Marine veteran: Trump disgraces himself with stunt at Arlington, attempts to exploit heroes’ deaths
Next week our family will rendezvous at Miramar National Cemetery in San Diego to walk behind the horse-drawn caisson bearing the remains of my sister-in-law Kimberley Hebert.
The trauma of her service to our country will finally be put to rest in that hallowed ground. Kim did her duty, as did many in our family; her sister served in the Navy too, and so did her father and her husband. Kim’s nephew (my son) served three combat tours in Iraq, and I served in Vietnam, Cambodia, Panama and Grenada, to name a few.
So, in that context you can imagine how incensed we all were recently when Trump and his campaign staffers desecrated Arlington National Cemetery (seen above in a public domain image from wikimedia commons) to make a tacky campaign commercial and, in the process, assaulted a cemetery employee trying to do her job.
Trump said they were invited by several of the families who lost loved ones during the evacuation of Kabul in August 2021. It’s hard to say if Trump’s people tracked down these Gold Star families to pull off this campaign stunt or if, as Trump said, they “were invited to come and take video by the families.”
Hard to say because Trump is a pathological liar! Regardless, national cemeteries have strict regulations to maintain the respectfulness, dignity, and decorum of our heroes’ final resting place, and certainly no one asked the families of the more than 400,000 other Americans buried at Arlington for their permission.
It’s also worth noting that after filing an incident report with the Army, the cemetery caretaker who was assaulted by Trump’s thugs refused to pursue any follow-up action, apparently because she feared retaliation from Trump’s violent supporters.
Of course, the real reason behind this whole sordid event is that the Trump campaign is trying to use the incident in Kabul to weaponize the deaths of the 13 American service members as a political ploy to say Biden was incompetent in the handling of our departure from Afghanistan. Trump doesn’t have a clue about the intricacies of military operations and has reduced this sad event to just another one of his grifts.
But I lived that reality when my crew and I flew what I believe was the last U.S. military aircraft out of Saigon on April 30, 1975. The reality is that it’s always a messy disengagement after so many years of a military commitment. Now, almost 50 years later, I still think about all that went wrong, about Lance Cpl. Darwin Judge and Cpl. Charles McMahon, the last two Marines killed in Vietnam, during a North Vietnamese Army rocket attack on our evacuation site at Tan Son Nhut Air Base.
In the chaos their bodies were left behind and not recovered for 10 months, even though our USMC watchword has always been, “No Marine left behind.” I can still see the human tsunami of terrified people, easily 10,000 strong, breaking against the embassy walls, and desperate mothers throwing their babies over the razor wire.
Then there were the 400 at-risk allied personnel, including a Korean general, whom we abandoned at the embassy as we flew away for the last time. Everyone involved did their best, but thinking you can control every variable as the military, the government, and the entire social order collapse around you is a fool’s errand. Basically, you need personnel and equipment in place — until the moment you don’t.
Trump’s Doha deal with the Taliban to leave Afghanistan is considered by most experts to be the primary reason for the collapse of the Afghan National Security Force and, subsequently, the government. In another inept piece of his “diplomacy,” Trump agreed to the release of 5,000 seasoned Taliban fighters, with no quid pro quo, a gift that likely contributed to a much faster collapse than our intelligence sources anticipated.
It makes me ill to think about this incompetent sociopath being the commander in chief back then, and that he could possibly hold that position again. All this detail is esoteric military stuff, so it’s easy for Trump, (you know, the cowardly draft dodger) to exploit the deaths of 13 of our finest for a cheap political shot at Biden when Trump’s previous “diplomacy” deserves most of the blame.
After all, what is stopping him, his moral compass? Obviously, he doesn’t have one of those.
Jim Petersen was a Marine Corps officer during the Vietnam era for eight years, served 10 years in the USCG mostly as director of federal law enforcement at USCG Air Station Miami, and retired from the 1085th Medical Company, Air Ambulance, South Dakota National Guard.
