War claims college-age casualties
By Joyce Tang
April 14, 2004 9:00 p.m.
Christopher Mabry was just like any high school senior last year
““ except that he chose to serve in the U.S. Marines instead
of attending college directly after high school.
The San Diego-based Private First Class Marine from Chunky,
Mississippi was 19 when he died last Wednesday in Iraq fighting
Sunni insurgents.
Mabry was deployed last February, just a month after his basic
training, according to The Meridian Star, a local newspaper in
Mississippi. He was among 25 Marines from Camp Pendleton who died
last week.
Since the inception of the war in Iraq, young soldiers, often of
college-age, have suffered a large portion of the casualties,
making up more than 40 percent of the toll.
Data from March 18 indicated that out of the 432 casualties in
Iraq at the time, 182 ranged from 18 to 24 years old.
As of Wednesday, a total of 664 U.S. troops have been killed in
Operation Iraqi Freedom; age-specific data has not yet been
released.
Recent casualties, especially in the heavy fighting of last
week, seem to follow the trend seen in the March data. College-age
soldiers continue to make up a significant part of the
casualties.
“You’ve got to bear in mind, they’re the ones
doing the fighting; of course they’re the ones doing the
dying,” said Matthew Baum, a political science professor.
Mabry, like his young peers, are generally on the lower end of
the military hierarchy. Younger enlisted men and officers suffer
more casualties because lower-ranking soldiers are more exposed to
civilians and thus to the guerrilla tactics of the insurrections in
Iraq.
“I don’t know if age has anything to do with it;
it’s just the specific job they’re performing ““
the lower the rank, the more they deal with the populace,”
said Captain Barry Burns, Army ROTC administrator at UC
Berkeley’s Department of Military Science.
The U.S. Army has a corporate structure with rank mobility
similar to that of the private sector, said Major Michael Berry, an
assistant military science professor at UCLA.
In addition to the rank differences, the percentage of
college-age soldiers killed is proportional to age demographics in
military enrollment.
“The majority of the military force is younger,”
Burns said.
The youngest age at which person can enlist is 17 with parental
permission. Otherwise, the minimum age is set at 18.
Reasons for young people to join the military range from
continuing family tradition to obtaining college scholarships.
Government incentives, such as the Montgomery G.I. Bill,
guarantee tuition aid upon completion of service. For officer
candidates in the ROTC, they can complete military training while
working on their college degrees.
While soldiers and officers in the lower ranks may not always be
experienced in combat, they are trained and competent to be sent
into battle.
On top of basic training, each enlisted soldier must train and
qualify for one of the 211 Military Occupational Specialties,
before being allowed to be deployed anywhere as a soldier. Officer
candidates complete a similar program, AIT, Advanced Individual
Training.
“You’re not deployable until you’re
branch-qualified as an officer or MOS-qualified as an enlisted
soldier,” Berry said.
Units are deployed depending on their specific combination of
soldiers possessing certain skills. Changing military conditions
require unit rotation as units are sent in to relieve troops
already there.
“Everybody that goes over there is completely and
thoroughly trained,” Berry said.
The high deployment numbers of young soldiers in Iraq is similar
to trends seen in the Vietnam conflict.
“It’s my impression … given the high percentage of
draftees in Vietnam, that the average age was younger than the
current range,” said James Goodwin, an English professor who
teaches an Honors Collegium course on Vietnam War and American
Culture.
“The general, widely accepted view … is that the average
age of the combat soldier (in Vietnam) was closer to 19 to
20,” Goodwin added.
But the average age of soldiers during Vietnam was younger
because of the draft.
Some college-age students during the Vietnam conflict were
protected from the draft by their college enrollment status. In
1971, the government instituted a new lottery system that did not
preclude college students ““ drafting from all of the
qualified male population.
A repeat of the draft is not very likely in this war, Professor
Baum said.
“But you can never say “˜never,'” Baum
added.
Largely because of the lack of a draft, different political
climates and different circumstances, Goodwin warns against drawing
extensive parallels between the wars in Vietnam and Iraq.
“The timeline is different … political awareness is
greater now, the willingness to question is greater (and) the
voiced opposition to the war is stronger,” Goodwin
said.Â
And the high casualty toll of young soldiers in Iraqi is not
much different from that in any other war. Historically, the
leaders make the wars and the young and able fight it.
While the number of young soldiers dying is proportional to
demographics in the military force, it is not proportional to
society, Baum said.
“Generally, leaders of countries are not teens, and they
make the decisions … You can make that sound very sinister, but
it’s not necessarily a conspiracy ““ but it’s just
the way society works,” he said.
