Rural America bears scars from Iraq war (My hometown featured)

[RamboLiberal]

When I looked at this story it was an OMG moment. While I wouldn't call McKeesport rural, it is a small city outside Pittsburgh that has become impoverished as Big Steel shut down in the 70's. It is like much of the country wherein one way out is the military. This cemetery is very familiar to me being only about a mile from where I live. The story tells how the poor are bearing the burden of providing the cannon fodder to this war.


Joanna Hawthorne, the mother of U.S. Army Staff Sgt. Edward Carman, sits in a folding chair she brought to the graveside of her son in the McKeesport-Versailles Cemetery in McKeesport, Pa.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17231366/

Edward "Willie" Carman wanted a ticket out of town, and the Army provided it.

Raised in the projects by a single mother in this blighted, old industrial steel town outside Pittsburgh, the 18-year-old saw the U.S. military as an opportunity.

"I'm not doing it to you, I'm doing it for me," he told his mother, Joanna Hawthorne, after coming home from high school one day and surprising her with the news.

When Carman died in Iraq three years ago at age 27, he had money saved for college, a fiancee and two kids -- including a baby son he'd never met. Neighbors in Hawthorne's mobile home park collected $400 and left it in an envelope in her door.

For a year after his death, Hawthorne took a chair to the cemetery nearly every day, sat next to his grave and talked quietly. Her vigil continues even now; the visits have slowed to once a week, but the pain sticks.

[unhappycamper]

1. Link, please. n/t

[RamboLiberal]

2. Fixed - thanks

I was overwhelmed by the photo and forgot.

[leftyclimber]

3. In my local birdcage liner they ran this story

on the same page as a story about a local kid who "got" to be in a firefight. It looked like a press release (the firefight story). :wtf:

Those two stories juxtaposed. I think they missed the irony.