Hessians

A most interesting item from The Associated Press:

MCKEESPORT, Pa. — Edward “Willie” Carman wanted a ticket out of town, and the Army provided it.

Raised by a single mother in this old industrial steel town outside Pittsburgh, the 18-year-old saw the military as an opportunity.

“I’m not doing it to you, I’m doing it for me,” he told his mother, Joanna Hawthorne, after coming home from high school one day and surprising her with the news.

When Carman died in Iraq three years ago at age 27, he had money saved for college, a fiancee and two kids — including a baby son he had never met. Neighbors in Hawthorne’s mobile home park collected $400 and left it in an envelope in her door.

Across the U.S., small towns are quietly bearing a disproportionate burden of war. Nearly half of the more than 3,100 U.S. military casualties in Iraq have come from towns like McKeesport, where fewer than 25,000 people live, according to an analysis by The Associated Press. One in five have come from hometowns of less than 5,000.

Many of the hometowns of the war dead are not just small, they are 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.

Some are old factory towns like McKeesport, once home to U.S. Steel’s National Tube Works, which employed 8,000 people at its peak. Now, residents’ average income is just 60 percent of the national average, and one in eight lives below the federal poverty line.

On a per capita basis, states with mostly rural populations have suffered the highest casualties in Iraq. Vermont, South Dakota, Alaska, North Dakota, Nebraska, Wyoming, Delaware, Montana, Louisiana and Oregon top the list, the AP found.

There’s a “basic unfairness” about the number of troops dying in Iraq who are from rural areas, said William O’Hare, senior visiting fellow at the University of New Hampshire’s Carsey Institute, which examines rural issues.

Diminished opportunities are one factor in higher military enlistment rates in rural areas. From 1997 to 2003, 1.5 million rural workers lost their jobs due to changes in industries like manufacturing that have traditionally employed rural workers, according to the Carsey Institute.

(snip)

Death is not the only burden the war has put on small towns.

Entrepreneurs in many small communities have lost their businesses after deploying in the Guard and Reserves, said Senator Jon Tester.

Another fairness issue, raised by Rep. Bart Stupak, D-Mich., is the Pentagon’s practice of transporting the remains of military personnel killed in Iraq only to the nearest major airport. He has introduced legislation to require delivery of the remains to the military or civilian airport chosen by the family.

Support for the war in rural areas has declined sharply in the past three years. AP-Ipsos polls show that those in rural areas who said going to war was the right decision dropped from 73 percent in April 2004 to 39 percent now.

(snip)

Joanna Hawthorne is bitter about a military she said enticed her son with promises of money, then sent him to a war based on a lie.

When her son’s first enlistment was nearing an end, before the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Hawthorne said he decided to re-enlist, partly because the signing bonus of more than $10,000 would help pay his bills.

When he deployed to Iraq, his sister said, he had money saved and planned to go to college when he got out of the military in 2005.

Instead, he died in Iraq in 2004 when his tank overturned.

Hawthorne said the military gave her $4,000 for his funeral, but it wasn’t enough to cover the $14,000 expense. The funeral home forgave the rest.

“You don’t see anyone who has money putting their children into the military,” Hawthorne said. “I’m all for our soldiers. Without them, our country wouldn’t be where we are today, but this war just doesn’t seem right.”

IT'S COME TO THIS in our all-volunteer military at a time of war. We're sending in the Hessians.

And the Hessians are coming back home -- coming back home disproportionately dead.

During the Revolutionary War, the British supplemented their ranks with soldiers-for-hire from what would eventually become Germany. Today, King George 43 and his generals in the Pentagon just send for their soldiers-for-hire disproportionately from America's small towns, where the deck is stacked (and not in a good way) and a future is what college boys from the big city have.

The military as a way out worked out pretty well for Audie Murphy during World War II. He killed a bazillion Krauts, then got a million-dollar wound, a Medal of Honor and a Hollywood career.

We knew why the hell we were in World War II. Somebody tell me -- with a straight face, now -- why the hell we're in Iraq.

Even amid the catastrophe that is Iraq, kids from small-town America still see the military as a way out. Or at least as something to do.

But that "something to do" too often means they come home not as postmillennial Audie Murphys but, instead, as merely dead. Or merely horribly wounded.

And the "who" of who is paying the price probably is why President Bush has gotten away with murder for as long as he has. We don't have to fight this insane, pointless war -- or at least the well off and the college boys and the politicians' sons and daughters don't, by and large.

We have the Hessians to do it for us, freeing us to worry about the truly important things in life. Like that ski weekend. Or replacing the SUV with a new H2.

Or sending Johnny off to State U., where the most dangerous thing he'll do in his dissolute college existence (before heading off to his dissolute adult existence) is drink to excess and risk a catching nasty case of something from "hooking up" with the coeds.