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 of $250,000. His widow, Debra, gets that money and a folded flag. It should come with a note: "Thanks for doing business with Uncle Sam. The medals are on us."

What I'm left with is a dead brother; J.D., a fatherless 9-year-old nephew; and a giant void where this giant man once stood.

For a guy who never made a lot of money in his life - he was a front-line soldier making $2,500 a month - Sherwood paid the highest price in the war, while companies and individuals in the war business are reaping maximum profits.

Bush has dumped $149 billion into this war. In what reservoir does all this money rain? Certainly not the bank accounts of widows. Who is truly rewarded for their sacrifice? How about this: Halliburton has racked up billions in government contracts since the start of the war.

And then there's Ahmed Chalabi and the Iraqi National Congress, an exile group that pushed for the war in Iraq. His organization received more than $39 million in "aid" along with a fat $340,000-a-month stipend for the last two years.

Sherwood had it all wrong. Maybe if he had helped to invent evidence to start a war, the Bush people would have been more rewarding. He certainly would have been on track to a safer and more profitable career path.

But that wouldn't suit Sherwood. He did what most patriotic Americans do: He worked for a living. He knew he would never be rich from his job, but he wanted to help people. A graduate of King's College in Wilkes-Barre, he was a Luzerne County caseworker for the mentally handicapped.

To supplement his income, he hired himself out as a DJ at local bars and clubs. Sherwood wasn't enough of an entrepreneur to make it into Harvard Business School. So, when George Bush told him to go to work with his National Guard unit in Iraq, he went willingly.

Sherwood worked until the very end. He died pulling perimeter security for the Iraqi Survey Group. This group has assumed the responsibility of finding those elusive weapons of mass destruction - any WMD - with high hopes of making an honest man out of the President.

Just before he died, Sherwood plainly illustrated where a life of hard work and dedication gets you: hungry and thirsty in the desert. In his last e-mail, he asked that we send him and his fellow soldiers food and water. As it turns out, the most powerful military machine in the world has its soldiers on rations.

I've had countless people tell me my brother is a hero and died defending our freedom. They may be right. In a country that promotes the virtues of the free market, he died for the benefit of the war profiteers and for very little benefit to himself.

Dante Zappala teaches high school history in Los Angeles

Copyright 1996-2004 Knight Ridder

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