NY Observer, May 26, 2004 Here's New Face Of U.S. Military: Lynndie England by Philip Weiss
The condemnation of Lynndie England, the abuser of prisoners, in some ways echoes the exaltation a year ago of Jessica Lynch. Both young women come from small West Virginia towns. The privileged who offer such strong opinions about them are not their peers; they would never make the decision to enlist that these young women did. Notwithstanding the livid horror of Abu Ghraib, there is something condescending and unconvincing about the portrayals of the poor people who are fighting the war for the rest of us.
The class issue has shadowed the war from the start but has lately been getting more attention. It is the impetus for several initiatives on Capitol Hill and a theme of Michael Moore’s antiwar documentary, Fahrenheit 9/11. "It’s a poverty draft," said Rick Jahnkow, who does anti-military recruiting in California. "The vast number of people in this country who are escaping this draft are not elites. They’re middle-class or upper-middle-class people."
The issue started percolating politically last year.
"We were looking at casualties from Texas on the Department of Defense Web site and it struck us that ‘Gee, these kids are coming from towns in Texas that we never heard of,’" said Robert G. Cushing, a retired sociology professor in Austin who works with the Austin American-Statesman. "Not just small towns. But small towns not even close to metropolitan areas."
The newspaper undertook a study of the numbers and found that while one in five Americans live in non-metropolitan counties, nearly one out of three casualties in Iraq have come from these counties. These are places that do not have a city over 50,000 people and are not within commuting distance of a big city. The paper’s interviews with enlistees from these places have shown that they can’t find good jobs in their communities and feel that a university education is out of their reach— they couldn’t afford to move to a community near a state school.
Representative Ike Skelton of Missouri, the ranking minority member on the House Armed Services Committee, was even more emphatic. Last fall he stated that 43.5 percent of the soldiers killed in Iraq came from rural cities and towns with a population below 20,000.
full: http://www.nyobserver.com/pages/frontpage4.asp
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