His process is solitary, but the last time he wrote these letters on our dining table, I walked through them as I walked into the kitchen. He was crying as his pen moved over the paper.
He returned home safely. The letters became unreadable. Last week I found it at the bottom of a desk drawer as I was packing our house to move, still sealed, “Don’t open until I go” written on them.
It also describes how on Memorial Day in 2017, Trump visited the Arlington National Cemetery with his then-Secretary of Homeland Security, General John Kelly, whose son, Robert, a young Marine Corps officer, died after setting foot on a landmine in Afghanistan. Was found. 2010, were buried there.
“He was 29,” Goldberg writes. “Trump meant, on this visit, to pay his respects to John Kelly at his son’s grave, and to console the families of other fallen service members. But according to sources familiar with the visit, Trump was standing by Robert Kelly’s grave.” He went straight to his father and said, “I can’t find him. What was in him?” “
That’s a rude question. And miss that point.
“Serving something more than myself is based on my experience, my experience, why they join,” says Marine Corps veteran Kate Wyatt. Derek Wyatt, a Marine, died in Afghanistan in 2010.
First Lieutenant Robert Kelly was her husband’s platoon commander. He commanded retired Corporal Sebastian Guadalupe Gallegos.
“They are doing it out of a sense of patriotism. And that patriotism is not loyalty to any particular political party or politician, but to America,” explains Gallegios, who lost his hand in the bombing in Afghanistan.
Americans serve to protect their siblings from weapons.
His father, an Air Force colonel. Norman Eaton, who died in the Vietnam War in 1969, flew missions delivering supplies and providing close air support to special forces.
“He was shot at the Ho Chi Minh Trail section just outside Vietnam in Laos,” Eaton said in a video he posted criticizing Trump’s service members posted online, and grabbed his father’s dog tag.
“The best men and women in the United States of America are found in the armed forces of the United States military. Brave men and women. They’re not just brave, they’re smart – and they’re smart.”
But how did the Commander-in-Chief wrap himself in the images of the military, and be responsible for sending them in the direction of damage, not understand this?
To borrow Trump’s words, what’s in them?
Members of the military are only on the mind of this president when they are working for a purpose.
In Trump’s case, it’s popularity by the organization.
By comparison, 13% of the press say the same, and only 6% trust Congress.
For Trump, the military is a muscle to flex for him, whether he involves the National Guard military police in the presence of federal law enforcement who pushed back peaceful protesters outside the White House, or deployed active duty troops on the U.S.-Mexico border during immigration. . The crisis – whether they have a constitutional ban on playing a useful role there – or the fourth of a July military parade funded by an expensive taxpayer, is embodied in a leading political video aired during the Republican National Convention.
While the Gold Star families exercised the right to swear allegiance to their fallen loved ones – such as the Khan family, who lost their son Humayun to a suicide bomber in Iraq and spoke out against Trump at the 2016 Democratic Summit – the president defamed them.
There, in front of the men, is her husband’s grave.
“You can’t stand on the graves of better men who fought and died for this country,” he told CNN.
Those better men and women are ordinary Americans who did extraordinary things: they answered the call. Those who survive are usually fighting for a normal life. They fight against visible and invisible scars, because, with all the dangers, they are rarely the ones who said, “Send me.”
“What you’re at risk of dying for – and for whom – is probably the most profound question one can ask oneself,” wrote Sebastian Younger, a young correspondent in Tribe: On Homing and Belonging, exploring the challenges of military personnel. When they return from battle.
“Most people in modern society are able to spend their entire lives without answering that question, which is both a blessing and a significant loss.”
It is a shame for the Commander-in-Chief to never really answer this question.
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Catherine Valentine of CNN contributed to this report.
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