He Who Has Borne The Battle
Posted on | February 22, 2007
Who’s doing the dying among American forces in Iraq?
Many of the hometowns of the war dead aren’t just small, they’re poor. The AP analysis found that nearly three quarters of those killed in Iraq came from towns where the per capita income was below the national average. More than half came from towns where the percentage of people living in poverty topped the national average…
On a per capita basis, states with mostly rural populations have suffered the highest fatalities in Iraq. Vermont, South Dakota, Alaska, North Dakota, Nebraska, Wyoming, Delaware, Montana, Louisiana and Oregon top the list, the AP found…
While support for the war in rural areas initially was high, there has been a sharp decline in the past three years. AP-Ipsos polls show that those in rural areas who said it was the right decision to go to war dropped from 73 percent in April 2004 to 39 percent now. In urban areas, support declined from 43 percent in 2004 to 30 percent now…
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2 Responses to “He Who Has Borne The Battle”
February 22nd, 2007 @ 1:41 pm
John, I live in a medium sized town in a semi-rural area in a state w/a shaky economy and the same is true here. People know somebody or know somebody who knows somebody who was in Iraq. Fact is, people who did enlist did so for one reason–to get out of this part of the country as they thought by enlisting they could have a future and get a job. (Same was true re: enlistment during the recession of the late 70’s and early/mid 80’s.)
There are quite a few amputees around town now (you actually see more in the summer than in the winter). Since the human cost is more visible there have been less of those stupid “Support Our Troops” yellow ribbons, then there was more of a “What is happening?” mindset, then “Get out of Iraq.”
I believe that I am a decade or so older than you, as even though I was a kid/in my teens at the time, I remember the same changes in attitudes at the middle/toward the end of the Vietnam War. In both instances, the price in terms of human cost is just too high.
February 22nd, 2007 @ 5:37 pm
Terri, we seem to be pretty close in age. When I taught high school in the eighties, my students would ask me, “Mr. ___, were you in Vietnam?” I laughed at the thought, having reached my teens as that war ended. I enlisted the month before Saddam invaded Kuwait, and was in Basic Training during Desert Storm. I was eight or ten years older than my fellow recruits, and certainly no infantryman; I spent the remainder of my Army years in comfortable garrison environments in Germany and here in Atlanta. The Army was a great opportunity for me (best pay I’d ever had), and I loved it. The experience has netted me one good job after another.
I was also about as liberal as soldiers get, openly advocating for equality for my GLBT brothers and sisters in uniform. I enjoyed being the perfect soldier (battalion soldier of the year, ‘93) while secretly thinking of the Army as the biggest, grandest joke ever perpetrated by humanity.
As jokes go, the humor is becoming blacker and blacker as the nation creeps toward fascism/imperialism—or maybe I’m just moving left. There’s nothing much funny about it anymore, since a young friend of one of my fellow soldiers followed in our footsteps, surprising us all by enlisting in the infantry. He’s now on patrol 7×16 in the wrong end of Bush’s war, and we’re worried.
I was only able to offer this real soldier a little bit of advice. “Be a good one,” I said, “the kind your buddies can depend on.” His stories are of an Army I never knew, where one must live the phrase I only parroted: “stay alert, stay alive.” We also ordered this young man not to win any medals, but he’s got at least one already, with a V for valor.
I just don’t want him to get hurt, or to have to hurt anyone. We want him home. We want him back in civilization.