The Pentagon named 1st Lieutenant Tyler James Feehan, 25, of Ewa Beach, Hawaii, who died on Saturday 18 July, and Private Isabella Gonzales, 19, of Carrollton, Texas, who died on Friday 17 July1. Both were assigned to Army Air and Missile Defense Command, and both were killed in the Iranian missile and drone attack on Muwaffaq Salti Air Base, the installation near Azraq in eastern Jordan that hosts American air and missile defence units.
Cumulative US military deaths since the war began on 28 February now stand at 1723. CENTCOM (US Central Command) announced the deaths on 18 July without naming either soldier, and the count stayed contested until the Pentagon released the names.
We owe readers a correction on that figure. Our previous briefing carried both 17 and 18, the gap turning on whether a service member listed as missing at Muwaffaq Salti had been counted before identification finished. The figure is 17, and we should have published that rather than the spread. The other death over that weekend was not a strike casualty and already sits on our record.
Gonzales was nineteen. Feehan was twenty-five. Neither flew a sortie against Iran; both worked the layer that catches what the nightly bombing does not prevent, which is where the American losses in this war have accrued. Two nights after Gonzales was killed, Jordan published its own interception figures for a further wave of incoming missiles, more than most governments under fire are willing to say. The missile that gets through is the whole distance between an interception statistic and a casualty list.
