Now, Just Staying at Your Job Is Heroism

The Terror War has inverted the familiar socioeconomic pattern of dying for one's country.

Usually, it's been young men, mostly poor and working class, who went off to the front to do and die. But in this war, so far at least, the home front has been the fearful killing field -- at the World Trade Center, in airliners, and in the offices of media companies and prominent politicans. And so the gold stars of mourning go to a new group as well: the bereaved relatives of white-collar knowledge-workers.

Since World War II, the trend in American life has been the distancing, even alienating, of the educated classes from the military, let alone from combat. The late columnist Rowland Evans, a Yale man, once told me that when he went to join the Marines the day after Pearl Harbor, the line of his classmates joining with him ran around the block outside the recruiting station.

By contrast, growing up as I did in university towns in the '60s and '70s, not only did I not know anyone who had fought in Vietnam, I didn't know anyone who was in uniform. In fact, one of the great campus causes of that era was booting ROTC off campus.

Casualty figures for the various wars reflect this elite shift away from service. Princeton University, for example, lost 353 men in World War II, but just 24 in the decade-and-a-half of the Vietnam conflict. Yet on the single day of Sept. 11, a dozen Princetonians died.

To be sure, the vast bulk of those thousands killed in the World Trade Center weren't part of the yuppie upper crust; in addition to firefighters and emergency technicians, many secretaries and service workers who lived in Brooklyn, not the Upper East Side, perished as well. But hundreds of "masters of the universe" -- mastery being defined as talking on the phone and doing business deals -- were killed. One might ask: Was a single rich Wall Streeter a KIA in Vietnam or the Persian Gulf?

But now the world has changed; the target in the Terror War is America itself and its symbols: high-rise buildings and high-profile media combines. The wave of anthrax attacks and alleged anthrax attacks and bomb scares have been aimed at luminaries. All of a sudden, there's a downside to being famous, to working for a famous company, to sitting at a famous address.

The point here is not to take class-warring satisfaction in the death or discomfort of anyone, but rather to underscore the wisdom of those who say that this war will be different. Different tactics, different targets, different victims.

On Saturday, I visited the Newseum, the museum of news set up by the Freedom Forum in Arlington, Va. It's just a few blocks away from Arlington National Cemetery, final resting place for American heroes. The Newseum has its own honor roll, commemorating the 1,395 journalists worldwide, going back to 1812, who died covering the story. The roster for 2001 hasn't been filled out yet, but I hope that anthrax victim Robert Stevens, the photo editor at American Media, the tabloid publisher in Boca Raton, Fla., will find his place on this Journalist Memorial.

Tabloids? The National Enquirer? The Star? The Weekly World News? To be sure, the high churches of journalism are embarrassed by these raffishly lowlife publications, but they have made their contribution to patriotic spirit, celebrating the gallantry of rescue workers and hijacker-fighters. Moreover, as the Enquirer proved in the O.J. Simpson and Ennis Cosby cases, the tabs' hook, crook and checkbook approach to news-gathering can reap truths that other media miss. In a war against cells and conspiracies, anyone uncovering information is a valuable asset.

The Terror War has been a summons to yuppies and the scribbling classes. They now know that everyone is at risk. And while by far the greatest courage is shown by those who enter burning buildings and drop into far-away war zones, those who continue to do their jobs, knowing that others who were just doing theirs have died, are showing a stiff-upper-lipped stick-to-it-iveness that maybe they didn't know they had. Yet over time, that could prove to be a quiet bit of heroism.