Figuring Out the Price of Death

Dante Zappala’s cellphone rang while he was teaching history at Fremont High in South Los Angeles, where the military aggressively recruits the next wave of American soldiers. He saw that the caller was the wife of his brother, a soldier stationed in Iraq, but he didn’t answer.

“I had a bad feeling,” Zappala says. “She doesn’t usually call in the middle of the day.”

After school, the 28-year-old teacher called back and got the news.

His brother was dead.

Thirty-year-old Sherwood Baker of Pennsylvania, taken in by Zappala’s parents in Philadelphia as a foster child at the age of 13 months, was killed in an explosion in Iraq late last month. The National Guardsman worked with the mentally disabled in Pennsylvania, and he leaves a 9-year-old son, along with his wife.

Last week, Zappala wrote an essay about losing the lifelong buddy he calls his brother, and he wondered if I might help him get it published. You can read the full text of it at www.latimes.com/essay, but I’m going to share the first two paragraphs with you right here.

“Not long ago, $250,000 bought you a house, a car, started a college trust fund and still left you with enough for dinner at the Olive Garden. Today, $250,000 gets you a dead soldier.

“My brother, Sgt. Sherwood Baker, was killed in action in Baghdad last month. Before he left, he took out the maximum Servicemembers’ Group Life Insurance: $250,000. His wife gets that money and a folded flag.”

On Friday afternoon, as the Memorial Day weekend approached, I visited Zappala in Room 218 at Fremont High. As the final minutes of the school day ticked away, his students were completing a writing assignment: If you were going to participate in a protest, what would it be, and why?

It bothers Zappala that his minority, low-income students are targeted by the military -- an on-campus recruiter tosses nets into the stream of students -- and he wondered if there is any recruiting at all in Westside high schools.

In an earlier history class, Zappala told me, his assignment produced one or two war protests from students. But a lot of these kids don’t have many options after high school, he said, and some have told him they’re going to enlist.

“I have a more tangible story to tell them now. I say the Army is potentially a very noble career, but don’t fool yourself. If you think the consequences are not real, my brother was killed there,” he says. “That’s real.”

Zappala grew up in Philadelphia in an activist family, so he was not surprised last month by something his mother told him as they left the church on their way to bury Sherwood in a Pennsylvania cemetery.

“I’m not going to be quiet about this,” his mother said.

Zappala has not been quiet, either. Before he wrote the essay I mentioned above, he wrote letters to the editor extending an invitation to the president.

“George Bush said we need to finish the work of the fallen, so I wrote an open letter inviting him to my brother’s grave site. I said, ‘My brother’s work was not in Iraq; it was taking care of his family. If you want to see unfinished work, come and see my nephew.’ ”

Even before he lost his brother, Zappala had not been quiet about a war that was pushed on the American public with fear, bluster and deceit -- a war that has bogged down in ways that were so utterly predictable.

I asked Zappala how a family of peaceniks ended up with a son and brother who wore the uniform and marched off to Iraq to serve his country, even after Zappala was arrested in an antiwar protest in San Francisco last year.

Sherwood was a complicated guy, Zappala said. He went to Catholic high school but wore a pro-choice button. He lived in a conservative blue-collar Pennsylvania community where everyone flies a flag from the porch, but wrote letters to the editor saying it was insulting to have a school holiday for the start of hunting season but not for Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday.

“He was displaced as a child, and it seemed like he was always trying to make family and make permanence, and he was the most committed father you could imagine,” Zappala said.

Sherwood had joined the National Guard after helping a rural Pennsylvania unit fill sandbags during a flood, and the Guard became family, too.

“He made clear that he understood the false premise for the war,” Zappala said. “But when the time came for Iraq, it was not about going or not going for him. He wanted to protect his family ... and he became the first Pennsylvania National Guardsman in 45 years to get killed.”

In his last e-mail to his family, Sherwood asked them to send food and water to him and his fellow soldiers. Because of shortages, they were hungry and thirsty in the desert.

Zappala wondered how you can spend $149 billion on a war, send soldiers into battle under shaky pretenses and without a coherent plan or purpose, and not supply their most basic needs.

A Halliburton subsidiary was under fire for the food snafu, so Zappala went to the Halliburton website and found some corporate gibberish defending the company against its critics.

It’s no surprise, then, that in Zappala’s history class, I looked at the blackboard and saw a list of questions for his students involving the billions made by Halliburton and other war contractors.

It’s no surprise, either, that Zappala measures all those billions against the check his brother’s wife will receive for $250,000 -- the price of death.

Steve Lopez writes Sunday, Wednesday and Friday. Reach him at steve.lopez@latimes.