Military officials are investigating the non-combat-related death of a soldier that occurred on February 11 at Camp Arifjan, Kuwait. Camp Arifjan, located south of Kuwait City, is a multi-service, international military installation that serves approximately 9,000 service members.
According to a press release issued by U.S. Army Central, Shaw Air Force Base, South Carolina, the soldier was assigned to U.S. Army Central. Neither the identity of the soldier nor the circumstances surrounding the death have been released, pending next-of-kin notification. The unidentified soldier’s death marks the fifth non-combat-related death reported on the base since 2020.
Maj. Stephen Khou, 36, died on the base in 2023. In 2021, Staff Sgt. Anthony Bermudez, 28, and Staff Sgt. Timothy Manchester,34, were both killed in vehicle accidents at Camp Arifjan. In 2020, Senior Airman Jason Khai Phan, 26, was killed in a single-vehicle accident while conducting a routine patrol outside the base perimeter.
Accidental deaths among service members have been the focus of several service-wide reduction initiatives following a study that showed a third of all deaths among soldiers stationed in Iraq and Afghanistan were accident-related, as well as a Congressional Research Service study that documented 6,198 accidental military member deaths between 2006-2021.
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While some of these deaths were recorded as due to accidental overdoses or other incidents, a majority of accidental training deaths are recorded as related to vehicle rollover rates.
The Government Accountability Office released a report in 2021, recommending nine points of action to be taken among all services to reduce these deaths. At this time, all nine recommendations are recorded as ‘open,’ indicating the individual services have been received and reviewed, and they are working to implement the recommended actions.
According to Army Times, the Army set a new low in accidental deaths for 2022. Remarking on the decrease, Combat Readiness Center issued a statement that read: “For the first time in history, the aviation community did not lose a single crew member in an aviation mishap. While there were four Class A flight mishaps, defined by the total loss of an aircraft, fatality, or more than $2.5M in damage, it was the lowest annual total in Army history.”
