50% of female fatalities in Iraq have been Latina and African-American women

• Originally published by National Public Radio (NPR) March 23, 2005 Wednesday Copyright 2005 National Public Radio
  

ED GORDON, host:

The war in Iraq has taken more women's lives than any other conflict since World War II, and black women in particular. They comprise 25 percent of the female fatalities and half of the total number of enlisted women. But, says Columbia University Professor Kristal Brent Zook, you won't hear about these soldiers on the nightly news.

Professor KRISTAL BRENT ZOOK (Columbia University):

You won't hear that in 2005 alone, 50 percent of female fatalities have been Latina and African-American women. Their names and faces are invisible. But I can tell you about a few of those who've died since the beginning of the war.

Sergeant Keicia Coleman Hines of Citrus Heights, California, joined the Army Reserves during her first year at Sacramento State College. At 18, she dropped out of school to go on active duty. Both of her parents work for the police department, and her father is a Vietnam veteran. Keicia's aunts hold jobs at US Air Force bases. Her husband is a Persian Gulf War veteran on active duty in Iraq. According to everything she saw around her, the military was a perfectly viable way of life for Keicia. It was the key to a promising career in forensics. Keicia was killed in Mosul, Iraq, at age 27.

Tyanna Avery-Felder of Bridgeport, Connecticut, planned to earn her master's degree in childhood education at Southern Connecticut State University, but she dropped out of college due to financial difficulties just like her sister had done two years earlier for the very same reason. Going into the Army was the only way she saw to pay for college. Tyanna died at age 22 in Balad, Iraq. Notice a pattern? College equals hope. But how am I going to pay for it?

Here's one more. Leslie Jackson signed up for the Army even before she graduated from high school. The 17-year-old Junior ROTC battalion commander wanted to see the world, study medicine and make something of herself. Her mother, a single parent, remembers how proud Leslie was at a special recruiting ceremony at George Wythe High School when Leslie walked on stage to the cheers of her classmates and held up an oversized Army paycheck for $32,000 in college funds. `To my mommy,' she wrote in a note sent during basic training, `from your littler soldier, trying to make the best of life.' Eighteen-year-old Leslie died in Baghdad, Iraq.

One poll found that at the start of the war, only 33 percent of black women supported George W. Bush's decision to attack, as opposed to 57 percent of African-American men and 70 percent of the general public. Many black women are caught in an irony: opposed to the war, but anxious to be somebody, regardless. I wish Tyanna, Leslie and Keicia had known about high school student Shayla Price of Louisiana, who typed in the words `minority scholarships' on a Google search and eventually received over $100,000 for tuition at Xavier University in New Orleans. I wish these invisible women had been able to see each other.

GORDON: Kristal Brent Zook is a professor at Columbia University and a contributing writer for Essence magazine. Her article on female fatalities in Iraq will appear in a future issue of Essence.

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