"For the Troops"

I can’t adequately describe how done and pissed off I was in this picture.

People are always shocked when I tell them Afghanistan wasn’t my worst experience in the Army. Yes Afghanistan was 8 months of 12-on-12-off 24/7 work, and there was a period where we got hit by indirect fire pretty much daily, but Arizona was so much worse. The “mission” to Arizona wasn’t well planned, we were undermanned, lived in a VFW post, ate awful food and were quite frankly miserable for two months. I can’t help but think about that and wonder how bad it would be in a grey prison, in the middle of the ocean, and add 4-5 months, and have no idea when it would end. That would be torture. It’s easy to think that the “cost of war” is just in bodies, munitions, boats and tanks, but we’re destroying our military because of a man who has no clue what it is like to serve.

Yes, I Know What It’s Like

When we got orders that we were going to deploy I remember the initial excitement that we were finally going to be DOING our jobs. I was a short-range mobile radar technician (the actual description of my job is literally a paragraph) but since we had been attached to a long-range battalion that regularly deployed to Kuwait I hadn’t done much of anything since arriving at Fort Hood Texas. For a year I had been bounced to every detail and extra duty you could possibly do (including funeral detail), but now we were going to do our jobs. Then the nightmare started. We had to work around the clock for two weeks to get equipment that hadn’t been used in years deployable. We had to “certify” and do drills that we literally had never done with that same equipment. We had to get everything ready to be flown (which if you’ve ever had to prep vehicles for transport you know). And all that was before we got to Arizona

We packed into a VFW hall where over a hundred of us were to live and sleep together. We shared one bathroom that had communal showers. Once we hit the ground in Arizona we were told the original mission which was supposed to be 12 hours a day 6 days a week was now 24/7. This meant we would only be getting one hot meal a day and eating MREs at the worksites. This is where I would work for the next two months-

I’m pretty sure this was the view from the chemical toilet

God sent this literal angel to hang out with us for the last two weeks. We never figured out where she came from or knew what happened to her.

What’s more, they tried to contract with food vendors that simply couldn’t feed the size of the group we had. The portions were always small, the food bland. One night they accidently threw out the dinner they were supposed to save for those of us on day shift and then fished them back out of the dumpster to feed to us (my NCOs took us to McDonalds thankfully). We couldn’t order food. We weren’t supposed to leave the compound. A couple of times they had to bring in someone to do haircuts. By the end of the mission, we had fights breaking out and tempers frayed to nothing.

That experience sadly isn’t rare in the military. In fact, many could relate stories of worse times, awful leaders, even active abuse suffered. One of the things you tell yourself in the “bad times” of military life is hopefully what you are doing (however dumb or seemingly pointless) is a part of the “mission” and that eventually you’ll be done, and the mission will be over. What so many of us who have had those experiences eventually decided is that we had to get out of the military all together and holding on to that hope was the only thing that kept us going.

No, He Doesn’t “Respect the Troops”

We already know Trump doesn’t care about the military personnel he supposedly leads. Remember the illegal deployments of soldiers to cities? Trump and Hegseth called up National Guard members for those “missions”. This is where my experience in the Marine Corps Reserves helps me empathize with those they called up.

I was a Marine Corps Reservist for six years. That means for six years I would drill for one weekend a month and two weeks a year. For many in the Reserves/Guard their drill is a welcome change of pace, something different in your month that’s worthwhile. Even so, for me after six years I found it difficult because I had built a life completely outside of my military service. For 28-29 days a month I had a job, a church, friends, and a life that had no intersection with my life as a Marine. Then one weekend I’d get a haircut, press my uniform and go in and be Corporal Mallow for a weekend. Trust me when I say most drill weekends/weeks are not “fun”.

Calling up Reservists/Guard in a way is worse than deploying active-duty troops because yes while active-duty soldiers and Marines have lives and families too, their lives are the Army or Marine Corps. To get called up as a Reservist is a major upending of a whole life someone has built and lives, you’re taking fathers, teachers, mechanics and mothers away from their lives and they don’t necessarily have support or contingencies for life that an active-duty member might. You would hope that when someone would call someone up like that, they would have a compelling reason or a vital mission. Trump wanted clicks. While there definitely were those who wanted to see how far Americans would tolerate the military being used on its own citizens, Trump almost certainly used the military as “shock and awe” rage bait. Those soldiers ended up raking leaves, mulching, and generally just walking around for no reason. The whole operation ended up not only being illegal, but it also disrespected the time and lives of the soldiers who were asked to serve.

We’ve Already Lost an Aircraft Carrier

Viral photo of a meal on a ship deployed to Iran (and yes I can absolutely believe this is real)

Trump’s indifference and ignorance have already cost America the use of it’s newest and most advanced aircraft carrier. The U.S.S. Gerald R. Ford finally was moved from its marathon deployment after a fire broke out and essentially made the ship mission incapable. The carrier, air wing, and all the sailors and Marines had been at sea and operating at an incredible tempo for 11 months. That means 11 months of little to no down time. 11 months of doing the same job every day, eating the same food, breathing the same recycled air. 11 months of bad or no internet, being unable to see family, friends, children. It isn’t just that the Ford was pushed to the mechanical breaking point, Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth pushed people there.

