High Rate of Service Leaves State Vulnerable
by Gwen Florio, Tribune Capitol Bureau, February 12, 2006
HELENA — Hunter Schildt went into the Army for one reason: a job.
"When I signed up, the main thing for me was to give me a better chance in life. Basically, I felt like I had hit a dead-end road, and I signed up as a getaway," said Schildt, who grew up in Browning, on the Blackfeet Indian Reservation, where unemployment is desperately high.
Schildt, now 30, got what he wanted from the Army. It trained him for the information technology job he now does for the Indian Health Service in Fort Hall, Idaho.
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But he also ended up in Iraq for a year, where he couldn't help but wonder whether the benefits provided by the military were worth the risk of leaving his wife and their blended family of five children without a husband and father.
That risk is all too real, according to Robert Cushing, a former University of Texas sociologist who analyzed Iraq war deaths for the Austin American-Statesman. Cushing found a higher death rate among soldiers from rural areas.
Montana, despite its high enlistment rate, bucks that trend, an anomaly one military official attributes to the soldiers' rural upbringing.
But 10 Montana soldiers have died in Iraq, and the pain is no less crushing when a soldier's death does strike a small town.
The results of Cushing's study hit home for him in November, when Capt. Michael MacKinnon, the son of family friends in Helena, was killed in Iraq.
"I don't know that you ever get prepared for it," said Cushing, who attended services in Helena for MacKinnon, 30, a West Point graduate who served two tours in Iraq. "... I found it a sad time."
MacKinnon's father, John, said his son applied to West Point because he wanted to go to an out-of-state school to study engineering, but needed a scholarship.
The military academy, he said, "provided a nice means to an end." Michael MacKinnon was also carrying on a family military tradition: His father served in the Army, and his grandfather served in the Canadian Army during World War I.
Adj. Gen. Randy Mosley, head of the Montana National Guard, said that his 40 years of living in Montana has brought home to him the significance that military service holds here.
"It's that spirit that is in Montana," he said. "... Montanans are just hard-working, patriotic people who in times of stress reach out and try to do something about it."
Montana, one of the nation's most sparsely populated states, has one of the highest rates of military service. It has more veterans, per capita, than any other state except Alaska, according to the U.S. Census. And, among the Army, Navy and Air Force, its recruitment rate is the highest in the nation, according to the National Priorities Project, which analyzed data from those three branches of the military.
Cushing said the hardscrabble economy of rural areas also provides an incentive. That's even more true on Indian reservations, where unemployment is much higher than in the rest of the state.
"There really isn't much opportunity for any of the young people on reservations," said Schildt's stepfather, Stewart Miller, a project manager for Blackfeet Planning and Development.
Indeed, said Mosely, many recruits cite the military's benefits as a reason for enlisting.
"Many people do join for the additional income," he said. To ensure that soldiers returning from Iraq can benefit from their military training, the National Guard held a job fair outside Helena earlier this month for soldiers and their spouses.
Another factor in high recruitment rates here could be Montana's long tradition of military service.
Take Elizabeth Wells, 69, of Browning, whose son Dan served in Iraq with Hunter Schildt.
Her father was in the military. So were her uncles, her cousins, and all three of her brothers. Her husband was a military man and her son, after knocking around in college and in different jobs, also enlisted.
"He said that he felt he wanted to follow in his dad's steps," she said.
Despite having seen various relatives through past conflicts, she said her son's deployment to Iraq was especially difficult.
"It was a horrible time for me. I relied on the Lord and he took my son home. I'm so relieved and happy," she said. Dan Wells is now stationed at Fort Carson in Colorado.
Cushing's study, updated in August, focused on 18- to 54-year-olds, the ages most likely to be serving in Iraq. It showed that rural counties and densely populated counties each comprise about a quarter of the nation's population in those age groups.
But only 20 percent of soldiers killed in Iraq come from the densely populated counties, while 32 percent of the war dead are from rural counties.
Ten Montanans have died in Iraq, a number that, compared with the state's general population, puts Montana 40th in terms of combat deaths.
For that relatively low ranking, Moseley attributes the same rural upbringing that might attract Montanans to the military in the first place.
"I'm guessing there's something to the nature of rural areas where people have to be more self-sufficient and they're outdoors-oriented. They garner skills and an inner sense of being more aware of what's going on around them that comes in very handy when you're in the military in a combat or stressful situation," he said.
"There may be an advantage in this type of environment," he said, "that has to do with conditioning and hardening."
Contact Gwen Florio at 406-442-9493, or gfloriogreatfal.gannett.com
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