I met this kid from Miles City, Montana, who read the Stars and Stripes every day, checking the casualty list to see if by some chance anybody from his town had been killed. He didn’t even know if there was anyone else from Miles City in Vietnam, but he checked anyway because he knew for sure that if there was someone else and they got killed, he would be all right. "I mean, can you see two guys from a raggedy-ass town like Miles City getting killed in Vietnam?" he said.
This passage from Michael Herr’s Dispatches, p. 182, presents a far different tale than Indian men from the Punjab during World War I: of 683,149 Indian recruits to the British army between August 1914 and November 1918, 349,688—some 60 percent—were from the Punjab, and the casualty rate among those new recruits was astronomcal (from Tan Tai-Yong’s article, "An Imperial Home-Front: Punjab and the First World War," in The Journal of Military History, 2000). And it was not always infantry. In a few-week period in April 1916, for example, nearly 9,000 Punjabis were enlisted to be camel and mule drivers for the armies overseas, often in Mesopotamia.
Today, of the 2,508 Americans killed in Iraq, California (258 deaths) and Texas (223) have buried more soldiers than any other states. Others—New York, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Florida—have each buried over 100 of their own residents. Such morbid number analysis doesn’t weigh one state over another, of course, but relates the spread of enlistments across the country, and the contributions of poor and often rural communities to America’s war in Iraq.
It also cruelly extends Herr’s passage to the present, when a rural resident of Texas, California, or Montana (10 deaths in Iraq) can once again get killed in a far-off country, along with a neighbor.
