Iraq toll falls unevenly on Latinos, rural whites. By Juan Castillo, Bill Bishop AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF Sunday, February 27, 2005 Hispanic Texans are dying in Iraq at a rate more than 60 percent higher than the rate for the nation's military-age population as a whole, according to an Austin American-Statesman review of war fatalities. In a separate study, a University of California professor has found that during the first six weeks of the war, 16.5 percent of troops killed were Latinos, although Latinos made up only 11.2 percent of the combat troops. More than 1,470 troops have lost their lives since U.S. forces invaded Iraq. With the invasion approaching its second anniversary next month, the uneven distribution of fatalities is forcing the military and the nation to confront questions about exactly who dies for their country when the United States goes to war. The burden in Iraq is not being shared equally. Hispanic Texans and rural Americans, mostly white, have among the highest death rates.

The federal Government Accountability Office and academic researchers are studying the counts, looking for social factors that might help explain how race and class shape who joins the military.

Through a spokesman, the Department of Defense said it could not respond directly to the American-Statesman's findings without conducting its own statistical analysis, but said the findings generally reflect "the fact that we are at war."

Extensive Department of Defense studies from as recently as 2002 have consistently found that poor young people with low grades and the least likelihood of going to college or getting jobs are more likely to enlist, many to get college financial aid. One department report prepared by a consultant in 2000, for example, recommended that recruiters "concentrate on C students."

An all-volunteer military makes understanding who is joining — and therefore dying — especially relevant, analysts say.

"I think in a democracy, given that the military is an agent not only of the state but also of society, you want a military that all sectors feel they have a stake in," said David Segal, a sociologist and director of the Center for Research on Military Organization at the University of Maryland.

Texas is home to 19 percent of the nation's Latinos of military age. Yet 32 percent of the Hispanic service members killed in Iraq as of Feb. 19 came from Texas, according to the American-Statesman's review by statistician Robert Cushing.

Put another way,Hispanic Texans have died at the rate of 15.6 for every million Hispanic men and women of military age in the state. The comparable rate for the nation is 9.7 deaths per million.

Of the 142 Texans killed in Iraq as of Feb. 19, 54 — or 38 percent — were Hispanic, although Hispanics account for only 32 percent of military age Texans, the American-Statesman's analysis shows.

Because most of the country's population lives in and around cities, in sheer numbers, most of those killed have come from metropolitan areas.

But a disproportionate share of troops killed has come from rural America, where whites make up more than 80 percent of the population.

Whites make up 65 percent of the nation's military and made up about 72 percent of all fatalities through Jan. 8, according to a study by Brian Gifford, a health policy researcher at the University of California, Berkeley.

Best option
After graduating from St. Michael's Academy in Austin, Andrés Telles was living at home, thinking about his options. He wanted to go to college, but he wanted no part of student loans. He joined the Marines in 2001 — "I was going to join the best service there was" — and was assigned to an infantry battalion.

When U.S. forces invaded Iraq, Telles was behind the wheel of a Humvee, driving his company's gunnery sergeant and executive officer on a surreal, nonstop three-week trek to Baghdad.

"The first time, it's scary," the 22-year-old said in a telephone interview from Camp Pendleton, Calif., where he returned last month after serving a second tour of Iraq. "Sadly enough, you get used to it, to where you realize people are trying to kill you, so you just get mad and try to even the score."

Telles is certain that he made the right decision to become a Marine. "I'm pretty sure I know how I would have turned out had I not," he said thoughtfully, adding but not elaborating that he didn't like what he might have become otherwise.

Statistically, Telles was among one of the groups most likely to die in Iraq.
In his newly published study, "Combat Casualties and Race: What Can We Learn from the 2003-2004 Iraq Conflict?", Berkeley's Gifford examines what he calls the "war" and "occupation" phases and finds that "when U.S. tactics dictate a more active, aggressive role in finding and attacking enemy targets, Hispanics incur casualties in excess of their participation in ground combat units."

The rate of Hispanic deaths lessened during the insurgency and occupation phases of the war, when attacks became more random, but Hispanic deaths remained slightly disproportionate to the number of Hispanic troops overall. Gifford has updated the study with data through Jan. 8.

The percentage of total Hispanic deaths during the war is below the Hispanic percentage of the country's military age population, Gifford found. Hispanics are underrepresented in the armed forces as a whole, analysts say, because education and language requirements render many Latinos ineligible for service.

African Americans also suffered high death rates during the war's earliest stages, compared with their presence in combat units and the military age population as a whole,he found.

Some of the imbalances might result because Hispanics and whites volunteer for combat units and dangerous specialties — particularly those in the Marine Corps — at higher rates, according to a Department of Defense study.

