It's Personal now

Photo: Lilly Truscott

This is a photo of my son, Lucian K. Truscott V, immediately after I administered the oath commissioning him as a Second Lieutenant in the U.S. Army Infantry this afternoon at the University of Tennessee, where he graduated this morning with a B.A. in History. He is holding his framed commission in his hands. In exactly 21 days, he will report to the Infantry School at Fort Moore, Georgia, to begin the Infantry Basic Officer Leader Course. That course will take 20 weeks, then he goes to Airborne School, and from there to Ranger School, all training done at Fort Moore, as they now call it, having jettisoned the name Fort Benning, named for decades after a singularly unsuccessful Confederate general. Lucian has wanted to follow in the footsteps of both his great-grandfathers, his grandfather, and his father by serving his country as an Army officer. Today, December 15, 2023, he has done it. He’s an Infantry officer in the U.S. Army. As you can see by the photo, he is very, very proud, and I am proud of him.

Now, it’s personal. Everything that goes on in Washington D.C. regarding our military in general, and the Army in particular, will have an effect on my son. The House just passed the National Defense Authorization Act yesterday after months of wrangling between Republicans and Democrats over culture-war issues Republicans sought to stuff into the bill regarding abortion, diversity, and the rights of members of the military who are LGBTQ. Finally the House reconciled with the Senate version of the bill, which contained no culture war add-ons, and it got done. The NDAA provides funds for a 5.2 percent raise for military personnel, which will directly affect what ends up in Lucian’s bank account. The NDAA also extends the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative through 2027, although that does not include specific funding bills that will have to be passed to provide military and humanitarian aid to Ukraine as time and the war go on.

There is other stuff done every day in Washington that affects the military. The Commander in Chief, President Biden, recently ordered more soldiers to serve in Europe, concentrated on Eastern Europe, to deter Russian aggression that is, of course, already underway in Ukraine. An ROTC friend of Lucian’s who is a half year ahead of him is just finishing up his basic officer training, and as soon as he’s been to Ranger and Airborne schools, he will be assigned to a unit at Fort Carson, Colorado, where he will spend just a single month leading a platoon before being shipped out to Poland, which has become the second front line behind Ukraine in defending against Russian ambitions in greater Europe.

Republicans have stalled Ukraine funding for months now. Ukraine has become an fractious issue in the Republican primary, and there is an absolute certainty that Ukraine aid will be an issue in the 2024 presidential election with Trump, known to be talking to aides and advisers about pulling the United States completely out of NATO if he is elected. When I heard about Lucian’s friend being deployed to Eastern Europe within months of being commissioned, I got slapped upside the head with how real this is.

If Donald Trump becomes president and pulls out of NATO and does his friend Putin the favor of leaving Ukraine on the battlefield with no ammunition or any other kind of U.S. support, Ukraine could fall to Russia, and my son could be on orders to what will have become the front line with Russia in a new Europe-wide war. Or, as Rolling Stone reported this morning, he could be among the 300,000 soldiers Trump plans on sending to the border with Mexico to build detention camps and help round up 10 million immigrants to deport. Or he could be deployed to the streets of American cities to put down demonstrations against Trump and his policies.

Trump has threatened to do all of it, and every whim he might decide to act on if he is elected president would affect my son.

I will be covering the politics having to do with our military with a much more wary eye now. I will look at the two ongoing wars in which our allies are involved not in the abstract, but as wars which my son might someday be called to fight.

This stuff is personal for me now. I am enormously proud of Lucian as he begins his turn making his mark on our family’s legacy by defending his and our country. But the politics of it? The Truscott family has served this country in the Army for more than a century. As Lucian begins our second century of having this country’s back, trust me: I’m going to stand up for him with this column, and I will be watching his back like a hawk.