TomDispatch: Bush's Sacrificial Americans

[marmar]

Tomgram: The President Alone in the Dark

Surging from Kenai

Bush's Sacrificial Americans
By Tom Engelhardt
A Surge of Bodies

On January 4th, the Pentagon "announced the identities" of six American soldiers who had died between December 28th and New Year's Eve. It was just one of many such listings over these last years and, like similar announcements, this one had a just-the-facts quality to it -- spare to the bone, barely more information than you would get from a POW: rank, age, place of birth, date of death, place of death, type of death, and the unit to which the dead soldier belonged.

These announcements, which blend seamlessly into one another, also blend the dead into a relatively uniform mass. You can, of course, learn nothing from such skeletal reports about the dreams of these young men (and sometimes women), their hopes or fears, their plans for the future or lack of them, their talents and skills, their problems, their stray thoughts or deepest convictions, their worlds, and those who cared about them.

So few paragraphs are almost bound to emphasize not the individuality of the dead, but their similarity in death. Five of these soldiers died due to roadside explosives (IEDs), one from small-arms fire. Two died in Baghdad; two in Baqubah; the embattled capital of Diyala Province, north of Baghdad, where civil war rages; one in Ramadi, the capital of al-Anbar Province, the heartland of the Sunni insurgency; and one in Taji, also in the "Sunni Triangle." None had a rank higher than sergeant. The oldest was only 22; the youngest, 20. Another thing five of the six had in common was not coming from a major American city.

In order of population:

Sgt. John M. Sullivan came from Hixon, Texas, halfway between New Ulm and Cat Spring. It has never had a post office and, reports the Handbook of Texas online, "A 1963 map showed no trace of the community."
Pvt. David E. Dietrich came from Marysville, Pennsylvania, (population, 2,428 in 2005), not far from Harrisburg.

Pfc. Alan R. Blohm came from Kenai, Alaska (population, 7,166 in 2003), 150 miles south of Anchorage.

Cpl. Jonathan E. Schiller came from Ottumwa, Iowa, (population 24,998 in 2000), best known as the home of Radar O'Reilly in the TV show M*A*S*H. It supposedly has "the highest unsolved murder rate (per capita) in the free world."

Spc. Luis G. Ayala came from South Gate, California (population of 103,547), part of Los Angeles and once the home of a huge General Motors plant.

Spc. Richard A. Smith came from Grand Prairie, Texas, population 145,600 in 2005. "Legend has it," the Wikipedia tells us, "that the town was renamed after a famous female actor stepped off the train and exclaimed ‘My, what a grand prairie!'"

Some of them, in other words, grew up in places with vanishingly small populations but even those who didn't came from places you're likely to have heard of only if you grew up there yourself. As Lizette Alvarez and Andrew Lehren put it, in examining the last thousand American deaths in Iraq for the New York Times:

"The service members who died during this latest period fit an unchanging profile. They were mostly white men from rural areas, soldiers so young they still held fresh memories of high school football heroics and teenage escapades. Many men and women were in Iraq for the second or third time. Some were going on their fourth, fifth or sixth deployment."
All you have to do is look through the most recent of these Pentagon announcements of deaths in Iraq to find more evidence of that parade of places you just haven't heard of: Vassar, Michigan (pop. 2,823), Paris, Tennessee (pop. 9,763), Wasilla, Alaska (pop. 5,470), Tamarac, Florida (pop. 55,588), New Castle, Delaware (pop. 4,836), and Vancouver, Washington (pop. 157,493). .......(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=156374

[Blue_In_AK]

1. I believe we just lost another soldier from Wasilla

another small (although growing) Alaska community north of Anchorage. Add the local boys to all the soldiers from Ft. Richardson and Ft. Wainwright who have died, and Alaska is taking a very hard hit. It seems like every other day we're hearing of another soldier with local connections being slain.