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of the genre, immersing himself in its crackly old spirituals and Scots-Irish murder ballads.
His reaction to Iraq was different. About two months after the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003, White discovered that a California antiwar protester named Pat Kneisler had posted a self-researched tally of troop casualties on Daily Kos, a pro-Democratic website. Like White, Kneisler had been frustrated by differing fatality counts in the media.
White contacted her and offered to keep the count going on his own site, lunaville.org-- the name for the make-believe city where he set his daughter's bedtime stories.
Kneisler accepted the offer, and the pair set about their common task from different sides of the country. For White, it was a protest, albeit a low-key sort that suited his personality.
"I'm not the kind of person who will stand on a street corner holding a sign," he said. "Maybe I'd be a better person if I was."
Then, as now, the Department of Defense kept its own tally of U.S. casualties on its website, http://www.defenselink.mil . But White and Kneisler were concerned that the numbers were updated slowly, and didn't seem to be consistent in media accounts.
"The concept from the get-go was to get an accurate count," White said. "I'd pick up the morning paper and it would say the number was X, and then I'd hear a news report that said five more troops had been killed. But the next day in the paper the number was still X. It was always behind, and I wanted to know what the immediate tally was."
The pair used official military news releases for their list, cross-checking them with reports from journalists who were traveling with coalition troops. Over time they earned a reputation among media and military families for being accurate and quick to update their figures.
THE traffic to the site soon overwhelmed White's home server. When he switched to a commercial host, the traffic outstripped his subscription plan: At one point, he ended up with a $1,000 monthly bill. So he changed the terms of his subscription and put up a request for donations. Today, donors keep the bills paid.
There were more changes as the war dragged on. The name "icasualties" supplanted "lunaville." ("Yeah," Ashley said. "Some bedtime story, huh?") They added links to news stories, and began counting casualties in Afghanistan.
Kneisler dropped out of the project in April without explaining her reasons to White. She would not comment for this story. In the past, White said, they had argued over whether to post the name of a soldier who had been run over by a car while on leave back in the United States. He refused to include the fatality in the official count because it wasn't war-related.
White added features that packaged the casualty numbers -- on the wounded as well as the dead -- in ways that the Pentagon had not. The idea, he said, was to generate the kind of detailed data that corporate executives demand for their board meetings.
One map shows the number of coalition and U.S. deaths that occurred in each Iraqi province. It reveals that Al Anbar province, the largest in the nation and a stronghold of Sunni Muslim insurgents, has seen at least 1,044 coalition deaths, making it a deadlier place than Baghdad province, with at least 746 deaths. Some fatalities, the website notes, cannot be identified by province.
Some of the charts focus on fatalities among non-U.S. coalition troops: of the 246 killed, 125 were from the United Kingdom, 33 from Italy, and Poland and Ukraine have each lost 18. Another chart shows the number of U.S. troops killed each month by roadside bombs, known as improvised explosive devices, or IEDs.
SOME of the information on White's site, such as the number of U.S. deaths per state, is also available from the Defense Department, but White often updates his numbers faster. And his information, arguably, is easier to find: For one, the government's state-by-state fatality breakdown is accessible at a much more unwieldy URL (http://siadapp.dior.whs.mil/personnel/CASUALTY/castop.htm).
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And White goes one step further. He also breaks down the number of deaths by city.
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