Don't Hate the Soldja, Hate the Game

My friend Derrick called a few days ago. We’ve both gone our separate ways since the days of serving lunch to hungry mobs of soccer moms and senior citizens in a department store café. Me, I got a gig in the non-profit world. Derrick works two jobs and goes to school, and, more and more often these days, is dispatched to “drill” – weekend trainings for the Marine Corps reserves.

When I left my job at the café, I gave Derrick my number, and told him to call me if he was called to go to Iraq.

Our lives aren’t exactly parallel, Derrick’s and mine. He’s a black guy who grew up in a lesser-known town off the San Francisco bay – I’m a white girl from the Colorado suburbs. Derrick busts his butt to help out his sister, and his mom, but you never hear him talk about it. He’s much more excited to tell you about the latest, greatest comic book or demonstrate the new things his cell phone can do. He’s good-natured and a little crazy, which is probably why we hit it off. But I wouldn’t exactly call us close.

After Derrick broke the news that he would be going to Iraq – “all roads are headed that way” is what a lieutenant colonel unofficially told him – I sat down on the concrete steps behind my workplace and thought about the parents, brothers, sisters, wives, husbands, high school teachers, coaches, cousins, ex-girlfriends, professors, and entire communities that feel the impact when a young soldier is sent to Iraq. I wondered about the degree of separation – how many people in the U.S. have a connection to someone who’s in Iraq, is going to Iraq, was wounded in Iraq, or lost his or her life in Iraq? How long before we all do?

I live in a progressive city, and have mostly radical friends. We make a point to protest the war in Iraq with bumper stickers and T-shirts and we show up to meetings, protests and actively work to bring down the man by questioning things like the military industrial complex. It might be hard for my crew of friends to remember that a lot of the U.S. soldiers serving and dying in combat are our peers. Peers. Most of my friends are under 25, which means a significant number of them graduated from high school the same years we did, or later. Put a uniform on someone and they suddenly seem older, sure. But chances are, whether the soldiers serving in Iraq are pro-Bush or Pro-Kerry (or neither), they’d all probably all rather be home reading comic books and talking on cell phones.

My generation wasn’t there to see soldiers returning from the Vietnam War to protest and shouts of “baby killer,” – a word I now associate with the anti-abortion contingent. And we might be too busy mobilizing against the School of the Americas or fighting sweatshops to get caught up in the socio-political history of recent wars, but we’re pretty clear about one thing: being anti-war doesn’t have to mean being anti-troops.

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The median age of soldiers in Vietnam was 20-21. This time around, the average is slightly higher. But for the most part, the people who fight wars are like me – young, ambitious, hoping to do something meaningful with their lives. They might want careers or jobs outside the armed forces, they might want (or already have) families. They might just want to come home and see a hip hop show.

Unfortunately, some soldiers don’t get that chance. 1,101 U.S. soldiers have died in Iraq since the beginning of combat (as of Oct. 18, 2004) according to icasualities.org. Nearly 60 percent of those soldiers were 25 years old or younger – 637 soldiers. That’s roughly 1,250 moms and dads. About 25% of those troops are married, so that’s about 160 spouses. Then there’s the brothers, sisters, uncles, cousins… you get the idea. Yes. It could be worse, and, as the Bush administration is constantly reminding me, major combat operations of the past have seen much higher casualty rates. But I’m not seeing the grief in the media. And when glimpses do get through, I don’t have a frame of reference for that grief.