Service and self-sacrifice
I’ve shared before a tale about the first Memorial Day in 1865 in Charleston, South Carolina, a remembrance of “slavery’s terrible legacy.” The focus of that ceremony and of most on Memorial Days since is on the fallen. Less featured are the stories of those left behind.
The Fayetteville Observer ran an op-ed a few days ago by Rebekah Sanderlin. She calls out Donald Trump for his dismissal of soldiers who fell in battle in Europe as “suckers and losers.” She spotlights the burdens borne by the wives of U.S. soldiers lost in Afghanistan thirteen years before Trump’s snubbing:
I started leading Care Teams in 2005, only we didn’t call them that then. We didn’t call them anything back then. We just helped. We, military spouses, showed up after the soldiers in dress uniforms notified someone just like us that the person she loved most in this world was never coming home. As the wife of an enlisted U.S. Army Special Forces soldier who spent more time deployed than home, my husband’s friends were the ones dying, and my friends were their widows.
Sometimes we were there to simply be a friend to a woman who didn’t have any friends nearby, but mostly we quietly did all the little things life requires of people, things people can’t do when they’re in shock and grieving. Because most military families live far from their hometowns, they rarely have a local network to lean on during a tragedy. We became their local network.
We vacuumed, we washed dishes, we walked their dogs. We prepared their houses for the stream of people who were about to appear. We bought groceries, arranged meal trains, picked up their family members from the airport and met their kids at the bus stop, fully aware — though those children weren’t yet — that they were having the last normal moments of their entire lives.
Early in 2005 I learned to always bring toilet paper with me. When the widow wasn’t looking, I would sneak a few rolls into her bathroom. It seems like a tiny, insignificant thing, and it was, but I quickly saw that the last thing anyone needs when their world has collapsed is to also be out of toilet paper. Some of those years, the casualties came often enough that I just kept a giant pack in my car.
Service is what Trump expects wherever he goes. It’s not a thing he does, nor is self-sacrifice in his limited vocabulary. Trump’s comments left Sanderlin and others “furious and disgusted”:
I was still leading Care Teams and still carting around toilet paper in November 2018 when then-President Trump called the U.S. Marines who died at Belleau Wood “suckers” and the American soldiers buried at Aisne-Marne American Cemetery “losers.” I was furious and disgusted even though, like everyone else, I had become conditioned to our President saying horrible things. But there were some lines that even the most ardently anti-war protestors were too decent to cross, and this man — the President of the United States — had just spit on those lines. But I didn’t have time to stay mad then. We were at war, and we were still getting new widows.
In the months following President Trump’s callous insult, my husband’s unit would lose six more soldiers in Afghanistan. I had the privilege of knowing most of them before the deployment and there was not a sucker or a loser among them. They were committed, proud, well-trained and highly competent patriots, and they were some of the greatest people I’ve ever known.
Sanderlin’s story evokes We Were Soldiers, the 2002 Mel Gibson film, sure to be streaming this Memorial Day weekend. Based on the Battle of la Drang on November 14, 1965, first major battle of the Vietnam War, the film’s depictions of battle are brutal. So brutal that unlike most war films this one is thought with caveats to “get it right.” Although it lays on the patriotic symbolism pretty thick, scenes that flash back to the wives comforting each other as news of their husbands’ deaths arrives as the battle rages are a gut-punch. Sanderlin’s Care Teams have lived it.
Unlike in the film, the practice today is for uniformed soldiers to deliver death notices.
In military communities, and in most civilian communities, we revere the people who gave their lives for our country. We honor them and we take care of their families. Not because there’s something in it for us, but because it’s the right thing to do. We do it because when they saw a need, they stepped up, and we owe them at least that much. We do it because we know our large, diverse country is held together only by an understanding of shared sacrifice.
Trump’s “what’s in it for me” nation
Sanderlin concludes:
How did we get to a place where mocking our nation’s war dead is not an immediate disqualifier for a Commander in Chief? Why would any young person agree to wear a military uniform knowing that even their President does not honor their service? And why would anyone who has served in our military ever forgive Donald Trump for denigrating their brothers who were killed in action?
The irony in Trump’s Make America Great Again slogan is that, in the years since Trump entered politics, he has remade our country in his own image, a what’s in it for me nation where mocking the very concept of sacrifice carries no political repercussions.
If we elect him again, we are the suckers and losers.
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