"Coahoma High School guidance counselor Cheryl Green doesn't need to check her files to know that 10 percent of the school's senior class is entering the military after graduation. It was 10 percent last year. And 10 percent the year before that.

Coahoma is a tiny cotton and oil town of approximately 900 people in West Texas. Ten percent of the high school senior class totals six kids. But over the years the numbers add up, and today there are 48 men and women from Coahoma on active military duty. So far, one Coahoma graduate has died in Iraq.

The whole country may be at war, but the whole country isn't doing the fighting. In today's all-volunteer military, places like Coahoma appear to be overrepresented. They are sending their young off to die in Iraq at more than twice the rate of the nation's metropolitan centers.

The U.S. military doesn't publish data on the hometowns of its recruits. But several months ago, Robert Cushing, a statistical consultant to the Austin American-Statesman and a retired University of Texas sociologist, began tracking the home counties of those who died in Iraq. In his analysis, Cushing found dramatic differences in casualty rates between urban and rural areas. The smaller the county's population, the higher the death rate, as evident in the chart below.

A quarter of the nation's military-age men come from counties of more than 1 million, and a quarter come from counties with populations of less than 100,000. Yet look at the figures from Iraq. As of Nov. 9, 67 soldiers from the more populous counties had died. But 127 soldiers from the smaller counties had lost their lives. (Because only eight female soldiers have died in Iraq, Cushing has confined his data to men. The study also excluded soldiers from Puerto Rico and American Samoa.)

If deaths in Iraq were spread evenly across the United States, 53 soldiers from counties of fewer than 50,000 would have died. As of a week ago, the death toll for these mostly rural counties stood at 80.

The pattern stands out even in one incident. Sixteen soldiers died when a Chinook helicopter was shot down on Nov. 2. Two came from counties of a million or more: Texas's Harris County (Houston) and San Diego. Eight were from counties of fewer than 100,000, ranging from Orangeburg County in South Carolina (pop. 92,582) to diminutive York County, Neb. (pop. 14,598).

Military historians can't point to any similar study of the hometowns of soldiers during the Vietnam War, when there was a draft. The best evidence before Iraq comes from the University of Chicago's General Social Survey which, in surveys conducted from the 1970s through the mid-'90s, found no difference in the military enlistment rates of those from small towns or farms and those from cities with more than 250,000 people. The toll of rural dead in Iraq appears to be a new phenomenon.

The pattern appearing in the news releases announcing the dead in Iraq -- urban blacks and Hispanics, rural whites -- has prompted Rep. Charles Rangel (D-N.Y.) and Sen. Ernest F. Hollings (D-S.C.) to renew their call for a reinstatement of the draft. Rangel last week sent a letter requesting a General Accounting Office study, in part to examine the geographic disparity in military deaths. "Congress must address the question of who is carrying the military burden," Rangel wrote, "and whether all segments of the American society are carrying a fair share of the load."

In 1999, Loyola University political scientist John Allen Williams wrote that "Americans may love their military, but it is in the same way they might love their Rottweiler: They are happy enough for the protection but do not want to become one themselves." To many Americans, he added, military life is "as unfathomable as life on another planet."

In the politically polarized America of today, there are unmistakably two planets. There's the planet that watches the war on television and debates the merits of an $87 billion appropriation, and then there's the planet that sends its kids to Afghanistan and Iraq -- the planet of places like Coahoma." (Bill Bishop, The Washington Post, November 16, 2003)

Author's e-mail: bbishop@statesman.com

Bill Bishop is a writer for the Austin American-Statesman.