Vermont's War
It's known for liberal politics. But the Green Mountain State has also paid a heavy price in Iraq
MILTON, VT.-The last of the thin December light was fading as Heather Sheehan made her way past rows of gray, age-pocked headstones that line the old Milton Village Cemetery road.
Ahead, her children, Nathaniel, 8, and Alyson, 5, raced through slush under dark, bare trees and waited for their mother at a familiar spot, where freshly turned earth and miniature American flags speak of deaths more recent, grief more raw.
Their father is buried here in the state's northwest corner, his smooth granite headstone etched with images that tell the story of a young father's loves-a catcher's mitt, a hockey player, an eight-point buck, and the date he married Heather, his Springfield (Vt.) High School sweetheart.
Army National Guard Sgt. Kevin Sheehan, 36, and his fellow guardsman, Spc. Alan Bean Jr., 22, killed in the same mortar attack south of Baghdad on May 25, 2004, were the first Vermont guardsmen to die in combat since the Korean War. They thus became members of a group that, to outsiders, seems an aberration in this Democratic state: Vermont, where nearly three quarters of residents oppose the war, has the nation's highest per capita death rate in Iraq.
It's a statistic seemingly at odds with the state's reputation as a modern-day liberal utopia, a low-stress playground for the escape-from-New York crowd. It's been 18 years since a Republican presidential candidate won here, and Ben and Jerry are giving away to left-leaning causes a fortune amassed making ice cream with names like "Karamel Sutra." Last fall voters here elected to the U.S. Senate its first self-described socialist, Bernie Sanders.
Sacrifice. But maybe it's not so counterintuitive. An analysis of Defense Department records last year by demographer William O'Hare for the University of New Hampshire's Carsey Institute found that rural states like Vermont and South Dakota have shouldered an inordinate war burden-they have per capita death rates far higher than urbanized states like Michigan and California. Indeed, in the quiet corners of the Green Mountain State, where men like Sheehan and Bean lived off the beaten path, the politics can harken back to Vermont's more conservative roots. And here-in hamlets like Milton and Bridport and Hardwick-military service has remained a time-honored tradition dating to the days of the Green Mountain Boys and the state's mythic Revolutionary War hero, Ethan Allen.
"Vermonters historically have been good soldiers," says historian Howard Coffin of Montpelier, author of books about the heroics of the state's Civil War fighting brigades. "They were rural kids, farm boys who grew up walking and were in good condition. And all of them could shoot."
Like many before him, Sheehan, a civil engineer, saw himself that way. "He always knew he wanted to serve his country," his 37-year-old widow said, as dusk settled over her husband's grave and she and the children climbed into the car for a short ride to the home she and Kevin bought seven years ago.
But with the tally of dead Americans hitting 3,000 at the end of 2006 and President Bush calling for more troops, many Vermonters are asking whether they've already sacrificed too much for a cause whose lofty original aims may be unreachable. The count of Vermont's war dead now ranges from 18 to 23, depending on how the list makers define the soldiers' state connections and whether the count includes National Guard Sgt. 1st Class John Stone, 52, of Norwich, killed in Afghanistan last year.
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