Linkin Park is one of my favorite bands. Recently, the group came out with their new album, “Minutes to Midnight.” The album includes some great songs and a different style than I’m used to. I was especially intrigued by the album’s number seven song, called “Hands Held High.” If anyone has ever heard this song or read the lyrics, you’d find that this song is basically blasting the Bush Administration about the Iraq War. More specifically, the lyrics promote the idea that the Iraq War is a poor man’s war; that it’s only the poor who fight and die for the rich elites:

Cause I’m sick of being treated like I had before
Like the stupid standing for what I’m standing for

Like this war’s really just a different brand of war
Like it doesn’t cater the rich and abandon poor

Like they understand you in the back of the jet
When you can’t put gas in your tank

These fuckers are laughing the way to the bank and cashing the check
Asking you to have the passion and have some respect

For a leader so nervous in an obvious way
Stuttering and mumbling for nightly news to replay

And the rest of the world watching at the end of the day
In their living room laughing like “what did he say?”

-Snip-

It’s ironic at times like this you pray
But a bomb blew up the mosque yesterday

There’s bombs in the buses, bikes, roads
Inside your market, your shops, your clothes

My dad he’s got a lot of fear I know
But enough pride inside not to let that show

My brother had a book he would hold with pride
A little red cover with a broken spine

On the back, he hand wrote a quote inside
When the rich wage war it’s the poor who die

Meanwhile, the leader just talks away
Stuttering and mumbling for nightly news to replay

As one who came from a well-to-do middle class family and has actually been deployed to Iraq, I say the lyrics and the idea behind the lyrics in this song are total crap and the artist has no clue what he’s talking about. As an Air Force member, I continue to serve with people from all walks of life, and the idea that the Iraq War is a poor man’s fight is simply inaccurate and undeniably flawed. Actually, it’s more or less insulting, the idea that somehow all my brothers-in-arms are all poor boys dying for a worthless cause. This is not a poor man’s war with the “rich” somehow cashing in on the death’s of American soldiers.

Recently, the Heritage Foundation actually put out a study that disproves that American military forces are disproportionately poor:

This paper reviews the demographic status of the all-volunteer military and refutes the claim that enlisted troops are underprivileged and come from underprivileged areas. In terms of education, household income, race, and home origin, the troops are more similar than dissimilar to the gen­eral population.

Put simply, the current makeup of the all-vol­untary military looks like America. Where they are different, the data show that the average sol­dier is slightly better educated and comes from a slightly wealthier, more rural area. We found that the military (and Army specifically) included a higher proportion of blacks and lower propor­tions of other minorities but a proportionate num­ber of whites. More important, we found that recruiting was not drawing disproportionately from racially concentrated areas.

Read the whole thing…