Sunday Times (London) November 9, 2003
GI Jane deaths hit middle America
By Sarah Baxter
ON the streets of Baghdad, a girl has to keep up appearances. "Dear Mom, please send me lots of shampoo and conditioner. My hair is really brittle out here. It's like straw, " wrote Private Rachel Bosveld, 19. She wanted to look pretty as she patrolled the city's most dangerous police precinct. She joked that she was working on her tan.
That was not all. "Hey Mom, I've been dodging bullets etc," she said in her last letter home, "but I'm really doing great. I got to drive a tank. So cool!"
Some of Bosveld's best quips were posted on the wall of the church where her funeral was held last Friday in Oshkosh, Wisconsin.
She was killed on October 26 during a mortar attack on the Abu Ghraib police station in Baghdad. Bosveld was already due to receive a Purple Heart for injuries sustained during an earlier rocket-propelled grenade attack on her Humvee.
She wrote to her brother Craig: "There was fire and smoke everywhere. It was loud, there was shouting. My team leader's seat was on fire. I found my seatbelt but it was stuck. Damn it, I knew I shouldn't have worn it."
She hurt her shoulder and lost her hearing in one ear for a week.
Mary Bosveld, her mother, did not want her to serve in Iraq. "I said, 'Oh honey, anywhere but Iraq', but she said, 'No Mum, I have to do it'."
Bosveld was proud to serve in such a demanding country, but after the first attack she began to count the days until she could leave Iraq. "More and more people want us to go home," she wrote. "Believe me, we want to go home."
Bosveld lived and died in the thick of a conflict that is gaining in intensity. In the past week, 32 American lives have been lost, prompting comparisons to Vietnam and questions about the point at which the American public may turn against President George W Bush and the war.
Shortly before a Black Hawk helicopter crashed near Tikrit on Friday, killing six people, a Gallup poll last week showed support for the Iraq occupation fading. In August, 57% of Americans approved of Bush's handling of Iraq; now only 45% are in favour.
"If casualties continue at this rate, Bush will lose the next election, I don't care how good the economy is," said Larry Sabato, a pollster at the University of Virginia. "Americans are clearly seeing Iraq as Vietnam without the jungle."
In one respect, American casualty rates may soon outstrip those of Vietnam. Only eight women died during the Vietnam war. With the downing of a Chinook helicopter near Fallujah last Sunday, the number of dead American servicewomen in Iraq has already risen to six.
Women make up 15% of the modern American army. Some of the dead fought alongside the men in Iraq; others were supposedly behind the lines in a war that no longer has a definable front. They included a single mother, a missionary and a teenager.
Concerns about how and why they lost their lives present stark political problems for Bush.
Private Lori Piestewa, 23, a mother of two children, was the first native American woman in the US army to die in combat. She was with Private Jessica Lynch on March 23 when their Humvee was ambushed and crashed in the desert. Lynch, who was rescued from an Iraqi hospital, is this week's cover girl. Her book, I Am a Soldier Too, goes on sale tomorrow.
Piestewa was Lynch's best friend. "Most of all I miss Lori," Lynch said when she returned from military hospital to her home town.
A single mother from an Arizona backwater, Piestewa had a daughter, Carla, 3, and a son, Brandon, 4. "I want my mommy, but she has to rest in peace," Brandon said solemnly at her funeral.
She had joined the army to give her children financial security. "It's very important, knowing my children are being taken care of," she said on leaving for Iraq. Squaw Peak in Arizona has been renamed Lori Piestewa Peak in her honour, but her toddlers no longer have a mother.
Though cruel, the death of Piestewa, the only woman to have been killed in the active combat phase of the war, seemed of little consequence to Bush's war aims.
With hindsight, however, there were already telltale signs of the trouble to come.
The worsening morale of soldiers who are putting their lives on the line is now a gnawing worry in the White House.
"We don't know yet whether the body count of the last two weeks will turn out to be normal, but these are real numbers," said John Pike of defence lobbyist GlobalSecurity.org. "If it stays in the double digits, it's going to grate."
Many members of the US army signed up not to fight, but "for college tuition or medical insurance or financial security for their kids", said Pike. "They told their parents or spouses they wouldn't get killed."
In the past, a supply soldier such as Piestewa would have been relatively safe.
But in Iraq the front line moved so fast that her rear unit was left behind, took a wrong turn and was attacked.
Women soldiers who thought they would be in non-combatant positions are now feeling exposed. There are diminishing havens for American troops in Iraq.
Private Karina Lau, 20, was reluctant to venture outside her army base, 30 miles from Baghdad. "I never leave the compound because it's safe here," she e mailed her sister Martha.
Her job in radio communications did not require her to go on patrol and the one time she went to Baghdad she felt vulnerable. "She was under Mom and Dad's wings all her life and then suddenly she's in Iraq," said Lau's brother-in-law, Noel Rivera, a veteran of the first Gulf war.
Lau, a talented clarinet and flute player, had hoped to surprise them with a visit home to California when she boarded the Chinook in which she and 15 other soldiers died after being shot down last Sunday.
In another sign of the deteriorating security, Analaura "Lissy" Esparza Gutierrez, 21, was killed on October 1 only 300 yards from the sanctuary of her heavily fortified army compound near Tikrit. Gutierrez's Humvee was blown up by a home-made bomb and fired on by a rocket-propelled grenade. Her father, Agustin Esparza, said Bush should bring the troops home. "She didn't deserve to die. There are a lot of young people over there and as long as they are there, they are going to die," he said.
Two families are still waiting for an explanation of their daughters' deaths. For Sergeant Melissa Valles, 26, and Specialist Alyssa Peterson, 27, the official cause of death is "non-combat weapons discharge".
The army says the incidents are under investigation. Valles was shot twice in the abdomen on July 9, when Iraq was relatively peaceful. "Since the war had ended, we weren't expecting this," said Maribel Valles, her sister.
Peterson was an army interrogator and gifted linguist from Arizona who had studied Arabic in the army. Her work was secret and her mother found out she was in Iraq only when an officer turned up at her workplace. "It was a shock," said Bobbie Peterson. "He said the words you hear in the movies, 'We regret to inform you...'"
Her daughter had died on September 18 of a bullet wound to the head.
Army relatives are often the last to complain about the cause for which their loved ones died. It can seem disrespectful to their memory. "We're conservative Republicans," said Peterson's mother. "We know there is evil in the world and we have to stand up for it and that's how Alyssa felt."
The American public was taken aback when Bush failed to mention the 16 dead in the Chinook last weekend, but many relatives of those on board did not flinch.
Lau's brother-in-law was adamant: "It would only be rhetoric. It wouldn't stop a single bullet from hurting more troops. If Bush opens his mouth, the public will start demanding an explanation for every casualty. I think people are going to stay behind the mission, but week by week, as casualties mount, they're going to get a lot more flustered."
© Copyright 2003, Times Newspapers Limited
