During Vietnam, there were deferments for men going to college, and exemptions for boys like our President, well-connected enough to wrangle a place in the National Guard. During the Civil War, $400 could buy a drafted man a substitute to go to war in his stead. The draft sending kids to Iraq may be an informal, economic one-but it is no less effective for that. Like the Vietnam and the Civil War before it, the conflict in Iraq has become a rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight. They’re kids who are shot by snipers or blown up by car bombs before they have a chance to spend the tuition money they’ve earned under the Montgomery G. They’re the kids for whom the army has set up the recruiting website, where you can download the “highly realistic” America’s Army game or play the Army Racing game (“satisfy your need for speed”). They’re Southern kids and Midwestern kids, kids for whom the army means a way out of their little town and maybe some money for college. They may be members of our cohort, but they aren’t our peers, exactly-they’re less New York than we are, less East or West Coast. The kids who are dying are from places like Arkansas, Nashville or Ayden, North Carolina. It has confirmed the death of the following Americans.” And then the names follow, and the ages-18, 19, 20, 21-and the hometowns. Almost every day, below the headline “Names of the Dead,” the New York Times publishes their names according to the same stark formula: “The Department of Defense has identified 768 American service members who have died since the start of the Iraq war. At night, music and laughter from formals drift from house courtyards out over the river.Īnd half a world away, American kids our age are dying in Iraq. During the day, we sprawl on patches of grass to sunbathe and complain about how much work we have to do, our voices floating to each other, languid, in the warm air. Seersucker and madras glow prematurely, like early gladiolus. The air smells of lilac flip-flops slap the brick sidewalks.
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