Posted by Sal on Tue, 09 Jan 2007 22:39 | #

Bear with me, I am going to speak in sweeping generalities…

Young, white “backwoods” men from the south and west and midwest, but especially the south, are more likely to join the military for a variety of reasons.  These areas of the US, being more traditionally minded and patriotic, provide a large number of soldiers.  Many families have a military tradition.  Many of these individuals can shoot before they can walk and hunt not only for sport but for sustenance and because it is also a tradition.  I feel that some may join for economic reasons, but to a lesser extent than you might think.  I don’t think many of them are starry-eyed (no pun intended) about America either. 
Since these men are the ones doing that fighting and getting to the fighting or on patrol, they get hit the most.  Simple case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.  If whites are doing the most fighting and are in the most vulnerable positions of being exposed to the enemy (i.e driving along a road in Baghdad), they will die the most.  Says quite bit about who commanders want in combat or who makes up combat units, or am I reading too much into it (you want the most effective people, the best shots, the best hunters-if you can stalk deer, then you can stalk people, etc…).  As to a way to judge who is patriotic, just do a count of American flags in urban areas like Detroit or Harlem (and Berkeley, CA), vs. more rural, and yes, suburban America.  Then ask yourself the demographics.       

Now I am sure I’m going to get some heat for this, but here is my Scotland connection.  The Scotch Irish, in my opinion, as an ethnic group, enjoy fighting and are quite good at it (as opposed to ethnic Italians,for example).  Some of the best US soldiers were Scotch Irish (see Carlos Hathcock, a sniper.  Google his feats in Vietnam).  This ethnic group provides some of the best soldiers around, but I only have anecdotal evidence.  Some of these individuals are highly aggressive and the most aggressive and best have a tendency to go to units like SEAL, Special Forces, Recon, etc… I have seen some of them at work and it is really wild stuff.  I feel a majority of them that I have met are southern, midwestern or western.
This is a story that may be “ignored” for a variety of reasons including:  Who is making the sacrifices (whether the cause is good or bad is not the question) and who is sitting at home collecting a check?  Who is pariotic and who isn’t?  Who can be an effective soldier in a modern, technological military and actually does the real fighting?  Why do some have a greater sense of duty or honor?
Final question:  Many of you guys up here at MR seem to be Englishmen.  Do the best soldiers/snipers in your army come from Scotland?  After all, the Scotch ghillies were the root of modern sniping today.

Posted by Guessedworker on Tue, 09 Jan 2007 23:41 | #

Sal, in my inexpert opinion it is the German line that produces fine soldiers, and the same is probably true of all Nordics.

Posted by Desmond Jones on Tue, 09 Jan 2007 23:45 | #

Canadian casualties in the Stan, reflect the above reality even more starkly. Of the forty odd fatalities, two are vismins (black). There are no Chinese, Sikhs, Hindus, Muslims or for that matter, Quebecers (although the “Vandoos”, the Royal 22nd Regiment are now serving in the Stan, so that may change) fatalities. Although there are some ethnic groups, (Italian-Canadians) represented in the killed, overwhelmingly they are Anglos. And disproportionaly, they are from Canada’s east coast, not unlike the US south, Anglo-Celtic and relatively impoverished.

Rob Furlong, Tim McMeekin and three other Canadian sharpshooters—Graham Ragsdale, Arron Perry and Dennis Eason—[Furlong and Perry are Newfoundlanders] had spent nearly a week in the rugged terrain of Afghanistan’s Shahikot Valley, reaching out and touching the enemy from distances even they had never trained for. But that shot was something special. Rob Furlong had just killed another human being from 2,430 m, the rough equivalent of standing at Toronto’s CN Tower and hitting a target near Bloor Street. It was—and still is—the longest-ever recorded kill by a sniper in combat, surpassing the mark of 2,250 m set by U.S. Marine Gunnery Sgt. Carlos Hathcock during the Vietnam War.

It should have been a moment of pride for the Canadian army. Five of its most talented snipers—men trained to kill without remorse, then turn around and kill again—did exactly that. They destroyed al-Qaeda firing positions, saved American lives and tallied a body count unmatched by any Canadian soldier of their generation. U.S. commanders who served alongside the snipers nominated all five for the coveted Bronze Star medal. “Thank God the Canadians were there,” is how one American soldier put it.

Yet days later, their heroics on the mountain would be overshadowed by suspicion, including stunning allegations that one sniper, in a subsequent mission, sliced himself a souvenir from the battlefield: the finger of a dead Taliban fighter. Military police launched a criminal investigation, but uncovered nothing but denials. As the months wore on, there emerged so many conflicting accusations and supposed explanations that no charges were ever laid. Even Rob Furlong’s record-breaking shot became lost in the confusion. In fact, until now, a different sniper has been widely—and incorrectly—credited with pulling the trigger on that long-distance kill.

