Trump Is A Boomer
Lt. Cmdr. John McCain, center, with Sen. Carl Curtis (R) from Nebraska at a luncheon honoring the returned prisoners of war in 1973.
Photo source: National Archives via Wikicommons
The Washington Post from last September—before the presidential election—ran an article, Trump has history of disparaging military service by Michael Kranish that caught my eye, front page, left side, above the fold. Following The Atlantic magazine story about comments attributed to Trump during the World War I commemoration ceremonies in France: Trump: Americans Who Died in War Are ‘Losers’ and ‘Suckers’ by Jeffrey Goldberg. Seems during the one hundred year anniversary of the war’s end in 2018, Trump skipped the visit to the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery near Paris where American troops are buried.
“In a conversation with senior staff members on the morning of the scheduled visit, Trump said, ‘Why should I go to that cemetery? It’s filled with losers.’ In a separate conversation on the same trip, Trump referred to the more than 1,800 marines who lost their lives at Belleau Wood as ‘suckers’ for getting killed.
“Belleau Wood is a consequential battle in American history, and the ground on which it was fought is venerated by the Marine Corps. America and its allies stopped the German advance toward Paris there in the spring of 1918. But Trump, on that same trip, asked aides, ‘Who were the good guys in this war?’ He also said that he didn’t understand why the United States would intervene on the side of the Allies.”
from The Atlantic magazine article by Jeffrey Goldberg
For another president, cancelling a scheduled tribute to fallen American soldiers would have been a PR disaster, but Trump had long since cancelled mainstream news, so not even the tick of a move in the polls. However, it’s harder to criticize his ‘who were the good guys’ query regarding World War I; this is the same question historians ask. If you want to know where today’s conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan came from, you can find the origins in the Ottoman Empire’s dissolution after World War I.
It’s no better than sloganeering to claim dying in war is a glorious way to go. It’s not; it is hellish, tragic, and too often unnecessary. So Trump isn’t 100% wrong, like a lot of Boomers he’s just misdirected from a long time ago.
The New York Times’ article, Trump’s Nationalism, Rebuked at World War I Ceremony, Is Reshaping Much of Europe by Peter Baker and Alissa J. Rubin steps back to look at what Trump has rendered with our allies. ‘Going it alone’ and ‘me first’ are classic Boomer-isms.
Admittedly hearing anything resembling these quotes from a U.S. President gives pause, but might have a better expression–less snidely put–of a revulsion for war, might that have gained him nods from more than his base? Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address wasn’t a panegyric for war; it honored those who had died.
“… But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate–we can not consecrate–we can not hallow–this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us–that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion–that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain–that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom–and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” [1]
Abraham Lincoln November 19, 1863
World War 1 wasn’t a war America needed to fight–except to keep two allies, Great Britain and France, from total collapse. And the retributive terms forced on Germany after the war–which Woodrow Wilson’s administration agreed to–helped bring on World War II. We collectively screwed the pooch on that one.
It is said that World War I was largely a repeat of the American Civil War with a much higher death toll, and the battle for Belleau Wood was as horrific as they came, including U.S. Marines charging across an open field in the teeth of machine gun fire. Picket’s Charge redux, only the Marines took the German positions.
“Athough a victory for the Americans, the Battle of Belleau Wood exacted a heavy toll on the 4th Marine Brigade. Of its complement of 9,500 men, the brigade suffered 1,000 killed in action, and 4,000 wounded, gassed, or missing equaling a 55 percent casualty rate. The supporting 2nd Regiment of Engineers lost another 450 casualties of its assigned unit strength of 1,700 soldiers. During the three weeks of fighting, Thomas Holcomb’s 2nd Battalion alone suffered a shocking 764 casualties out of a paper strength of 900 marines. On June 6 alone, his unit started across the wheat field with two companies with some 500 marines. After wrenching control of [the village of] Bouresches, only 200 of Holcomb’s men remained able to repel German counterattacks. This represented a 60-percent casualty rate, which matched the rates of earlier battles in World War I.”
from The Importance of the Battle of Belleau Wood by David John Ulbrich
Trump says they’re not, but if the quotes attributed to him are true, they only further confirm a well established Boomer position. Trump may go in for bombast but he shows a distinct distaste for wars, so perhaps he’s only half wrong?
Then there’s Trump’s infamous “I like people who weren’t captured.”
Noted mostly in passing, I remember John McCain’s return in 1973. Nearly finishing grad school, I probably saw it on the evening news. McCain, released from 5+ years in captivity, tortured, beaten and starved by his captors, came home to a divided country yet to a hero’s welcome. His North Vietnamese captors knew he was the son of an Admiral and worked hard to break him. Mark Salter’s new book, The Luckiest Man, portrays the young McCain as the original wild military brat, the last person expected to amount to much in the military. Stubborn iconoclast who lived that way to the end.
McCain exemplifies why we need a Senate with no term limits.
I voted for McCain in the Virginia primary when he ran against George W. Bush for the Republican nomination in 2000–mainly because it seemed likely a Republican would win that year–after 8 years of Bubba and his Willy–and if so, I preferred a Republican I respected. I had nothing against George Bush, not really knowing him, but he came across as a bit of a lightweight. I was proved right for the wrong reason.
I am another Boomer. Like Trump, I never served in the military either–high draft number–so I never flew a fighter jet over North Vietnam, nor was shot down and captured, one leg and both arms broken to be yanked from a lake, you know, real pain, and that was just the start.