Now it is estimated that the Ford might be in repairs for over a year meaning the rest of the fleet will have to stretch leading to longer and more frequent deployments for more sailors and Marines. But the cost on personnel has already been dramatic. In a recent interview a spouse of one of the returning sailors related, “It’s a lot of like torturing yourself thinking about all the things you’re going to miss… like this holiday… that baptism… it’s just… it’s a lot,” As military members and their families know it isn’t just the deployments, the waiting, the myriad of unknowns that happen on both sides, it’s a struggle after the deployment as well. Some relationships will reintegrate and find a new normal, after a long and stressful deployment I guarantee more than a few will not. There will be families destroyed, children hurt and lives ruined because Trump and Hegseth put them last.

Now we also know that Trump is moving 5000 military members out of Germany. This means people upending their lives, families looking for places to rent or homes to buy, servicemembers trying to plan… until Trump makes a different decision (He’s already getting pushback from members of Congress). This decision seems merely the result of Trump’s ire at German Chancellor Friedrich Merz. But Trump doesn’t care about those 5000 servicemembers lives, he simply sees them as a way to bully someone else. Which is what he views the military as, the means for Trump to be the biggest bully on the global stage.

Soldier’s Know Who Pete Hegseth is

I was asked recently what I thought about Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth. I’ll be honest my view is extremely low, cause every person in the military knows “that guy”. Hegseth is no different from a Captain or Major that is never going to get promoted higher. He’s barely holding onto his rank because of a DUI and a complaint that he’s cheated on his wife. The command knows they can’t give this asshole any real responsibility so what he does on any given day is walk around and “correct” troops to enforce “discipline”. “Hey hard charger when’s the last time you got a haircut?” “Hey motivator let’s see those sox, are they in regulation?” He’s also the dick who PT’s with random squads every morning cause he’s just fit enough to think he can humiliate everyone else, “Hey let’s get one more in there! (while he hasn’t done one pull up right).”

Hegseth is the kind of “leader” that everyone (including himself) knows he’s trash. Everyone knows he’s an idiot. Everyone knows he’s a poseur. Everyone knows his turn to “religion” is just a way to pretend his multiple moral failings aren’t evident to the entire base. Everyone knows he’d sell out anyone and anything to latch onto a General who takes his brown nosing as “leadership potential”. Hegseth is a coward pretending his bullying means he’s brave, he’s an incompetent pretending his faults are the failure of anyone but himself. He IS the guy who creates his own clusterf*ck and then yells at everyone else as if his failures are anyone but his fault. And here’s the thing, we all know it.

Absolutely no one with a functioning braincell thinks Pete Hegseth is capable of running a bar at a veteran’s get together much less the largest military in the history of the world. You cannot tell me that Hegseth is able to go into the White House Situation Room and tell the President that there aren’t enough resources when he is precisely the kind of motherf*cker to not order enough MRE’s for a field exercise. He’s the kind of guy who will screw over absolutely everyone for the chance to plant his face in the ass of someone he thinks can validate his crippling insecurities and inadequacies.

Being “For the Troops”

One of the biggest false equivalencies that is being made right now, specifically by Hegseth, is that if you are questioning Trump or him you “don’t support the troops”. We’re given the false dichotomy that if you’re not blindly supporting everything Trump does (“Greatest Commander in Chief”) that means you are against the wellbeing of servicemembers. Being “for the troops” isn’t just feeling rah rah when there is a flyover at a football game, it’s acknowledging that they are human beings.

Human beings deserve to be treated with respect and consideration not as billboards for an image of “whiteness” that was ridiculous when those grooming standards were first introduced 80 years ago. Families deserve to not just be applauded for their “sacrifice” they need to be considered in operational planning and tempo. Soldiers, sailors, Marines, airmen, all need to be seen as people who’s time is valuable at least to them, and pointless operations that do nothing but “flex America’s muscle” lower morale. “Supporting the troops” means understanding that if we make military life and deployments so miserable (and it’s already not fun) that they leave, we gut our armed forces of leaders and Non-Commissioned officers which have been the backbone of our military.

“Supporting the troops” means holding those who hold their lives, in so many ways other than their physical ones, accountable for what they do with those lives. If we really support the men and women who have volunteered to defend America we will care about their wellbeing. We need to do that particularly when we have a Commander-in-chief who not only doesn’t understand the sacrifice of the American serviceman and woman, but he’s also never, once in his life, ever had to sacrifice anything. Being “for the troops” means demanding they be treated as people. It means asking what the objective is, when is it going to be fulfilled, and when can those fulfilling that objective not just get out of danger, but get on with their lives?

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