American Notes

Americans got a reminder last week that some war zones are more lethal than others. After seven months in the Persian Gulf with a Patriot missile battery, Army Specialist Anthony Riggs, 22, won a two-week furlough. Back home less than 24 hours, Riggs was helping his wife load a car and rented van to move out of a crack-infested neighborhood in northeast Detroit to an apartment in the safer suburbs. Someone took a fancy to Riggs' 1989 Nissan Sentra, pumped five shots into the soldier and sped off in the car.

Riggs had underestimated just how murderous America's urban battlegrounds could be: "I just got back from where they were firing missiles at my head," he said on his return to Detroit's mean streets, where gunfire is all too common. "Those bullets aren't going to frighten me now." A few hours after he died, a letter from Riggs arrived, dated Feb. 22. "I have no intentions on becoming one of this war's casualties," he wrote. But he was talking about the wrong war.