Today, more than four years later, three of the five decorated snipers who served in Afghanistan are no longer in the army, brushed aside by a military machine that seemed all too willing to watch them go.

Posted by Al Ross on Wed, 10 Jan 2007 00:02 | #

Considerable as the Scots military contribution has been to the British Army, on a per capita basis Ulster has provided the most number of distinguished generals, many of them, of course, Scots-descended.

Lowland Scots produced a fine officer class, whilst Highland Scots supplied the other ranks with fighters of great ferocity.

Posted by Al Ross on Wed, 10 Jan 2007 00:31 | #

Apropos The Herald : the paper’s social-Marxist bias is vomit-inducing and the Communist convivium which dominates the letters page simply underscores the reality of Scottish society’s Leftist defacement.

About 4 years ago The Herald’s front page carried the dolorous news that ” 83% of Scottish hate crimes were committed by Whites”. When I wrote to thank them for pointing out, axiomatically, that Scotland’s 2% non-White population was, therefore, responsible for a whoppingly disproportionate 17% of such heinous crimes, the editor decided not to print my letter.

Posted by PF on Wed, 10 Jan 2007 13:46 | #

My granddad used to do work surveying railroads and he said the railroad crews were divided into English, and Irish-Scottish guys.

He said the English guys would just drink a pint afterwards, but the Irish and Scottish guys would drink and then fight. He said ~They genuinely liked fighting each other, they really took pleasure in it.~

Its purely anecdotal, but its interesting.

On the other hand, what would one say apropos the English hooligans and skinheads? Those guys are pretty hardcore I think.

I dunno. Its an interesting topic, though.
To see how aggressivity and tendency to violence manifest themselves in these recently domesticated peoples.

The pre-Norman British history is incredibly blood-soaked and gory, I analysed the Anglosaxon chronicle and calculated that in the 215-year period between 687 and 902 there were 54 major conflicts. (Major conflicts are between great powers, Wessex against Danes, for example). On average, there was 1 major conflict every 4 years. All this at a time when even superficial wounds could be fatal owing to infection.
Of course there is no way to take into account all the duels, skirmishes, vendettas, and killing that was going on in the periphery so to speak. In fact the subjugation of Northern and Middle England by the Danes is hardly treated, though it occurs in this time (the Saxons in the South had little way of knowing what happened there).

So all in all, the Anglo-Saxon chronicle speaks to a pretty unbelievable amount of violence, especially considering we have to take it as an underestimate of how much was actually going on. Britain was pretty multi-culti in those days, after all.

Posted by Bo Sears on Sun, 14 Jan 2007 02:29 | #

The Herald suddenly introduced new software, and the new address for this story is much too long for this site, However, go to:

http://pqasb.pqarchiver.com/smgpubs/advancedsearch.html

and type in “a Pentagon study shows the majority of those killed were young, white and from rural backgrounds” with dates that bracket 1/2/07.

The same subject was mentioned in an essay by NYT authors reproduced at:

http://www.veteransforamerica.org/index.cfm/Page/Article/ID/9194

“The service members who died during this latest period fit an unchanging profile. They were mostly white men from rural areas, soldiers so young they still held fresh memories of high school football heroics and teenage escapades. Many men and women were in Iraq for the second or third time. Some were going on their fourth, fifth or sixth deployment.”

Antiwar.com also covered the same ideas, quoting the NYT, at:

http://www.antiwar.com/engelhardt/?articleid=10317

The NYT article may be found at:

http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F10613F63D540C728CDDA80894DF404482

I don’t expect everyone to rush to read these, but they are priceless documentation about the killings of young white Americans in Southwest Asia.

Posted by Guessedworker on Sun, 14 Jan 2007 22:54 | #

An article by Tom Engelhardt at [url=“http://www.antiwar.com/engelhardt/?articleid=10317
” title=“anti-war”]antiwar.com[/url] puts a little more detail on who is dying for Amerikwa:-

On January 4th, the Pentagon “announced the identities” of six American soldiers who had died between December 28th and New Year’s Eve. It was just one of many such listings over these last years and, like similar announcements, this one had a just-the-facts quality to it – spare to the bone, barely more information than you would get from a POW: rank, age, place of birth, date of death, place of death, type of death, and the unit to which the dead soldier belonged.

These announcements, which blend seamlessly into one another, also blend the dead into a relatively uniform mass. You can, of course, learn nothing from such skeletal reports about the dreams of these young men (and sometimes women), their hopes or fears, their plans for the future or lack of them, their talents and skills, their problems, their stray thoughts or deepest convictions, their worlds, and those who cared about them.