Even more than McCain’s surviving captivity, his later statements that he bore no ill will toward his captors struck me as remarkable. To prove it, he worked ‘across the aisle’ with John Kerry, another Vietnam veteran to reestablish diplomatic relations with the victorious Vietnamese communists. Not only was Kerry a Democrat, god forbid, but he’d come out against the war after his tour of duty. Neither Kerry nor McCain favored that Vietnamese communist government, but they felt it was time for both countries to put the war behind them despite their differences. Statesmen, I believe people like that are called.
So the title of this blog–and with apologies to many fellow Boomers–was what the WP story brought to mind, a too common attitude among Boomers during the Vietnam War era. Yes, there were sincere anti-war protesters–but there were plenty who just as sincerely avoided the draft any way they could, bad feet, bad eyes, emotional upset. Self preservation is a strong motivation.
Yet others of my Clemson classmates with high draft numbers (meaning they were exempt from the draft) were still signing up for their country; I knew several. The ones who shipped off to ‘Nam–both draftees and volunteers–were taking the obvious risk and paying for it. The ones whose daddies’ connections got them into the National Guard to escape the draft, and the ones who paid doctors to diagnose phantom physical problems, it was harder to respect them for their privilege, even knowing that was the way of the world, the haves and have nots.
I was late to the anti-war movement. Growing up outside Shaw Air Force Base in South Carolina, with Air Force brats for friends, two years of ROTC training including combat patrols in Clemson Forest, I was an unlikely anti-war protester to begin with, but the Jesuit chaplain, Father Fisher, worked on me. That and following the nightly news in the dining hall.
When I saw the cover of Life magazine with the dead soldier being brought out by his comrades, and recognized him as from my hometown, there was no denying people were dying over there. Then the Ranger captain who’d been training our ROTC counter-guerilla group was shot down in a helicopter; he was the kind of officer you wanted to emulate. Ah man, really?
Trump was no different from many Boomers in avoiding the draft. Self preservation–to use a polite term–was a calling card among my generation. We’d been given everything our parents hadn’t, cars, money, college–golf and piano lessons were extra–and we came to expect it of the world. Honest. The Vietnam War sobered some, though by no means all of us.
Surely a person reaching his seventh decade should have learned something from his youthful indiscretions. What Trump says is blunt truth as he sees it, though clearly it’s also how he justifies himself–like quite a few Boomers continue to do.
By my junior year during the 1969 Moratorium protests, I was running off silkscreen protest posters in the printing studio and helping organize the local antiwar effort, a seriously small band–Clemson, after all, was an ex-military school. Instinct said the war was unnecessary for my country and brutally cruel to Vietnam. Only later reading David Halberstam’s The Best and the Brightest, I came to understand the futility of the whole affair. I took my own high draft number and went to grad school.
When George H. W. Bush sent troops to Kuwait in 1990, defeating Saddam but pulling back before ‘taking him out’–and wiping out Iraq in the process–the part of that war I objected to was allowing Saddam to gas the Kurds in revenge–we still had jets flying over Iraq and didn’t use them. [2] Bush caught hell from some folks for not invading Iraq; his son’s advisors mistook his wisdom for weakness.
In the wake of 9/11, I also supported his son’s ordering troops to Afghanistan, though instead of keeping focus on stabilizing that poor country, Bush Jr. listened to Chaney, Wolfowitz, et al. and attacked Iraq instead–in one of our country’s worst misjudgments. Afghanistan becoming a stable part of the world community at best was always doubtful, but the Iraq war guaranteed our failure and doomed all three countries to decades of war. ‘If you break it, you own it’ was Collin Powell’s advice. Even the former general who misled us speaking to the U.N. knew better.
I think about those Confederate foot soldiers who died in droves trying to keep plantation owners in high cotton. In his Memoirs, Ulysses S. Grant suggested after the Shiloh and Vicksburg campaigns that the Union troops had done the South a favor by ridding them of slavery since it seemed unlikely they’d ever do it themselves. Grant recognized the valor of the soldiers he fought against, but could also see a greater good. I wonder if he knew how long it would take us to get there.
In the twilight of two more indeterminate wars, Afghanistan and Iraq, there are those willing to dismiss the wars as freak shows, and the volunteers who are fighting them the same–as too many Boomers did after Vietnam when their brothers and sisters came home.
One can question the value of any war without dismissing the valor of those who fought–which is so obvious it’s not even insight.
I didn’t agree with everything John McCain stood for in his political career, far from it. But if we’d been neighbors, I would have been proud to know him. One needn’t be a conservative to believe John McCain was a hero for how he conducted his public life. McCain’s concession speech following Obama’s election is worth listening to one more time. Think what it cost him, then listen to how graciously he delivered it. No wonder Obama gave the eulogy at his funeral. That’s how it should be done.
[1] “Bliss Copy Ever since Lincoln wrote it in 1864, this version has been the most often reproduced, notably on the walls of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington. It is named after Colonel Alexander Bliss, stepson of historian George Bancroft. Bancroft asked President Lincoln for a copy to use as a fundraiser for soldiers (see "Bancroft Copy" below). However, because Lincoln wrote on both sides of the paper, the speech could not be reprinted, so Lincoln made another copy at Bliss's request. It is the last known copy written by Lincoln and the only one signed and dated by him. Today it is on display at the Lincoln Room of the White House.” From Abraham Lincoln Online
[2] The Kurds were left without a country after World War I when England, France and Greece carved up the Ottoman Empire.