On Wednesday night, I saw an interview on
NBC with a retired Army veteran, Sgt. Steve Colson—who served in Korea and Vietnam—at
a Charlotte, NC, VFW post. Sgt. Colson was one of the few people interviewed
who said he thought the idea of a military parade in Washington was a good
idea. He said, “I was in the military for 20 years. I’ve been in some those
parades… I think it would be a great thing.”
First off, I have to thank Sgt. Colson for
his service, and I don’t mean that in an offhanded, faithless way; I love America’s
soldiers, sailors, Marines, aircrews, and Coast Guard sailors. I grew up in the
50s and 60s, the son of a West Point graduate, a World War II veteran who became
a Cold War warrior and a Vietnam-era commander, and my father, like his father
before him who served in World War I and World War II, believed to his core
(and to his Corps), in the sacred duty he carried out in defense of the
Constitution. My mother’s father served in the Army in Europe in World War I;
my wife’s father served in the Navy in the Pacific in World War II.
One of my nephews was a Marine, and
countless friends of mine with whom I worked on Capitol Hill, at the Department
of Veterans Affairs, and for the Pentagon were combat veterans from World War
II, Korea, the Cold War, Vietnam, the First Gulf War, and the wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan. I am proud to call “colleague” a handful of Medal of Honor recipients,
and one of my immediate supervisors at VA, Lt. Colonel (Ret) Tammy Duckworth
(D-Il), who lost both her legs to enemy fire in Iraq, is now a United States
Senator who has the fire and pride to call out Mr. Trump for his shameful
excoriation of Democratic Members of Congress who would not applaud during his
State of the Union address.
Like my dad and my grandfathers and all our
ancestors from the Revolution on, Sgt. Colson took the honorable path down a
road strewn with the bodies and washed in the spent blood of generations of servicemen
and women who, despite the fierceness of the fight before them, ran toward the
danger, faced it head on, and acquitted themselves with great honor. Too many of
them did not return; too many returned with external and internal wounds few
civilians—save their families and medical teams—can ever imagine. That is why I
love them; that is why Sgt. Colson and every man and woman I know who has worn,
is wearing, or will wear the colors of our Nation’s uniforms deserve the unqualified
thanks of a too-often ungrateful, or unthinking, nation. I would be proud to stand
on the front row along Pennsylvania Avenue and applaud as Sgt. Colson marched by.
So why not a parade to reaffirm our affection, or to shore up our wavering
gratitude?
Because the kind of parade envisioned by Mr.
Trump has nothing to do with Sgt. Colson, my dad, my father-in-law, my grandfathers,
or any of my veteran and active-duty friends. It has everything to do with a
draft-dodging business thug and shameless provocateur for whom the military is nothing
more than a child’s chest of toy soldiers, tanks, ships, and planes. Soldiers
do not fight and die in the plush pile carpet of a spoiled brat’s playroom.
They fight and die in places this president has not even deigned to visit.
Our military does not need the kind of
three-card-monte, barren-of-sincere-public-adulation envisioned by Mr. Trump at
a time when the very reason our military personnel serve, fight, and die is under
attack from within the government that sent them to war in the first place. The
parade as envisioned by Mr. Trump would be a Potemkin display of vainglorious honor
and self-serving tribute. It would be little more than a hollow and meaningless
nod from a national leader who is systematically gutting—or certainly making
every effort to pull down—the pillars of the Constitution, and to undermine the
foundation of public trust from which those pillars so nobly rise.
In memory of Col. Clifford James Moore,
Jr.
August 15, 1921--February 17, 2003
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