COUNTERING MILITARY RECRUITMENT
Articles: Military Service: Casualties
The Forgotten American Dead
Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch. com
January 25, 2007
Rural America pays the President's price in Iraq.When we hear about the American dead in Iraq, we normally learn about
the circumstances in which they died. Last Saturday, for instance, was, for
American troops, the third bloodiest day since the Bush administration
launched its invasion in March 2003 - 27 of them died. Twelve went down in
a Blackhawk helicopter over Diyala Province, probably hit by a
shoulder-fired missile. Five died under somewhat surprising and mysterious
circumstances. They were attacked in a supposedly secure facility in the
Shiite city of Karbala by gunmen who, despite their telltale beards, were
dressed to imitate American soldiers and managed to drive through city
checkpoints in exceedingly official-looking armored SUVs. They could, of
course, have been members of Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army, but were
probably Sunni insurgents from a neighboring province. The rest of the
Americans in that total died as a result of roadside bombs (IEDs) around
Baghdad or fighting with Sunni insurgents, mainly in al-Anbar Province. The
Pentagon announcements on which such news is based are usually terse in the
extreme. The totals, 29 dead for the weekend (as well as hundreds of
Iraqis), did, however, become major TV and front-page news around the country.
These deaths are presented another way in the little, black-edged
boxes you see in many newspapers. (My hometown ledger, the New York Times,
has one of these almost every day, placed wherever the humdrum bad news
from Iraq happens to fall inside the paper and labeled, "Names of the
Dead.") These, too, are taken from the Pentagon death announcements, which
offer the barest of bare bones about those who just died. But they do tell
you something that should be better noted in this country.
Take the Pentagon announcements for Iraq "casualties" from January
11th through January 23 - 21 dead in all, 17 from the Army, 2 from the
Marines, and 2 from the Navy (one in a "non-combat related incident" in
Iraq, the other in Bahrain).
Then just check out their hometowns. Remove a few obvious large
metropolitan areas, or parts thereof - Boston, El Paso, Jacksonville,
Irving (home of the Dallas Cowboys), and Irvine (California) - and here's
the parade of names you're left with:
Temecula (California) , Henderson (Texas), San Marcos (Texas), Lawton
(Michigan), Cambridge (Illinois), Casper (Wyoming), Richwood (Texas),
Prairie Village (Kansas), Ewing (Kentucky), Wisconsin Rapids (Wisconsin),
Redmond (Washington) , Peoria (Arizona), Brandenburg (Kentucky), Sabine Pass
(Texas), and Cathedral City (California) .
A couple of these like Peoria (pop. 138,000) and Casper (pop. 52,000)
are small cities. Others like Lawton (1,800) or Richwood (3,200) have the
populations of small rural towns. On the face of it, if you were to intone
this litany of the home places of the dead, it would minimally qualify as a
list of the forgotten places of America, the sorts of hometowns you would
only know if you had grown up there (or somewhere in the vicinity).
Are Sabine Pass or Cambridge, Illinois (not Massachusetts) , or
Wisconsin Rapids small towns in rural America? Probably, though any one of
them (like Temecula) could, in fact, be a suburb of some larger urban area.
Still you get the point. Go read the Pentagon death notices yourself, if
you doubt me on where the dead of this war seem to be coming from.
As it happens, though, we don't have to rely on the anecdotal or the
look of the names of the places from which the American dead have come.
Demographer William O'Hare and journalist Bill Bishop, working with the
University of New Hampshire's Carsey Institute, which specializes in the
overlooked rural areas of our country, have actually crunched the numbers
in an important study that has gotten too little attention. Matching a data
set from the Department of Defense listing the dead and their hometowns
against information from the White House Office of Management and Budget on
which counties in this country are metropolitan, they found that the
American dead of the Iraq and Afghan Wars do indeed come disproportionately
from rural America. Quite startlingly so.
According to their study, the death rate "for rural soldiers (24 per
million adults aged 18 to 59) is 60% higher than the death rate for those
soldiers from cities and suburbs (15 deaths per million)." Of rural areas,
Vermont has the highest rate of casualties, followed by Delaware, South
Dakota, and Arizona. Only 8 of our states have higher urban than rural
death rates.
Demographer O'Hare, who himself grew up in the small Michigan town of
Flushing, tells TomDispatch:
"We know that soldiers from rural America are dying at higher rates
than those from urban America, strikingly higher, 60% higher. We know, from
other research, that the rural young join the military at higher rates than
those from metropolitan areas. The dearth of opportunity in rural areas
simply leaves more young people there with fewer alternatives to the military.
"Dozens of case studies show that opportunities are moving away, part
of a long-term shift. The opportunity differential between rural and urban
America is probably higher now than at any time in the past. Our study
highlights the price some young folks and their families are paying for
lack of opportunity in rural America."
