The dead in Section 60 served because they loved their
country. If only Trump understood what that means.
Opinion by
Columnist
September 11, 2020 at 4:24 p.m. CDT
In his
account last week of President Trump’s relationship with the military, the
Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg described the
commander in chief’s 2017 Memorial Day visit to Arlington National Cemetery.
Retired
Gen. John F. Kelly, the Homeland Security secretary who would later become
White House chief of staff, led the president to the grave of Kelly’s son, 1st
Lt. Robert Michael Kelly, killed in Afghanistan in 2010.
There,
in Section 60, a field where U.S. troops killed in Afghanistan and Iraq now
rest, Trump turned to the father of the fallen 29-year-old Marine and said: “I
don’t get it. What was in it for them?”
That
Trump even asks the question is precisely what is missing in his character. The
answer, of course, is they served a cause greater than themselves — a concept
this president cannot fathom. The law, truth, honor, faith, patriotism,
charity, self-sacrifice: Is there any cause he has not subordinated to personal
gain?
I went
to Section 60 at Arlington on Friday morning, 19 years to the hour after
terrorist-flown planes hit the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
I’ve visited many times over those years, first for the funerals of the war
dead and more recently to thank and remember again those who gave the last full
measure of devotion.
Arlington
Cemetery was almost empty on this muggy, mid-pandemic morning. A few “happy
birthday” balloons, unmoored from a gravestone, rested in a mud puddle in
Section 60, where there was only one other person, a white-haired woman who sat
in the wet grass at her son’s grave.
She poured
a shot of Crown Royal whisky, spilled it into the earth and stuck a miniature
U.S. flag at the base of his headstone. She repeated the ritual at other
graves, taking photos to send to other Gold Star parents. At 8:46 a.m., the
time the first plane struck in 2001, she rose and saluted the rows of
headstones.
She
told me about picking her son up at high school on that day in 2001 and telling
him: “Our country is under attack.” He enlisted in the Marines two years later
and became an expert marksman and staff sergeant before he died in Afghanistan
at age 25. She pulled a laminated photo of him in uniform with Afghan children,
all smiles, taken two weeks before his death in 2011.
I asked
her the question that so puzzles Trump: Why did he serve? The mom (she asked
that I not use her name in an article about the “noise” of politics) looked at
me as though I were slow.
“He
loved this country,” she said. She told me through tears that he confided to
her a premonition that he wouldn’t return from his fourth and final deployment:
“He knew he was going to die, but he wanted to go anyway. He was very much a
patriot.”
Patriotism
and pride in the Marines: That’s what was “in it for him.”
Trump,
according to the Atlantic piece, described fallen soldiers as “losers” and
“suckers” and recoiled at the idea of seeing wounded veterans in a military
parade.
Trump suspects Kelly was
behind the article and has derided him as “unable to function,” and with “no
temperament.” He also publicly attacked the
military leadership as people who “want to do nothing but fight wars” to keep
defense contractors in business. Bob Woodward’s new book has Trump
saying to his trade adviser that “my fucking generals are a bunch of pussies.”
There
have been many accounts of Trump’s disparagement of “loser” John McCain, his
quarrels with Gold Star families, his reluctance
to attend memorials or
send condolences, his claim
that he knows more than his
generals, his belief that attending a military-themed high school gave him “more
training militarily than a lot of the guys that go into the military,” his
draft deferments for study and a bone spur, his boast
that avoiding STDs was his “personal Vietnam,”
his description of
Pentagon leaders as “dopes” and “babies” and so on.
On
Friday, Trump delivered a 9/11
anniversary speech in Shanksville, Pa., that contained very different words. He
celebrated the “military heroes” who “laid down their lives,” vowed to “strive
every single day to repay our immeasurable debt,” and resolved “to stand united
as one American nation.”
If only
he had governed that way. If only he hadn’t, at a political rally a mere 12
hours earlier, decried “these
ridiculous, endless wars” in “ridiculous locations” and said “we’re fighting
for sand and blood.”
Whatever
one thinks of the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq, the dead in Section 60,
and everywhere else they rest, didn’t die for “sand” in “ridiculous” wars. They
served because they loved their country more than they cared about “what’s in
it for them.”
Is it
too much to ask that the president do the same?
