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Actually, as Patrick points out in his comment on Iteration Tags, the 'n' notation refers to a sub-stack beginning at position n, not just the object at position n. Thus '0' is the whole stack and '1' is everything except the top object. In our example, we could have been more specific about getting the country name and said '1.top.name'.
Misc
If no value is specified, iterator will try to grap object from the 'top' of the stack. If it is not iterable, ClassCastException will be thrown in the process. @see com.opensymphony.webwork.views.jsp.IteratorTag#doStartTag