The elephant in the classroom: Violence at home and abroad

On Apr. 16, six US service members lost their lives in Iraq. At least 24 Iraqis were killed, including two university professors, and 11 unidentified bodies were found in Baghdad. The casualties made the usual rounds in the footnotes of the day's news. On that same day, a gunman went on a rampage through the Virginia Tech campus in Blacksburg, VA, ultimately killing 33 people, including himself. The tragedy captured the attention of a nation, prompted a review commission staffed by three Bush administration cabinet secretaries, and dominated the news cycle for at least a week afterward. Many are insisting that parallels between the unexpected massacre in Virginia and ongoing violence in US wars abroad cannot be ignored. "This is horrible and this is tragic and this gives us an idea of what it is like to live just one day in Iraq," says Larry C. Johnson, a former CIA analyst and State Department counter-terrorism official. Questioned about this comparison, he responded: "I feel terrible for the parents who lost children at Virginia Tech, but I feel worse for the parents whose sons and daughters have died in Iraq because of a lie. They deserve more honor and attention then those killed in a tragic mishap." "[The soldiers] have followed their orders and conducted themselves with great professionalism," he continued. "Yet our media obsesses about kids who chose to go to school rather than enlist." This echoes a sentiment expressed by Army Sgt. Jim Wilt, in a rare opinion piece leaked onto a Department of Defense website on Apr. 23. "I find it ironic that the flags were flown at half-staff for the young men and women who were killed at VT yet it is never lowered for the death of a US service member," he wrote. Wilt is based out of Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan, where flags were lowered to half-mast to honor the slain students, on orders from President Bush. However, Maj. Gen. Jerrold Allen, Commandant of Cadets at Virginia Tech, disagreed. "It is not true that the flag is never lowered for the death of a US service member," he said. "We have lost two alumni of the Virginia Tech Corps of Cadets in Iraq," he added. "We put our flag at half mast in both cases." Lost in the swirl of press attention around the shootings is the fact that Virginia Tech also includes a large military training academy. The exact number of VT graduates who have served or are currently serving in Iraq and Afghanistan is unknown, but "clearly hundreds," according to Allen. Iraq's own schools are no strangers to mass killings. Mustansiriya University in Baghdad, whose founding dates back to the 13th century, suffered multiple bombings in January and February of this year. The first was a dual bomb attack on Jan. 16 that killed 70 people and injured at least 100 others. Then, on Feb. 26, a female suicide bomber blew herself up in the lobby of the School of Administration and Economy at the university, killing 41 people, "with body parts everywhere and big pools of blood in the foyer as students were shredded by the high explosives," according to a report by Juan Cole, a professor of Middle East history at the University of Michigan. Cole was one of the first to draw a connection between the violence at Virginia Tech and that in Iraq, saying, on PBS's "Newshour" on the night of the shooting that "In Iraq this is a daily event. Imagine how horrible it would be if this kind of massacre were occurring every single day."