While Memorial Day honors those who have died in our foreign wars, Veterans Day honors the service of all those who have served this country in uniform. Bone spurs sufferers are not included.
Usually, Veterans Day is an occasion for the Pentagon and the U.S. military to strut their stuff. I recall marching down Fifth Avenue in 1968 in a Veterans Day parade wearing my cadet dress uniform. Even though it was yet another grim year in the war in Vietnam, people lined the street and waved as we marched by. This year, Veterans Day falls on the one-week anniversary of Donald Trump’s election, once again, to the presidency. Trust me, they’re not celebrating across the Potomac at the Pentagon. Here are just two headlines from the days immediately following Trump’s victory last week: From the Washington Post: “Pentagon anticipates major upheaval with Trump’s return to the White House.” From Politico: “Pentagon officials anxious Trump might fire military’s top general.”
That would be Gen. C.Q. Brown, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, whom congressional Republicans have accused of being the Pentagon’s top “woke” general.
Let’s stop right here in our celebration of Veterans Day and discuss this wholly invented and utterly bogus issue of the “woke” military. First of all, among the veterans whose service is being honored today are hundreds of thousands of people who are not white straight males. About 16 percent of those serving across all branches of the military are Black; about 17 percent are female. A 2015 report by the Rand Corporation, put out four years after Barack Obama signed the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell Repeal Act, found that about 6 percent, or 120,000 service members, identify as gay, lesbian or bisexual. Until then, identifying as any one of those sexual persuasions was illegal and punishable by expulsion from the service with a less than honorable discharge.
To be “woke” in the military, according to Donald Trump and his MAGA adherents, is to support DEI programs and the enormously diverse military I have just described. The fact of the matter is this: Since the end of the draft under Richard Nixon, the U.S. military has been a wholly volunteer organization from top to bottom. That means, people walk into recruiting offices and sign on the dotted line to potentially serve in combat, risking their lives in the service of the country.
There have been gay, lesbian and bisexual people serving in all the branches of the military for as long as we have had soldiers and sailors in uniform. Today the numbers of those serving who would come under the umbrella of what might be described as a "diverse" military are so enormous that we wouldn’t have a military without those patriotic volunteers. So, if Gen. Brown is described as “woke,” it’s because he is the senior general in a military that demands officers and senior enlisted service members who can command a broad spectrum of troops who serve.
Donald Trump and the Republicans’ concept of “wokeness” when it comes to the military is a fantasy born of ignorance and prejudice. The fact is, we wouldn’t have an army, a navy, the Air Force, the Marine Corps or the Coast Guard if we didn’t have brave men and women of all races and sexual persuasions who are willing to serve to defend this country. They deserve to be led by commanders who are not bigots and misogynists. That is what being “woke” in the military means. If Donald Trump thinks he’s going to fire all the “woke” commanders in the military and replace them with Republican loyalists who hew to the discriminatory party line of Trumpism, he’s going to end up with a hollow military.
Maybe that’s what Cadet Bone Spurs wants. He is said to have hated the generals who worked for him in his first administration, from Jim Mattis, the retired Marine general he first appointed as secretary of defense because he liked his nickname, “Mad Dog,” to former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Mark Milley to retired Marine Gen. John Kelly, who was White House chief of staff, to retired Army Gen. H.R. McMaster, who was national security adviser. Trump was famously dismissive of those who served and died in this nation’s wars, calling the fallen in a cemetery in France “losers” and once asking Kelly, whose son is buried in Arlington National Cemetery, “What’s in it for them?”
Who knows what lies behind Trump’s disdain for our nation’s military? Guilt that he dodged service? A secret knowledge that those in uniform are truly “macho” in a way that he will never be?
We’ll probably never know, even when he becomes, once again, commander in chief and appoints his hand-picked loyalists to positions of power in the Pentagon and across the armed forces. And I guess we’ll have to wait and see how his “non-woke” generals lead the most diverse organization in this country and the world, for that matter.
There is probably only one thing that’s for sure. If next year Trump has a Veterans Day parade down Pennsylvania Avenue, it will bristle with tanks and armored personnel carriers and missiles and cannons and machine guns, driven by service members who he thinks are losers, a good percentage of whom will be Black, female, gay, lesbian and bisexual. It will take a parade of irony to honor Commander Bone Spurs.
