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Homefront not at the forefront

If the World War II question, Hey, buddy, dont you know theres a war on? were asked today, the answer from American culture would be a resounding, Um, no.

BY JUSTIN DAVIDSON | STAFF WRITER

On Feb. 1, 2004, the day that Staff Sgt. Roger C. Turner Jr., a 37-year-old mechanic and father of two from Parkersburg, W. Va., was hit in his sleep by an Iraqi rocket -- the same day that a suicide bombing in the northern Iraqi city of Irbil killed 56 and maimed hundreds more -- the American people gasped: Justin Timberlake had yanked the covering off Janet Jackson's bejeweled right breast during the Super Bowl halftime show.

On Oct. 8, while 22-year-old Army Sgt. Andrew W. Brown, of Pleasant Mount, Pa., was dying from wounds he had suffered in a roadside bombing a week earlier in Baghdad, reporters established a base camp in front of a West Virginia prison to bring the nation minute-by-minute updates of Martha Stewart's entry into prison.

What's startling about American culture in wartime today is how much it resembles American culture in peacetime. If earlier wars soaked deep into the fabric of the nation, Iraq has become a sporadically demanding background, popping into the nation's consciousness at times of extreme carnage, and then politely making way for other stories, from natural disaster to the foibles of teenage celebrities.

While the price of occupying Iraq has risen to more than $128 billion, 1,400 dead U.S. soldiers and 10,000 wounded, the cost to daily life at home has been harder to detect.

Young men and women are not flooding military recruiting stations, children are not gathering aluminum foil, adults are not husbanding ration cards, teenagers are not handicapping their chances of being drafted.

Whether this is a war of choice or necessity remains a policy debate, but it is certainly a war that Americans regularly choose to ignore. And if the public has shown little desire for a nationwide surge of self-sacrifice, the government has also declined to ruffle the normality of civilian routine.

"This administration is not asking anything of anybody other than that they go out and spend money," says Todd Gitlin, a professor of journalism and sociology at Columbia. "We have zero-liability enrollment in patriotic symbolism: Buy a magnetic gizmo and stick it on your car."

Iraq is hardly going unnoticed, of course, and its burdens are being felt in innumerable private ways.

The evening news gives the grind of casualties its daily due -- in between commercials for cars and impotence-prevention drugs.

National Guardsmen returning to civilian life get a hand from grassroots organizations such as the Huntington Beach, Calif.-based Yellow Ribbon America, whose director Brad White negotiates discounts on oil changes and strollers with local stores.

At sporting events, "God Bless America" gets sung with an extra jolt of poignancy.

But nearly two years after Marines first thundered across the desert from Kuwait, the massive mobilization has yet to produce the patriotic parables and propaganda shorts that Hollywood began cranking out even before Pearl Harbor or the tides of protest music that were the soundtrack of the Vietnam years.

On college campuses, activism has been sporadic at best. At Hofstra, the war in Iraq is a specialists' topic that bursts fitfully into conversation, says Heather Gibbons, a senior from Newtown, Conn., who is president of the student government association.

"Political science majors are talking about it everywhere," she says. "Professors take students to lunch and discuss Iraq, but as far as most students, I wouldn't say it has any significant impact in the way Vietnam did."

War keeps its distance

Gibbons says that debate over the war is easily overshadowed by other issues, both vast and minor: the South Asian tsunami, for example, or the controversy over the university's food service contract with Coca Cola.

Even Gitlin's campus at Columbia, traditionally an incubator of leftist causes and antiwar positions, seems disoriented and muted by a confusing conflict.

"On the surface it's still extremely liberal, but if you get down deeper there's a lot more support for the administration and the military," says Chris Higgins, a Columbia junior from Farmingville whose organization, Students United for America, promotes solidarity with the troops but stays studiously neutral on policy. "But it's not a mobilized support."

No doubt the war seems distant to those of fighting age because they are not being conscripted. But wartime passions may also be kept cool by the statistical distribution of pain. While each combat death creates its legacy of grief, U.S. casualties have so far not been devastating to the nation as a whole.

About 969,000 troops have served in Iraq at one time or another in the past two years, and more than 1,400 of them have died. Despite losses that are modest by comparison with other conflicts, support for the war has been eroding steadily.