As Veterans Day Approaches, Vets Deserve Better Than Trump

By BILL JOHNSTON

As a veteran of the US Air Force during the Vietnam Era, for very personal reasons I have no doubt our unelected president has insulted those of us who served in the military. He has, in fact, as far back as the month I took my oath to “protect and defend the Constitution of the United States” degraded and insulted those of us who for our own reasons and conscience served in the American military.

Let me return you to the days of the military draft. It is February of 1966 and I have just lost my student deferment. I no longer had a II-S student classification. After a chat with my local draft board lady I was informed I would be drafted at the end of the academic year in June. I have read Trump lost his student deferment about the same time I did.

Few Americans realized how quickly the Johnson Administration was building up the military as they dug a deeper disastrous hole for themselves and our country in Vietnam. This is how it worked. You got drafted for two years – went to basic training – on to advanced infantry training – handed an M-16 and shipped to the rice paddies of Vietnam. By the end of the year the casualty list grew by the hundreds to a total of 58,000 dead before the US was forced out.

I admit I was not against the war at first, but I did have questions and I grew to oppose it. However, I come from a family that has served in the military since the American Revolution. I had two great grandfathers in the Union Army. My Dad was in the invasions of Iwo Jima and Okinawa and on the first US ship into Tokyo Harbor following the surrender. My brother in 1966 was already in the Seabees in Vietnam.

I joined the Air Force. Donald Trump’s rich father paid off a doctor to claim his boy had bone spurs and was medically unfit for service (4-F). We knew who these guys were! The same ones who put bars of soap under their armpits to raise their temperatures at the pre-induction physical. Or the guy who showed up at my draft physical with women’s underwear on. I had friends who opposed the war and received objector status. They worked in community-based alternative service around the country. Unlike Trump, they were not dishonest nor were they cowards. A draftee in 1966 was on his way to Vietnam — weapon in hand — for a year and we all knew it! TRUMP WAS A COWARD!

About this time, my brother was climbing a power pole just out of DaNang Air Base when he was fired on and had to jump from the top. His back never recovered. My 19-year-old brother Tim was killed in a shipboard accident on the USS Hancock. Years later, in an recorded interview, Trump bragged while thousands of young men were in the military overseas he had more women available to have sex with in the US. I guess that would have included my 20-year-old wife who sat at home waiting for me. Who votes or supports such a disgusting creature?

My working-class parents “donated” four sons to the military during the Vietnam War. They lost one. Another was seriously injured for life. It would have never entered their minds to pay off a doctor or lie their sons out of military service. My family’s morality and citizenship obligation is something the Trump family have shown they totally lack.

At last count the Washington Post had recorded 20,000 lies Trump has told in the last four years. He lied to the American public about the Coronavirus since day one but we are to believe him and his supporters when they claimed he didn’t say those confirmed statements calling members of the military and veterans “losers and suckers.” His insulting statements about John McCain are recorded. He has never addressed the reports the Russians are paying a bounty for every American GI killed in Afghanistan. Not important to him, I guess.

Perhaps as a mitigating factor for Trump he just doesn’t understand what it is to be in the military or be a veteran. It is like being a parent. If you are not a parent you can’t understand what it is to be a parent. I was in the Air Force during the worst part of the Vietnam War. I opposed the war, as did most of the younger airman. Yet there was never a day of my service as a “citizen soldier” or a day I was not proud to wear the uniform of my country and serve with my “brothers in arms.”

Donald Trump would not, does not and could not understand!

Bill Johnston is a retired staff organizer of the United Food and Commercial Workers. He spent 30 years as an organizer, local union president, international trustee and district council president for five Northwestern States. He is a member of the National Writers Union (Pacific Northwest Chapter). Email wfjohnstonehs@wamail.net.

From The Progressive Populist, November 1, 2020

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