In the Vietnam years, the Pentagon had, for instance, been stung by the thought that images of the American dead coming home in body bags had spurred on that era’s huge antiwar movement (though, in reality, those images were rare). Nor were they likely to forget the effect of the “body count,” offered by U.S. military spokesmen in late afternoon press briefings in Saigon, the South Vietnamese capital. Among disillusioned reporters, these became known as “the Five O’clock Follies.” They were supposedly accurate counts of enemy dead, but everyone knew otherwise.
In a guerrilla war in which the taking of territory made next to no difference, the body count was meant as a promissory note against future success. As it became apparent that there would be no light at the end of the tunnel, however, that count began to look more barbaric to growing numbers of Americans.
Body Bags and Body Counts
At the time of the first Gulf War, as part of a larger effort to apply the “lessons” of Vietnam, the Pentagon attempted to prevent any images of the American dead from reaching the home front. More than a decade later, top officials of George W. Bush’s administration, focused on ensuring that the invasion of Iraq would be a “cakewalk” and a triumph, consciously played an opposites game with their version of Vietnam. That included, for instance, secretly counting the enemy dead but keeping mum about them for fear of re-creating the dreaded “body count.”
General Tommy Franks, who directed the invasions of both Afghanistan and Iraq, bluntly insisted, “We don’t do body counts.” But it wasn’t true, and in the end, President Bush couldn’t help himself: his frustration with disaster in Iraq led him to start complaining about being unable to mention how successful U.S. forces were in killing the enemy. Finally, compulsively, he began to offer his own presidential body counts.
But an irony should be noted here. There was another lesson from Vietnam that didn’t quite fit with those drawn from body bags and the body count. American troops had been treated terribly by the American public—so went the postwar tale—and particularly by the antiwar movement that reviled them as “baby killers” when they came home and regularly spat upon them. Often ignored in this mythic version of the antiwar movement was the fact that, as the 1970s began, it was being energized by significant numbers of Vietnam vets and active duty GIs. Nonetheless, all this was deeply believed, even by many who had been in that movement, and everyone, whatever their politics, vowed that it would never happen again. Hence, the troops, and especially the dead, were to be treated across the board and in a blanket way as “American heroes,” and elevated to almost godlike status.
So, while President Bush carefully avoided making public appearances at Dover Air Force Base as the coffins were being unloaded (lest someone confuse him with Vietnam-era president Lyndon Johnson), much publicity was given to the way he met privately and emotionally—theoretically beyond the view of the media—with the families of the dead.
In a sense, whatever proscriptions were placed on imagery of the dead, the American dead were all over. For one thing, no sooner did the Bush administration shut down those images than war critics, following their own Vietnam “lessons,” began complaining about his doing so. And even if they hadn’t, every newspaper seemed to have its own “wall of heroes,” those spreads filled with tiny images of the faces of the American dead, while their names were repeatedly read in somber tones on television. Similarly, antiwar activists toured the country with displays of empty combat boots or set up little cemeteries honoring the war dead, even while making the point that they should never have died.
No less significantly, dying Americans were actually news. I mean front-page news. If American troops died in a firefight or because of a suicide bomber or went down in a helicopter, it was often in the headlines. Whatever else you knew, you did know that Americans were dying in the wars Washington was fighting in distant lands.
A Premature Graveyard of American Inattention
Well, that was Iraq, this is Afghanistan. That was the Bush era, these are the Obama years. And, with rare exceptions, the dead seldom make much news anymore.
Now, except in small towns and local communities where the news of a local death or the funeral of a dead soldier is dealt with as a major event, American deaths, often dribbling in one or two at a time, are generally acknowledged in the last paragraphs of summary war pieces buried deep inside papers (or far into the TV news). The American dead have, it seems, like the war they are now fighting, generally gone into the dustbin of news coverage.
Take the month of November 2010 in Afghanistan. You might have thought that American deaths would make headline news. After all, according to the website icasualties.org, there were fifty-eight allied deaths in that thirty-day period, fifty-three of them American. While those numbers were undoubtedly small if compared to, say, fatal traffic accidents, they were distinctly on the rise. Along with much other news coming out of the planet’s number one narco-state, ranging from raging corruption to a rise in Taliban attacks, they trended terribly.
In understanding how this relative lack of attention was possible, it’s worth noting that the American dead tend to come disproportionately from easy-to-ignore, tough-luck regions of the country, and disproportionately as well from small town and rural America, where service in the armed forces may be more valued, but times are also rougher, unemployment rates higher, and opportunities fewer. In this context, consider those November dead. If you look through the minimalist announcements released by the Pentagon, you discover that they were almost all men in their twenties, and that none of them seem to have come from our giant metropolises. Among the hometowns of the dead there was no Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, or Houston. There were a range of second-level cities including Flagstaff (Arizona), Rochester (New York), San Jose (California), Tallahassee (Florida), and Tucson (Arizona).
For the rest of the hometown names the Pentagon lists, from Aroostook, Maine, to Mesquite, Texas, whether they represent rural areas, small towns, parts of suburbs, or modest-sized cities, they read like a dirge for places you’ve never heard of unless you yourself were born there or lived in the vicinity. Here, for instance, are the hometowns of the six U.S. trainers who died in a single incident in late November when a “trusted” Afghan policeman opened fire on them: Athens, Ohio (pop. 21,909), Beaver Dam, Wisconsin (pop. 15,169), Mexico, Maine (pop. 2,959), Quartz Hill, California (pop. 9,890), Senoia, Georgia (pop. 3,720), Tell City, Indiana (pop. 7,845). Here, as well, are some, but hardly all, of the other hometowns of the November dead: Chesterfield, Michigan, Chittenango, New York, Conroe, Texas, Dalzell, South Carolina, Davie, Florida, Fort Smith, Arkansas, Freeman, Missouri, Frostburg, Maryland, Greenfield, Wisconsin, Greenwood, Louisiana, Mills River, North Carolina, Pago Pago, American Samoa, Sierra Vista, Arizona, Thomasville, Georgia, and Wyomissing, Pennsylvania.
Back in early 2007, 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, crunched the numbers on the rural dead from America’s recent wars. According to their study, the death rate “for rural soldiers (twenty-four per million adults aged eighteen to fifty-nine) is 60 percent higher than the death rate for those soldiers from cities and suburbs (fifteen deaths per million).” More recently, sociologist Katherine Curtis arrived at similar conclusions in a study using data on U.S. troop deaths in Iraq through 2007. There’s no reason to believe that much has changed in the last few years.