But if some Latinos seek out dangerous jobs, they also end up in them after faring poorly on military entrance exams, said Jorge Mariscal, a Chicano historian and part of the Project on Youth and Non-Military Opportunities, a California-based group of veterans and activists that tries to counter the influence of recruiters in public schools.

"I think there's a danger to think, 'Oh, Latinos want this,' said Mariscal, who heads the Chicano studies program at University of California, San Diego.
"That's a complete misreading of the social conditions that lead people there, the educational shortfalls that track people into those jobs," Mariscal said.

Experts debate why many Hispanics enlist:
•Military recruiting is highly effective in the nation's poorest schools, where Latinos often make up a majority of students;
•The Marines have cemented a reputation as the toughest of the toughest, appealing to those who want to prove their mettle;
•The military appeals to a patriotic sense of duty among Latinos;
•Recent immigrants want to show they are grateful for being in America, or they are drawn by a U.S. policy that allows troops who serve during wartime to apply for citizenship.

Social class and educational aspirations are the most powerful predictors of whether Hispanics will enlist, a 2000 survey of young Hispanics prepared for the Department of Defense found.

"It's really a class issue, then an ethnicity or race issue," Mariscal said.
In general, Hispanics are significantly less likely to complete high school than whites. In 2002, only 57 percent of Latinos older than 25 had completed high school, compared with more than 88 percent of whites and 78 percent of blacks.

About half of enlistment-age Hispanics are immigrants, and they tend to have less formal education than their native-born counterparts, Gifford's research found.

Another theory is that Hispanics maintain a proud, patriotic military tradition that spans generations.

"If history teaches us anything, it is that the military is considered a respectable and even an honorable career for Latinos," said Maggie Rivas-Rodriguez, whose U.S. Latino and Latina WWII Oral History Project at the University of Texas has interviewed hundreds of veterans and their families.

For Latinos who had no aspirations for higher education, military service in World War II provided job security, a good job and immediate acceptance within the family. "How many high-status jobs can you get with only a high school diploma?," Rivas-Rodriguez asked.

But Mariscal questions the tradition theory, noting that many of the early deaths in Iraq were recent immigrants. It's estimated that 37,000 noncitizens serve in the armed forces, one-third of them Latino.

Of the 56 immigrant U.S. troops in Iraq who have received posthumous U.S. citizenship, 31 were from Spanish-speaking countries, including 18 from Mexico.

Honoring the flag
Juan Saldaña came to Texas from Mexico in 1900, at age 12. His son Moses remembers a boyhood trip to the state Capitol, when his immigrant father pointed to the U.S. flag whipping in the wind and said, "That's your flag. Honor the flag."

Moses, now 73, did so as a Marine. In turn, two of his sons — Moses Saldaña Jr., 42, and Mark Saldaña, 40 — also joined the Marines.
"For me, joining was a sense of pride," said Mark Saldaña of Manchaca, who served from 1981 to 1989.

Understanding which segments of society pay the price of war makes assessing casualty counts important, Gifford said.

"If, for example, people from historically disadvantaged groups are dying in larger numbers than their representation in society, then we'd say there is an unfair burden that's being borne and that our national security decisions are in fact having unfair effects on different kinds of communities," Gifford said.
Concerns about racial equity have lingered since the end of the Vietnam War, when political scientists and African American leaders raised the specter of high African American casualties in subsequent conflicts.

Blacks accounted for 21 percent of combat deaths in 1965-66, for instance, even though they made up only about 12 percent of the Army and Marines, according to Gifford's research.

Since the end of the draft in 1973, blacks have been overrepresented in the military.

In a nation with tremendous income and wealth inequalities, many Americans "are uncomfortable with the idea that individuals who voluntarily provide (national security) do so in large part because they face comparatively few vocational and economic options," Gifford's report found.
Segal, the Maryland researcher, said today's military does not resemble American society as a whole. The upper working class and lower middle class bear the burdens.

"I worry about the fact that the top strata of our society don't send their sons and daughters into the military, because they're the people who decide when to go to war," Segal said.

How this study was done
The American-Statesman's statistical consultant, Robert Cushing, collected the official Department of Defense list of casualties from the department's Web site through February 19. (The address is: http://web1.whs.osd.mil/mmid/casualty/castop.htm.) County populations were taken from the 2000 census. Deaths were compared with the population between the ages of 18 and 54. The Department of Defense does not identify the race or ethnicity of individual soldiers. For this study, Hispanics were determined by surname. Odds that findings of this study are the result of chance are less than one in a hundred.