Rural America Pays the Price for War in Iraq

When we hear about the American dead in Iraq, we normally learn about the circumstances in which they died. January 20 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 11-23 -- 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).

Are Sabine Pass or Cambridge, Illinois (not Massachusetts), or Wisconsin Rapids small towns in rural America? Probably, though any one of them (like Temecula) could, in fact, be a suburb of some larger urban area. Still you get the point. Go read the Pentagon death notices yourself, if you doubt me on where the dead of this war seem to be coming from.

As it happens, though, we don't have to rely on the anecdotal or the look of the names of the places from which the American dead have come. Demographer William O'Hare and journalist Bill Bishop, working with the University of New Hampshire's Carsey Institute, which specializes in the overlooked rural areas of our country, have actually crunched the numbers in an important study that has gotten too little attention.

Matching a data set from the Department of Defense listing the dead and their hometowns against information from the White House Office of Management and Budget on which counties in this country are metropolitan, they found that the American dead of the Iraq and Afghan Wars do indeed come disproportionately from rural America. Quite startlingly so.