A view of Iraq from the home front

Coming home from college for the first time is always strange. It's necessary to answer to parents again after tasting complete freedom, siblings have appropriated favorite possessions, and friends have begun to find their niches elsewhere. My strangest encounter with change, however, occurred when my high school history teacher greeted me at the football game, "So, I see you've done the right thing and come home." Why would the man who spent two years telling me to go away to school congratulate me for returning?

Home for me is Morgantown, West Virginia. By now the leaves have turned colors and fallen; driving on the windy roads you can catch glimpses between tree trunks of the hills beyond the one you're struggling to climb in second gear. The nationally-known hot air balloon festival was cancelled again this year, though the airport resumed the shuttle flights to Pittsburgh discontinued after Sept. 11. The vast part of my graduating class that attends college stays at West Virginia University, the state land grant institution five minutes' walk from our old high school stomping grounds. The local newspaper, the Dominion Post, allowed high school students like me to write columns for the Sunday paper, and town news always headlined the front page.

The war in Iraq has changed this. I was struck, opening the paper last Monday morning, that while The New York Times runs articles about Iraq policy, the Dominion Post still runs the body count. The national media discuss the U.N.'s withdrawal from Baghdad, acts of sabotage, and "angry young men" leaving Western European nations to fight in Iraq, while a little West Virginia paper is left to keep tabs on the casualties. Thursday the paper announced 115 deaths since the end of hostilities, equal to the number of deaths during the combat phase; Friday's total, 116, surpassed casualties of the actual war.

The outpouring of concern is not surprising given my area's history of military service. One of the first casualties in Afghanistan was a man from my town who worked at the bike shop by the rail trail. He waited on us once when we went in to tighten handlebars and replace leaky tires. The heaviest casualties of the first Gulf War were a National Guard unit from Uniontown, Pennsylvania, and Morgantown. They were petroleum engineers, and a bomb hit their encampment. A large number of less-than-wealthy students put themselves through college with military scholarships. One absolutely beautiful girl in my class, the heart of the theater and choral departments, joined the Marines to "make bombs." Jessica Lynch, an especially famous West Virginian, enlisted in order to become a kindergarten teacher.

A week at home makes the lack of yellow ribbons at Princeton all the more obvious. The University's endowment, made accessible by a generous financial aid office, allows most students to shrug off recruiters; those few who do serve in the military are probably not motivated by financial necessity. For all the debate on campus about preemptive war, peacekeeping and nation building, students remain largely unacquainted with the reality of the ideas they discuss. The doctrine defended in precept, if applied as policy, might mean the student sitting next to you shipping out tomorrow or yet another bronze star tacked underneath your window.

A constitutional amendment proposed by Charles Rangel (D-N.Y.) targets the socioeconomic factor dividing those that send and those that serve. The sponsors hope that the amendment, by creating a mandatory two-year period of "national service," will cause policymakers to consider more carefully actions that would affect their own children. Realistically it won't pass, but it has sparked debate on Capitol Hill. Were such a motion to carry, however, its repercussions would be felt here at Princeton, whose student body is privileged even if only though association with the University.

Once again, my history teacher is right: it's important to go home. Every so often it's necessary to break out of the web of hypotheticals into the concrete, to see that all theories have their practical consequences. Going home reiterates the disconnect between Princeton and the real world, between our scholastic worries and the fears of a 19-year-old counting off the days of his tour until he, too, can come home. If some of us are to become the policymakers of tomorrow, we must fight the isolation that our privileges engender. Princeton may be a small town, but it's not small-town America.

Emily Stolzenberg is a freshman from Morgantown, W. Va.