I'm so sorry about your cousin's grandchild! That's a lot to put up with.

I looked it up and the cholera fatality rate is only 1% so I'm sure the troops will be fine. Here's more about it if you want to understand it better:

http://www.who.int/mediacentre/facts.../en/index.html

It sounds scary to us since it's been eliminated from where we normally are so we're not familiar with it anymore, just that it use to kill everybody in epidemics. The World Health Organization says the outbreak in Iraq isn't an epidemic. But the Iraqui children are at risk as they often don't have clean water.