Military Mirrors Working-Class America By DAVID M. HALBFINGER and STEVEN A. HOLMES
hey left small towns and inner cities, looking for a way out and up, or fled the anonymity of the suburbs, hoping to find themselves. They joined the all-volunteer military, gaining a free education or a marketable skill or just the discipline they knew they would need to get through life.
As the United States engages in its first major land war in a decade, the soldiers, sailors, pilots and others who are risking, and now giving, their lives in Iraq represent a slice of a broad swath of American society — but by no means all of it.
Of the 28 servicemen killed so far, 20 were white, 5 black, 3 Hispanic — proportions that neatly mirror those of the military as a whole. But just one was from a well-to-do family, and with the exception of a Naval Academy alumnus, just one had graduated from an elite college or university.
A survey of the American military's endlessly compiled and analyzed demographics paints a picture of a fighting force that, far from a cross section of America, looks much like the student body of the average community college somewhere in the South. With minorities overrepresented and the wealthy and the underclass essentially absent, with political conservatism ascendant in the officer corps and Northeasterners fading from the ranks, America's 1.4 million-strong military seems to resemble the makeup of a two-year commuter or trade school outside Birmingham or Biloxi far more than that of a ghetto or barrio or four-year university in Boston.