What does this mean? Just over 3,000 Americans have died in Iraq. If
the U.S. population is 300 million, then that's just 0.001% of it. Add into
this the fact that the American dead come disproportionately from the most
forgotten, least attended to parts of our country, from places that often
have lost their job bases; consider that many of them were under or
unemployed as well as undereducated, that they generally come from
struggling, low-income, low-skills areas. Given that we have an
all-volunteer military (so that not even the threat of a draft touches
other young Americans), you could certainly say that the President's war in
Iraq - and its harm - has been disproportionately felt. If you live in a
rural area, you are simply far more likely to know a casualty of the war
than in most major metropolitan areas of the country.
No wonder it's been easy for so many Americans to ignore such a
catastrophic war until relatively recently. This might, in a sense, be
considered part of a long-term White House strategy, finally faltering, of
essentially fighting two significant wars abroad while demobilizing the
population at home. When, for instance, soon after the 9/11 attacks the
President urged Americans to go to Disney World or, in December 2006, to go
"shopping more" to help the economy, he meant it. We were to go on with our
normal lives, untouched by his war.
In an interview this week, the Newshour's Jim Lehrer asked the
President the following:
"If it is as important as you've just said - and you've said it many
times - as all of this is, particularly the struggle in Iraq, if it's that
important to all of us and to the future of our country, if not the world,
why have you not, as president of the United States, asked more Americans
and more American interests to sacrifice something? The people who are now
sacrificing are, you know, the volunteer military - the Army and the U.S.
Marines and their families. They're the only people who are actually
sacrificing anything at this point."
And here was the President's pathetic but indicative answer:
"Well, you know, I think a lot of people are in this fight. I mean,
they sacrifice peace of mind when they see the terrible images of violence
on TV every night. I mean, we've got a fantastic economy here in the United
States, but yet, when you think about the psychology of the country, it is
somewhat down because of this war."
In other words, our President wants - has always wanted - most of us
to do nothing whatsoever.
To put all of this in some kind of crude context, let's consider the
Iraqi side of this horrific equation. Just recently, the United Nations
announced that in 2006, approximately 34,000 Iraqi civilians were killed.
As Jon Wiener pointed out at the Nation Magazine's "The Notion" blog, this
was clearly an undercount. Not all the December 2006 figures for the
civilian dead were even in when it was toted up; bodies that didn't make it
to morgues or hospitals couldn't be counted; embattled areas where
officials might have underreported couldn't be dealt with; and, of course,
though we don't know how the UN separated combatants from noncombatants,
the report "almost certainly omitted deaths of Iraqi policemen, soldiers,
insurgent fighters, and members of private militias like the Badr brigade."
Nonetheless, if the Iraqi population is about 27 million, then even
that one-year undercount represents more than 0.1% of it. If, as such
figures do indicate, total Iraqi deaths since the invasion reached even the
low end of the recent Lancet study's estimates - that is, several hundred
thousand dead (and they could well be far higher) - then we are talking
about a country that has already lost at least 1% of its population as
direct casualties of the President's invasion and occupation. (Remove
relatively peaceful Iraqi Kurdistan from the equation and these numbers
will, of course, look worse.)
To take another crude measure of such things, sociologists sometimes
claim that an average American knows approximately 200 people by their
first names. So think of those 3,000 dead Americans, significantly from
rural areas, as known on a first-name basis to 600,000 other people. (If
you include the war wounded, of course, these figures would go far higher.)
On the same exceedingly crude basis, those 34,000 dead Iraqi civilians of
2006 alone would have been known by 6,800,000 other Iraqis. If you add in
the Iraqi wounded, those who have fled the country, those who have become
internal refugees in the roiling civil war and ethnic cleansing of
neighborhoods, there obviously can essentially be no one in Iraq who has
escaped intimate knowledge of the ravages of the American invasion and
occupation, and the insurgency and civil war that have followed.
In other words, you have a war launched by a country whose people, in
a personal sense, can hardly know that it's going on and it's being fought
in a country that has been taken apart and ravaged more or less down to the
last citizen.
Or think of it this way: The forgotten rural American dead are the
Iraqis of the American War. I leave you to wonder about what the Iraqi dead
are.
Note: The Carsey Institute report by William O'Hare and Bill Bishop,
"U.S. Rural Soldiers Account for a Disproportionately High Share of
Casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan" can be read by clicking here (pdf file)
or you can go to this page at Rural Strategies.org, an interesting outfit
that also focuses on the problems of rural America, to find the report and
more material on the rural dead of the war, including a good piece on small
towns and casualties by Nick Stump that appeared on the Daily Kos site.
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