"Remember Clasternack? ...They got a street over in the park
named after him. ..he was the first of you kids to get it. ..There was
the Peters family too. ..both brothers ...Both of them killed in the
same week. And Alan Grady. ..Did you know Alan Grady? ...
"We've lost a lot of good boys. ...We've been hit pretty bad. The
whole town's changed."4
A community of only 27,000, Massapequa lost 14 men in Vietnam. In 1969,
Newsday traced the family backgrounds of 400 men from Long Island who
had been killed in Vietnam. "As a group," the newspaper concluded,
"Long Island's war dead have been overwhelmingly white, working-class
men. Their parents were typically blue collar or clerical workers, mail-
men, factory workers, building tradesmen, and so on."5
Rural and small-town America may have lost more men in Vietnam,
proportionately, than did even central cities and working-class suburbs.
You get a hint of this simply by flipping through the pages of the Vietnam
Memorial directory. As thick as a big-city phone book, the directory lists
the names and hometowns of Americans who died in Vietnam. An average
page contains the names of five or six men from towns such as Alma, West
Virginia (pop. 296), Lost Hills, California (pop. 200), Bryant Pond, Maine
(pop. 350), Tonalea, Arizona (pop. 125), Storden, Minnesota (pop. 364),
Pioneer, Louisiana (pop. 188), Wartburg, Tennessee (pop. 541), Hillisburg,
Indiana (pop. 225), Boring, Oregon (pop. 150), Racine, Missouri (pop. 274),
Hygiene, Colorado (pop. 400), Clayton, Kansas (pop. 127), and Almond,
Wisconsin (pop. 440). In the 1960s only about 2 percent of Americans lived
in towns with fewer than 1,000 people. Among those who died in Vietnam,
however, roughly four times that portion, 8 percent, came from American
hamlets of that size. It is not hard to find small towns that lost more than
one man in Vietnam. Empire, Alabama, for example, had four men out of a
population of only 400 die in Vietnam- four men from a town in which only
a few dozen boys came of draft age during the entire war.6
There were also soldiers who came from neither cities, suburbs, nor
small towns but from the hundreds of places in between, average towns of
15,000 to 30,000 people whose economic life, however precarious, had local
roots. Some of these towns paid a high cost in Vietnam. In the foothills
of eastern Alabama, for example, is the town of Talladega, with a popula-
tion of approximately 17,500 (about one-quarter black), a town of small
farmers and textile workers. Only one-third of Talladega's men had com-
pleted high school. Fifteen of their children died in Vietnam, a death rate
three times the national average. Compare Talladega to Mountain Brook,
a rich suburb outside Birmingham. Mountain Brook's population was
somewhat higher than Talladega's, about 19,500 (with no black residents
of draft age). More than 90 percent of its men were high school graduates.
N o one from Mountain Brook is listed among the Vietnam War dead.7
I have described a social map of American war casualties to suggest not
.U. S. soldiers but their class origins-not
where they came from but the kinds of places as well. Class, not
was the crucial factor in determining which Americans fought
Vietnam. Geography reveals discrepancies in military service primarily
it often reflects class distinctions. Many men went to Vietnam
places such as Dorchester, Massapequa, Empire, and Talladega
lived. The wealthiest youth in those towns, like those in richer
were far less likely either to enlist or to be drafted.
for example, grew up in Plainville, Kansas. In 1964 he
In his
, "From my own small home town ...all
Vietnam
working class families, while I knew of not a single middle
the town's businessmen, lawyers, doctors, or ranchers from
!- who experienced the Armageddon of our
even a sketchy map of American casualties must go farther
United States. Although
---~ well known, the military took draftees and volunteers from
American territories: Puerto Rico, Guam, the U.S. Virgin Islands,
and the Canal Zone. These territories lost a total of 436
Vietnam, several dozen more than the state of Nebraska. Some
Vietnam, many of whom could speak only a
, 345 died. This figure does not include men
born in Puerto Rico and emigrated to the United States (or
in Puerto Rico). We do not know these numbers
make a separate count of Hispanic-American
either as an inclusive category or by country of origin. 9
"8
It
heard of at all because American B-52s took off from there to
Vietnam (a twelve-hour round-trip flight requir-
(
geocities.com/yaoleechenb2)