Counting the Dead

How often have you heard a sentence like "55,000 died in Vietnam"? It resembles that other claim now in circulation: "The casualties from the Gulf war were miraculously light." Not many died in the Gulf -- but only if we are accepting the standards of Huck Finn's society:

"We blowed out a cylinder head."

"Good gracious! Anybody hurt?"

"No'm. Killed a nigger."

"Well, it's lucky; because sometimes people do get hurt."

When Winston Churchill and others talked of "the democracies" as defenders of freedom against dictatorships, George Orwell said that, in all such descriptions of the forces of freedom, "The unspoken clause is 'not counting niggers.'" He meant that hidden in with the democracies at the time were "six hundred million disenfranchised human beings" in the British and French empires.

Third World people literally do not count. Only 55,000 died in Vietnam -- and, miraculously, not one of the Vietnam War's casualties was Vietnamese. Not as we count, anyway. Actually, at least two million Vietnamese, by the best estimate, died during our own engagement with that country. Ten percent of the entire population was killed or wounded. And this takes no account of Cambodian, Laotian, and other neighboring deaths -- nor of casualties from the French colonial war that preceded ours.

In the Gulf we hear estimates of Iraqi casualties that come on a scale where one must say "give or take 25,000 to 50,000 people." One reason we find it hard to count our casualties is that we leave so many of them behind. We never have received a hard count of the dead in our comparatively small and contained assault on Panama. In Iraq, the deaths still occurring from disrupted water supplies, destroyed hygienic services, and human displacement mainly affect children under 5. Kurds and Kuwaitis are not fully counted in. Yet casualties were "miraculously" light.

This is the war of which President Bush said, to the National Religious Broadcasters: "We will prevail because of the support of the American people armed with a trust in God and in the principles that make men free -- people like each of you in this room." Apparently even God does not count niggers. The president, three days later, assured the National Prayer Breakfast meeting that God must be on our side because Billy Graham was so blatantly there:

In fact, the night the war began, Dr. Graham was at the White House. And he spoke to us then of the importance of turning to God as a people of faith, turning to him in hope. And then the next morning Dr. Graham went over to Fort Myer, where we had a lovely service leading our nation in a beautiful prayer service there, with a special emphasis on the troops overseas.

It is hard to know, in the modern world, what can still be considered blasphemy. But that lovely service with its beautiful prayer clearly qualifies. God is not mocked. God can, after all, count. Our God, who numbers the single fallen sparrow, or hairs of our head, knows whether it was 100,000 that we killed or 200,000. And God knows who did it -- though we do not have the grace to tremble for our dead.

In a country so blithely accepting of these figures, a magazine like Sojourners is, in ways that bring that worn old phrase back to life, a "keeper of the faith." Our dead accumulate around the world. Others watch that happening. God watches.

Garry Wills, a Sojourners contributing editor, was adjunct professor of history at Northwestern University in Chicago and the author of Under God: Religion and American Politics (Simon & Schuster, 1990) when this article appeared.