Like the rest of you, I've been following the Iraq war sort of passively on the news and in my various news media. At this point, there have been nine hundred twenty four coalition personnel killed since we invaded, of whom eight hundred and fourteen are Americans. The number is certainly going to increase, but when looked at from an historical perspective, it's remarkable for a couple of things:
A) How small it is.
B) In contrast to (A), how popularly important each of those deaths has been.
Now, I in no way want to belittle the sacrifice of the people killed in the line of duty. It's their life, and is as important and as valuable as anyone else's. But, speaking from societal perspective, each of the deaths in this current occupation is more disturbing - by far - than similar deaths a century ago, or in any prior conflict.
Ferinstance, one of our "gains" from the Spanish-American War was the Phillipines. Unlike Cuba, we had not taken the Phillipines with the intention of granting them their independence, and so the Phillipinos continued their guerilla war, started in 1896, only now it was against the United States instead of against Spain. It lasted from the time we acquired the islands in 1899 until 1902, and cost 4,234 American lives.
Which, if you look at the newspapers or the government briefings of the time, was an acceptable cost of doing business. We wanted the Phillipines, and if it took four thousand deaths to hold on to them, that's what it took. Which is not to say that every one of those young men was not precious to the people who knew him - that's a human constant that I daresay will never change - but society as a whole was much less appalled by battle casualties than it is now.
At some point, I think during the sixties, life became less cheap. Not less precious, if I can make such a distinction, but an early death became less acceptable. And I think I know why.
Antibiotics.
Before the middle of the twentieth century, although sanitation had drastically diminished the ravages of epidemic disease, it was still the case that anyone might die at any time of a sudden illness. Especially children. Thus, although people cherished and valued their friends and relatives as highly as people do today, and always have (in Rome I got to see a large number of exceedingly poignant pagan Roman funeral monuments, from parents to children and children to parents), it was less shocking to have them suddenly taken away. And it was less shocking to hear, as a member of society, that a bunch of your fellow-members had suddenly died. Death was much more with us, waiting around any corner, and was less unexpected.
Whereas now we expect any baby born to people in similar circumstances to ours to live until they are at least seventy. Even when young people enter an ostensibly dangerous occupation such as the military, we subconsciously expect that they will live through it, and are surprised (in addition to grieved) when they do not.
And now, just because I've looked for them, I'm going to throw some numbers at you. Have a look at the figures for American war dead. (Note that the Phillipine insurrection, because it wasn't actually a war - just like Iraq at present - isn't included.) There's a particularly salient feature there I'd like to point out, in the second section, "Casualties".
First, notice the separation of deaths into "Combat" and "Other" - and then notice how those ratios change dramatically between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Assuming that accidents and such (famine not being a major American soldier-killer) are a fairly small percentage of "Other", "Other" basically means disease. Now, sanitation was "invented", or a least applied, in the late nineteenth century - between the Civil War and the Spanish-American. And so note that World War One had very roughly equal numbers of casualties from combat death and from disease, whereas in all previous wars disease killed substantially more people than bullets did. (The Spanish-American war was fought largely in the tropics, and sanitation doesn't help much against malaria and yellow fever.)
And then the figures change even more for World War Two, which is when the first effective antibiotics made their appearance. By the time of Viet Nam, deaths from disease were down to very very few.
Which is, from an historical perspective, an incredibly recent development. For millenia disease has always been a great killer of armies. Louisiana is American now because the French army sent by Napoleon to occupy it stopped off en-route to reconquer Haiti. Napoleon sent some sixty thousand troops to Haiti in 1802 - by the end of 1803 fewer than seven thousand fever-ridden Frenchmen were left, and surrendered to the British rather than be butchered by the rebels. Almost all of those casualties were from disease, a story repeated again and again in military history. (Although with particular validity in the tropics.)
Turning to the civilian population, here's a somewhat amateurish list of epidemics in the United States that nonetheless gets my point across. Look at the dates. How many epidemics would a pre-twentieth century American see or hear about in their lifetime? Each one of those listings carried off between a tenth and a half (sometimes more) of the population in the stricken area, usually starting with children.
We haven't lived with that sort of random large mortality for almost a century - long enough for it to have passed out of collective experience. People still remembered the 1918 influenza epidemic at the time of World War Two, but not very much by Viet Nam, and very few people at all remember it now. When was the last time something breezed through your town and killed a few thousand people?
Our opinions are shaped by our expectations, and, perhaps uniquely in human history, we twenty-first century Westerners firmly expect to live into old age, and for our peers to do likewise. Which is why, when the nightly news tells us that another two soldiers have died occupying a hostile country, we wonder why and if it could have been prevented, rather than nodding and saying "well, that's what happens I guess". It's still tragic. It's still human life. The cost hasn't changed, really - only our expectation of having to pay it has.
Opinions, of course, are still two cents.
- Sun Ra