So few paragraphs are almost bound to emphasize not the individuality of the dead, but their similarity in death. Five of these soldiers died due to roadside explosives (IEDs), one from small-arms fire. Two died in Baghdad; two in Baqubah; the embattled capital of Diyala Province, north of Baghdad, where civil war rages; one in Ramadi, the capital of al-Anbar Province, the heartland of the Sunni insurgency; and one in Taji, also in the “Sunni Triangle.” None had a rank higher than sergeant. The oldest was only 22; the youngest, 20. Another thing five of the six had in common was not coming from a major American city.

In order of population:

Pvt. David E. Dietrich came from Marysville, Pennsylvania, (population, 2,428 in 2005), not far from Harrisburg.

Pfc. Alan R. Blohm came from Kenai, Alaska (population, 7,166 in 2003), 150 miles south of Anchorage.

Cpl. Jonathan E. Schiller came from Ottumwa, Iowa, (population 24,998 in 2000), best known as the home of Radar O’Reilly in the TV show M*A*S*H. It supposedly has “the highest unsolved murder rate (per capita) in the free world.”

Sgt. John M. Sullivan came from Hixson, Tennessee (population 37,507).

Spc. Luis G. Ayala came from South Gate, California (population of 103,547), part of Los Angeles and once the home of a huge General Motors plant.

Spc. Richard A. Smith came from Grand Prairie, Texas, population 145,600 in 2005. “Legend has it,” the Wikipedia tells us, “that the town was renamed after a famous female actor stepped off the train and exclaimed ‘My, what a grand prairie!’”

Some of them, in other words, grew up in places with vanishingly small populations but even those who didn’t came from places you’re likely to have heard of only if you grew up there yourself. As Lizette Alvarez and Andrew Lehren put it, in examining the last thousand American deaths in Iraq for the New York Times:

“The service members who died during this latest period fit an unchanging profile. They were mostly white men from rural areas, soldiers so young they still held fresh memories of high school football heroics and teenage escapades. Many men and women were in Iraq for the second or third time. Some were going on their fourth, fifth or sixth deployment.”

All you have to do is look through the most recent of these Pentagon announcements of deaths in Iraq to find more evidence of that parade of places you just haven’t heard of: Vassar, Michigan (pop. 2,823), Paris, Tennessee (pop. 9,763), Wasilla, Alaska (pop. 5,470), Tamarac, Florida (pop. 55,588), New Castle, Delaware (pop. 4,836), and Vancouver, Washington (pop. 157,493).

This isn’t new. You could say, in fact, that here, as elsewhere in the American experience of war in Iraq, the Vietnam analogy seems to apply, at least to a degree. Historian Chris Appy in his book Working-Class War comments:

“Rural and small-town America may have lost more men in Vietnam, proportionately, than did even central cities and working-class suburbs… It is not hard to find small towns that lost more than one man in Vietnam. Empire, Alabama, for example, had four men out of a population of only 400 die in Vietnam – four men from a town in which only a few dozen boys came of draft age during the entire war.”

But in the present all-volunteer military at the height of an increasingly catastrophic, ever-less-popular war, this trend toward sacrificing the overlooked young from overlooked American communities seems especially pronounced.

What does this mean, practically speaking? Assistant Professor James Moody of Duke University recently estimated that somewhere between 4.3 and 6.5 million Americans “may know people who were killed or wounded in the recent fighting” in Iraq and Afghanistan. That may sound like a lot of people, but as Globalsecurity.org’s director John Pike put the matter, “The probability of knowing a casualty was about 100 times higher in [World War II] than today.” Similar figures for the Vietnam years would have been significantly higher than the present ones as well (and, of course, the omnipresence of the draft gave so many more Americans a sense of being at war). As University of Maryland sociology professor David Segal put the matter, in considering Moody’s research, “The bottom line is that the American military is at war, but American society is not. Even in Vietnam, everybody knew somebody who was killed or wounded.”

When, last night, the president announced that he had already “committed more than 20,000 additional American troops to Iraq,” when he “surges” them into Baghdad and al-Anbar Province, he is surging from Kenai, from Wasilla, from South Gate. And he is ensuring a spate of future Pentagon “announcements” that will again take us to what’s left of the hamlets, villages, small towns, and out of the way smaller cities of this country, the places Americans increasingly don’t notice.

When the president talks to us, as he did last night, about “a year ahead that will demand more patience, sacrifice, and resolve,” this is who he is mainly sacrificing. Today, in our civilized world, we are shocked when we read of the bloody rites, the human sacrifices, of the Aztecs whose priests ripped hearts, still beating, from human chests to appease their bloodthirsty gods. These were, of course, the hearts of captives. In all his fervor, George W. Bush looks ever more like an American high priest who, for his own bloody gods, is similarly ripping hearts from the chests of the living. Make no mistake, in his speech last night, he was offering up human sacrifices from the captive villages and towns of the United States on the altar of blind faith and pure, abysmal folly.