Five years after millions of anxious Americans dared not blink and miss a moment of televised “shock and awe,” few on the home front of the Iraq war can accurately estimate its human cost.
Voices continue to argue the war’s divisive politics — in an election year, no less — but now more than ever they echo in an atmosphere of increasing detachment, perhaps even fatigue.
Absent some direct personal connection to the fighting, most Americans observe the fifth anniversary while going about lives comfortably insulated from the horrors of military conflict.
“Here,” says Jerry Risner, a 66-year-old Vietnam veteran from Golden who lost his oldest son in Iraq, “there is no sacrifice — only for the ones killed and wounded, and for their families.”
A sniper’s bullet killed Henry Cecil Risner, 26, in August 2004 in Baghdad, placing him on a list of nearly 4,000 Americans who’ve died. This precise watermark probably will be reached soon after the war’s half-decade marker.
Yet only a little more than 1 in 4 Americans recently polled by the Pew Research Center could correctly estimate the toll to the nearest thousand — by far the lowest awareness to date.
“I think most people are trying to ignore it, and we can’t,” says Risner, who traces his family’s military lineage back to the Continental Army. “They don’t think they’re involved in it. People are not thinking about the loss that’s going on.”
It’s not that people don’t care. Early last year, Iraq ranked as the public’s most closely followed news story, according to the Pew poll.
The subsequent drop-off in interest — the war hasn’t been the public’s top story since mid-October — could reflect a decline in overall violence in Iraq as more Americans see a measure of military success.
It could speak to creeping economic worries at home, or to just a gradual acceptance of war as the status quo. For whatever reason, it suggests an increasing disconnect between the distant violence and our daily lives.
If adults find their attention waning, what about kids who — whether they realize it or not — have lived their formative years in wartime?
Only a few months after Henry Risner was killed, Greg Rund died in Iraq’s Anbar province. He had graduated in 2002 from Columbine High School, where he was a freshman when two suicidal gunmen killed 12 classmates and a teacher.
Services were held for Rund the week after he died.
“For many of our students,” says Columbine principal Frank DeAngelis, “it was the first time they saw a military funeral or memorial service.”
The experience appeared to have at least a short-term impact on students — the war hits home just as it does when grads who have joined the military return to share stories with classes.
But still, it’s war at arm’s length.
“That’s the closest our students get to these things,” DeAngelis says.
History teacher Andy O’Hara leads a sophomore class in “Revolution and Conflict in the Modern World” at the Kent Denver School, where he helps his students follow developments overseas.
He briefs them with news from Iraq and Afghanistan three or four times a week and, while they’re “receptive and intrigued,” they’ve stopped actively pursing information on their own.
“It’s disheartening in a way, but something I’ve seen building over the years,” O’Hara says. “That doesn’t say they’re callous or insensitive to what’s going on, but they’re fatigued.”
The same Pew numbers that tracked awareness of U.S. troop deaths also noted that coverage has dropped significantly of late — from 15 percent of news space last summer to 3 percent last month.
Even kids demonstrated a sense of anger, indignation and bewilderment at how their lives changed following the 9/11 terrorist attacks. But O’Hara has seen that segue into war-as-abstraction — fewer news reports from half a world away heated by little more than dueling political rhetoric.
“With that comes a comfort level that is acceptable to them, despite having these wars go on,” he says. “When it’s not out there for them to see, and it doesn’t feel like a threat, things go back to business as usual. Maybe that’s just a human reaction to dealing with long-term stressful situations.”
Claire Ryder recognizes that hint of complacency — even in the peace movement, where she has been a steadfast figure in opposing the war.
Just a year ago, congressional elections produced a political shift that energized peace activists — only to disappoint them as they watched a subsequent surge in troop commitment.
“Has the wind gone out of our sails?” Ryder asks. “Yeah, probably. People are burned out and questioning what they can do that will make a difference.”
After five years, she has grown weary of the need to keep the war’s costs in the public eye. She helped organize last weekend’s demonstration at the state Capitol, and when the time comes, she’ll be part of the vigil to mark the war’s 4,000th U.S. fatality.
“And that’s the one thing that everybody can agree on no matter what side they’re on, the sadness of the lives lost,” Ryder says.
But now, it’s the economy that’s on everyone’s lips — Ryder hears it on a daily basis as she goes about her job appraising homes in a decimated housing market.
But even there she sees a disconnect, despite a new book by Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz and co-author Linda Bilmes that forecasts the cost of the war’s sixth year at about $12 billion a month.
“Of course, most people don’t think of the war in economic terms,” Ryder says. “The average person, until it hits them somehow in their life, they’re sitting on the couch watching TV. Until their house is foreclosed on, or their kid or their brother is in Iraq and Iraq becomes real, they’re not thinking about it.”
And so life goes on with its familiar rhythms of work and play.
Which brings us to Jake Schroeder, rock singer in the group Opie Gone Bad, coffee entrepreneur, radio deejay — but perhaps most recognizably the soulful voice behind the national anthem at Colorado Avalanche hockey games for the past nine years.
If there’s a disconnect between the tranquil home front and what’s happening half a world away, Schroeder sounds intent on bridging that gap.
“Politics change; politics come and go,” he says. “My biggest hope is that people be still and feel how lucky they are. There has been a cost to having so much prosperity and freedom. I get to remind myself of that in a dramatic way 41 times a year.”
Kevin Simpson: 303-954-1739 or ksimpson@denverpost.com
