Rural America Pays the President's Price in Iraq (TOM ENGELHARDT)

[laststeamtrain]

Rural America Pays the President's Price in Iraq
By Tom Engelhardt

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).

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[ayeshahaqqiqa]

1. When a soldier from Green Forest Arkansas died,

the whole town came out for the funeral. Green Forest has maybe 3000 population. The point is that when there is a death from a small town, everyone in the town is effected. They all know the deceased, his family, his friends. It becomes much more up front and personal.

It was after the death of the Green Forest soldier that I noticed vehicles were no longer sporting pro-Bush bumper stickers. I think these deaths are having an effect on rural America's attitude towards Bush and the repukes.