After watching my classmates’ reactions to the Peace Patriots documentary shown at a special program, I was struck by the general tone of indifference and apathy that seemed to plague our student body. The spirit and resolution of the people living in western Massachusetts, as documented in the film, was clearly lacking at Choate. Yet only thirty-five years ago, Choate students (and others around the country) were vehemently protesting the deportation of troops to Vietnam. So why does our outcry now seem so lackluster? There is no draft.

If as many upper- and middleclass young people were dying in the war as are people at the lower end of the socio-economic scale, dissent and opposition to American interference in the Middle East would be far more widespread than it is now. Those of us who support escalation or a continuation of the war do so only because the military burden falls not upon us, but upon the poor and underprivileged. Through an institutionalized system of targeted recruiting, the military strives to attract those most susceptible to join—that is, people for whom a prosperous American future is not ensured.

Military recruiters know that the poor lack educational and economic opportunities—and so promote enlisting in the army as an avenue to occupational advancement and funds to pay for college. The pervasive presence of the Army ROTC at most college campuses and public high schools around the country coupled with enticements of scholarships make it easy to become bound to service in Iraq or Afghanistan at a young age.

In a study of census data conducted by the Medill School of Journalism, striking figures show that 68% of the casualties (as of January 28th, 2006) came from a city, county, or zip code that had a median household income an average of 13% below the national average. David Segal, a professor of Military Sociology at the University of Maryland has said these figures reveal an over-representation of the poor and an under-representation of the upper classes in the military. “The military tends to draw on the South,” he explains, “Which is poorer than other regions; on rural areas, which are poorer than suburban; and on communities that are economically depressed.”

This sociological dislocation in the army is also represented in terms of race. Between 1983 and 2005, the number of all soldiers on active duty dropped by 37%, while the number of enlisted Hispanics rose by 75%, according to the Office of Army Demographics (OAD). This is not to say that the military has racist recruiting practices; rather, it is targeting the poorest subpopulations, many of which happen to be minorities. For example, 22.5% of American Hispanics live below the poverty line, whereas only 8.2% of non-Hispanic whites do. The high school graduation rate for Hispanics is 58.4%, while 90% of whites graduate from high school. African American people compose 20.3% of the Army—but only 12.7% of the American population is African American.

As is evident by these figures, George Bush’s “War on Terror” is being fought by the poor and minorities in this country—in other words, those very same populations who are hideously underrepresented in our government. Simply stated, those making the decisions in the Bush administration and in Congress are not coming from the same socioeconomic brackets as those dying in the streets of Baghdad. Similarly, it’s easy for Choate students to support a war when there is little threat that they will be sent themselves. If the blood spilt in Iraq was as much rich and white as it is poor and minority, this war would have been over long, long ago.