Is Charlie Rangel correct that a disproportionate number of our soldiers are black and poor? Not according to UPI, which crunches the numbers and finds it isn't so.

Contrary to popular belief, blacks have not died in combat in disproportionate numbers, even in Vietnam. Two leading military sociologists, Charles Moskos of Northwestern and John Sibley Butler of the University of Texas, researched this carefully for their 1996 book "All We Can Be: Black Leadership and Racial Integration the Army Way."

They reported, "Black fatalities amounted to 12.1 percent of all Americans killed in Southeast Asia -- a figure proportional to the number of blacks in the U.S. population at the time and slightly lower than the proportion of blacks in the Army at the close of the war."

In recent decades, blacks have tended to gravitate away from combat jobs. In arguing against Rangel's bill, the Department of Defense noted, "Blacks today account for 21 percent of the enlisted force, but make up only 15 percent of combat arms (e.g., infantry, armor, artillery)."

African-Americans make up about 13 percent of young adults, so they are still somewhat over-represented in combat positions....

Interestingly, the military today seems to attract pugnacious whites and pragmatic blacks. Analysts have suggested that more young white men see the infantry as a way, in the words of one, to "play Rambo" from age 18 to 22, then go to college using military tuition benefits. In contrast, blacks often view the military as either a long-term career in itself, or as a way to get practical training for a civilian white-collar career.

Are soldiers the products of particularly poor families? In general, the enlisted ranks come from neither the top nor the bottom of society, but from working and middle class backgrounds. Very few enlistees appear to be the scions of the wealthy. (Some officers are from rich families, however; but a larger proportion of officers are the sons and daughters of officers.) ....

In fact, on a number of measures, African-American enlistees tend to stand well above the black average and very close to, or above, the mean for white enlistees. The celebrated high degree of racial equality and amity found in the military, especially in the Army, would appear to benefit from the similar backgrounds that black and white soldiers bring to the Army.

Not only do black and white soldiers come from households of almost equal income, but their educational attainments are virtually identical. In 1994, 99 percent of black and 97 percent of white Army enlisted personnel were high school graduates, figures above the national average.

We suspect that the racial disparities came into play when there was a draft, because the affluent and connected got deferments or went into the National Guard. For the past 30 years, we've had a volunteer army, and "90 percent of black Army enlistees had their degrees, versus only about 40 percent of whites. After the large pay raises of the early 1980s, the Army was able to recruit a better-educated group of youth, so the black advantage narrowed as both groups' graduations rates approached 100 percent."

The article has lots more data, so go read the whole thing, and then come back and tell us what you think.