvised explosive device attack on a MRAP vehicle in Arab Jabour" on the southern outskirts of Baghdad on Saturday, US military spokesman Major Winfield Danielson said on Tuesday.

"This was the first fatality involving an IED (roadside bomb) attack on a Mine Resistant Ambush Protected (MRAP) anywhere," he added.

(Agence France-Presse)

Second, I've noticed criticism of news accounts (specifically one in The New York Times) based on their paraphrase of a military spokesperson.

2. "Colonel Adgie, the battalion commander... said initial examination suggested a 'deep-buried I.E.D.,' which was there for some time, rather than one set off by remote control."

Those two things are not mutually exclusive.

(Wired)

True, they're not mutually exclusive. The story doesn't suggest that, however, though it might be made as a plausible inference even if the words used in the story don't really imply it. It is fair to read it as offering the spokesperson's view that the IED had been in place for some time, using the "deep-buried" portion of the quotation as an added descriptive.

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